Understanding Yourself: Anger as an emotion

I'm sure no one is unfamiliar with "Anger". In fact, it is so common, happens to some on a daily basis, that you wonder why I am even writing about it.

Yes, no doubt everyone knows what anger is, we've all experienced what it feels like, and it's definitely not a good feeling. But what if I tell you, anger is neither good nor bad, it just serves to give us information, or alert us to something?

We've always heard people say "I am so angry because xx did this...". Now, this is a classic example of one mistaking the trigger for anger with the cause for anger. What xx did is the trigger, but it is never the cause. Now have you ever thought about why is it that the same incident can cause such anger in such people, while it merely prompts a shrug of the shoulders for some? Have they mastered some kind of superpower that enables them to be unfazed under all circumstances? If that's the case, won't you want to have such superpowers?

Well, there's no superpower at work, but good news is, you can definitely train yourself to be more zen. And I don't mean suppressing your anger outwardly but seething inside. I also don't mean ignoring or invalidating your anger, willing it to go away. Anger, when ignored, just builds up and eventually explodes catastrophically.

What I am going to do is to help you slow down the process between the trigger and you externalizing the angry emotion, so that you can see clearly what is happening. I'll use an example to illustrate. Wife comes back from work to see her husband playing computer games, while the house is in a mess, clothes strewn around, rubbish not taken out etc, you get the idea. Her first thought was "how could he be so selfish, I am tired after a day's work and he doesn't even care enough about me to help out with the housework. There he is enjoying himself, he has so much time and he can't even help out a bit! what a lazy man! why am I always the one having to clean up the mess?" Then before she could stop herself, she lashes out at her husband. Notice all these thoughts going through the wife's mind? All it took was one look at the situation and her brain has generated all these thoughts. The gap between what she thinks her husband should have done versus reality, and her interpretation of her husband as selfish, lazy, uncaring etc is the cause of her anger.

Now, you might ask, so what even if the cause of her anger are her thoughts, and not the event itself. They might as well be the same thing, since the event will always trigger such thoughts, and in turn the corresponding anger, no? I would say, that's where the differentiation is, between someone who is able to create space between the trigger and reaction, and someone who is unable to. In the words of Viktor Frankl "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom". Essentially, you have the power to control your response to the stimulus or trigger. In this same example, think what would have happened if the wife had caught herself having those judgemental thoughts and resultant anger, and took a step back to question the source of her anger. Could it be that she had a bad day at work and would have loved to come back to a nice and clean house. Could it be that she is jealous her husband gets to enjoy some leisure while she has no recreational time of her own at all. Could it be that she is tired of making the same request repeatedly to her husband to help with the housework but it doesn't seem to be working. Well, it could be any of these, but look how she has shifted from judgemental, accusatory thoughts about her husband to exploratory thoughts about her own emotions and taking ownership of them, being curious as to why she is having such thoughts. She is lengthening the timespan between trigger and response, and in doing so, she avoids the knee jerk reaction of trigger -> judgemental thoughts -> anger -> angry reaction. She is no longer attributing her anger solely to her husband, but starting to see beyond the trigger and going deeper to find out other possible reasons for her anger. As I have mentioned at the very beginning, anger serves to provide us with information, it is up to us to be able to get to the root cause. Failing which, we are always just going to stay at the superficial level, attributing anger to the trigger and repeating the same angry cycle whenever we encounter the trigger.