Understanding Anger
From the book “The Book of Not Knowing” written by Peter Ralston
Anger
Recall some time when you were clearly angry. Concentrate on this feeling. What is necessary for the anger to be there, what is it doing, what is it accomplishing? Dissect this emotion for yourself and see if you can come up with the components of anger.
As with fear, four components seem to compose anger: Remember, these elements need to be seen as occurring in the anger itself, not as causing or contributing to the anger.
The four components of Anger are:
About something that has passed
Based on a feeling of hurt
Revealing a core sense of incapacity
Regenerating a sense of capacity through a destructive intent or feeling reaction.
Following the same investigative techniques used for fear, we discover that in contrast to fear’s relationship with the future, Anger exists in relation to the past. It is historically based. Just as fear can be relating to the next millisecond or days from now, anger can relate to something that occurred a fraction of a second ago, or many years ago. But it is always about the past… It happened already. You’re not afraid, because it’s not something that might happen. You’re angry, because it did happen. And it hurt.
Anger is always based on hurt. Some form of hurt or pain is a component of anger. As with fear, in anger there is always something resisted, not accepted. Given that this experience has already taken place, its rejection shows up as hurt. Conventionally this is rarely noticed. People go right to anger and never get that it is based on the fact that they are feeling hurt. Perhaps one of the main functions of an anger-reaction involves ignoring or avoiding the hurt.
Beneath the hurt, you will find some sense of feeling Incapable or Unworthy in a very fundamental way. This component is not always easy to grasp, but a sense of something I’m calling incapacity is talking place. Imagine that you are completely capable in relation to what’s happened. Someone dents your car and you can magically remove the dent and restore it to its former beauty. Angry? Probably not. If you could correct what went wrong without pain, why be angry? Of course, sometimes things go wrong, or bad things happen, and we aren’t angry. We might be depressed, or sad, or flippant, or embarrassed, but not angry. So why are we angry when we are angry?
Anger, like all emotions, serves self-survival. How does it serve our survival in this case? Obviously something has occurred that you don’t want to be the case, and you feel incapable of having it simply or easily be the way you want. Something or someone has impeded your will, you plans, your self. And somewhere in there you feel incapable of having reality be the way you want – whatever is seen as serving your self. A personal deficiency has been demonstrated to you by some action or event that has brought to the fore a sense of incapacity that’s normally buried deep within your psyche.
Deep down you are unsure of your capacity to live life. How could it be any other way? You don’t know what life is, how you came to be, or that your survival is guaranteed. This deep sense of incapacity is drawn to the surface to some degree by a given circumstance. You want this circumstance to be another way, and you feel incapable of having it be that way – especially since it has already happened. This event can be about what someone has said or done, what you have said or done, or a circumstance that has occurred – it simply needs to bring up a sense of incapacity, which is resisted and so is painful. You’d like to set things right. You want to get rid of this sense of incapacity and the resultant hurt produced by the event that has occurred.
So how does anger help? Where are the feelings of anger directed? What would they like to bring about? With anger we feel we are now taking some sort of action, at least internally. What is the purpose of this action? Anger is an attempt to feel capable, to restore a sense of capacity to one’s self. At least the sense of being fundamentally incapable of life can be returned to it’s buried place in one’s psyche.
Usually we harbour some thoughts and feelings about proving ourselves to be capable – like beating up a bully, doing damage to the boss, or hurting ourselves. The component needed is simply action that demonstrates capability, and what is the easiest way to demonstrate capability? Destroy something. Creating something would work, of course, but creating is much too hard and usually takes too long, and also holds the possibility of failure (revealing our incapacity once again) way too much. Destruction can be immediate, and is the easiest thing to do. It’s negativity based, like the feeling of hurt, but produces a result that feels positive: the sense of capacity. Obviously these destructive thoughts, feelings, or actions are often directed at a particular reality that you don’t want, but are also frequently directed elsewhere. The drive is to restore a sense of capacity.
Everyone knows how to destroy and feels capable of doing it. Crush a flower, kick over a chair, toss the chess game from the table, throw mud at a clean dress, create pain in your or someone else’s body, take something of value from someone, say something hurtful, and so forth. There are many ways to express anger, some extremely devious and subtle, but they all have in trying to salvage the self’s sense of capacity, and the most common by far is a destructive course. It could simply be giving someone an angry look, or having destructive thoughts or fantasies, yet the immediate effect is feeling capable of something, feeling or imagining oneself as having some power. Of course if these attempts fail, one is likely sent into frustration and despair. But destroying is easy, so failure isn’t likely – especially if it is only acted out in your imagination.
Once again, eliminating any component of anger will eliminate the anger. If there is no concept of the past, there is no anger. If your experience is totally in the present, anger cannot exist.
Our next stop is Desire!
