Let’s do some myth debunking, yes? First myth: Anger is a problem.
I know we’ve been taught to treat it that way. Many of us have been conditioned to manage it, suppress it, apologize for it, or push through it as quickly as possible. But anger, on its own, is not the enemy. It’s just a signal. All a signal does is give us information and help us take action.
Second myth: anger is the primary emotion. Nope, anger is actually a secondary emotion. Yes, you read that correctly. Secondary. By the time anger shows up, something else has already moved through you so quickly and uncomfortably that it may have slipped right past your awareness. Underneath anger, almost always, you’ll find fear, hurt, or betrayal, or a feeling of powerlessness. Those feelings are much harder to process. Anger, by contrast, demands attention. It heats things up. It can even masquerade as strength. So we reach for it, sometimes without even realizing we have.
When anger arises, pause and ask yourself: “what’s underneath this?”
When we do, something shifts.
The Couple That Changed How I Think About This
I worked with a couple once where the husband kept directing his anger at his wife, and she genuinely couldn’t understand why she was constantly on the receiving end of it. It was affecting everything between them, including their intimacy. She told me that when she closed her eyes, all she could see was his angry face.
When we did some deeper work together, he uncovered something he hadn’t been able to express before: his primary emotion was fear of rejection. He had felt rejected by her, repeatedly, but couldn’t access that feeling and couldn’t articulate it. Instead it came out as rage and of course, his rage made it even harder for her to be close to him, which deepened his feelings of rejection. A vicious cycle.
Once he could see what was actually underneath the anger and share it openly, everything changed. Not overnight, of course, but the truth of what was beneath his anger gave them somewhere real to start.
What Anger Is — and Isn’t
Anger arises primarily when we feel offended, wronged, denied, or powerless. These are real experiences that deserve to be taken seriously. But here is what the Ari, Rav Isaac Luria, taught that I find both sobering and illuminating:
“A person who acts upon his anger is intentionally ignoring his soul and letting a strange God take possession of him.”
That is not a small statement. Acting on anger is, in his view, a kind of spiritual abandonment. A handing over of yourself to something that is not you, not your soul, not your highest nature. The ego grabs the wheel and drives. We’re all human beings, anger will come, and even the most spiritually developed people among us feel it, sometimes imperfectly. But feeling it and reacting from it are two very different things.
Our Feelings Are Mutable
Any emotion is a response to a certain event, and for the most part our responses are automatic and involuntary. This is known as emotional feedback. The good feelings are the feedback we want. For example, when we are in love, we are completely enchanted with all the new feelings of excitement and wonder toward our partner, we relish them, savoring each moment of joy and splendor, hoping they’ll never end.
The negative feelings, however, are the feedback we downright avoid. The minute we experience an emotion that makes us feel uncomfortable, like anxiety, hurt, or fear, we desperately try to disconnect from those emotions and disregard the feedback.
In both cases it’s important to remember that emotions never last forever, even though sometimes it feels like it. Our emotions arise to give us clues about how to act, when to change, when to shift, how to move. In a way, they’re all neutral—we assign them the label of “good” or “bad.”
Let’s say you’re watching a movie. Throughout the duration, you may experience excitement, fear, laughter, nervousness, sadness. The movie is something that you are watching as a viewer and yet you still experience the thrill of it, you just don’t attach to any of the feelings it inspires. You feel them, you observe them, and once the scene is over, you let them subside. This is exactly how we can practice feeling our emotions in response to our lives. Allow the feeling to rise, observe it with curiosity, and let it subside.
The Invitation Inside the Anger
We all struggle when life doesn’t go the way we hoped or planned. We struggle with unfairness, with being denied things we wanted, with people who let us down or hurt us. The question is never whether our anger is valid, it’s what we do with it that matters. We might need to ask for space to process, implement a new boundary, we might even just need to give ourselves the permission to feel it without pushing it away, blaming someone, or trying to solve it.
The kabbalists teach that our negative emotions, including anger, are not obstacles to our growth. They are the catalysts for it. Every flare of anger, every surge of hurt, every moment of feeling wronged carries within it an invitation to ask: what is this revealing? What feeling is beneath this? What part of me is asking to be seen? What needs to be expressed?
Letting your anger navigate you toward positive transformation is not just good emotional hygiene, it is, as the kabbalists would say, the whole point.
The goal is not to never be angry. It’s to make friends with this misunderstood secondary emotion and use it to better understand yourself.
No comments:
Post a Comment