The Taboo Against Anger
Hey Friends, Mak here.
Are you afraid of anger?
Do you feel nervous when someone raises their voice?
Do you have difficulty recognizing this emotion in yourself and expressing it directly to others?
I assure you you’re not alone. In my 5 years as a Radical Honesty Trainer, anger is the emotion participants have the hardest time recognizing and expressing to others, and I'm willing to bet that it’s the avoidance of anger that creates the most distance and confusion in your relationships, too.
So I want to show you how cutting yourself off from anger is like shooting yourself in the foot, and give you ways to reconnect with your anger rather than sweeping it under the rug.
Here are 3 ideas about anger that I hope will give you the courage to express it honestly rather than hiding and repressing it:
3 good reasons to reconnect with your anger
1. Anger is natural.
It is neither better nor worse than love, joy, sadness. Calling one positive and the other negative, or asserting that one vibrates at a lower frequency than the other is totally counterproductive. All of our emotions are like thoughts. They come and go and they are completely out of our control. What IS in our control is how we respond to our emotions.
If we learn to simply allow our emotions to come and go, we can eliminate the vast majority of our problems. Because paradoxically, the avoidance of the experience of anger is what keeps us trapped in anger.
You might say, “Well, what about all of those people that are chronically angry and always yelling and ranting? They clearly aren’t getting over their anger.”
People who are stuck in chronic anger are actually avoiding the full experience of their anger by escaping into their stories of injustice and persecution. When we’re chronically playing “poor little me who the world always shits upon,” we find no shortage of reasons to reinforce our righteous indignation, no matter what our circumstances.
It is only when we address the present emotion and go to the root of its origin within us that we can overcome it. We must then recognize a crucial fact: we are the creators of this emotion, not our circumstances.
2. To reconnect with one's anger is to rediscover one's vitality.
No matter how many spiritual retreats you attend, you cannot choose to feel only love and joy and not feel anger and sadness. In fact, as soon as you cut yourself off from anger, you necessarily cut yourself off from other emotions as well (joy, love, desire...).
To get out of this lethargy and reconnect with the living in you, you must be willing to fully experience all of your emotions without clinging to one or resisting the other. Allowing each emotion to come and go without avoiding it or clinging to it for dear life creates space for the next emotion to come and go, too.
3. Being angry is unreasonable, and that's OK!
The biggest trap that keeps us stuck in the avoidance of anger is our belief that anger must be completely reasonable and justified. If we believe that what the other person did is wrong and that we are a victim of that wrongdoing, we may tell ourselves that we are fully justified in our anger, and then AND ONLY THEN are we permitted to express it.
Well, the bad news for you and me and all of the other morally upright, righteous pricks is that anger doesn’t give two shits about having anyone’s permission or justification. Anger doesn’t think logically or weigh the pros and cons and it has never ever in history considered if NOW is an appropriate moment to reveal itself. But we sure like to believe the contrary!
Debates about right and wrong may have their place in public policy, philosophy and ethics, but in the context of our relationships, the battle between who is right and who is wrong is a complete waste of our time and of our energy.
A healthier approach to anger
What works much better in relationships is to learn to fully experience and express your anger in order to get over it. When you do that, you often discover that your fervent need for righteousness simply falls away.
When we learn to focus our attention on the actual experience of anger in order to get over that anger, rather than focusing all of our attention on our righteousness and proving the other person wrong, we’re on the path to growing into a very different and very powerful person. This is easier said than done (as we witnessed this past week at the Academy Awards ceremony), but this process can be learned and it is an essential step along the path to adulthood.
Our tools for getting over anger are in depth and specific; this is why the longest chapter of Radical Honesty is the one titled “How to Deal with Anger.” When we deal with our anger in the moment it comes up, rather than letting it bottle up and explode later, we allow it to come and go. We then create the space for more aliveness and love to arrive.
Weekend Workshops
A weekend workshop is a great place to start!
If you’d like a dive into getting in touch with and expressing your anger out loud in order to get over yourself and your righteousness, join us at an upcoming Weekend Workshop. And if you’re ready for a deep dive into everything Radical Honesty has to offer, join us for an 8-Day Intensive.
Michael Alan Kolb (Mak) is a Radical Honesty Trainer based in Austin, TX and Costa Rica. Join one of Mak’s upcoming workshops below:
