“Nonviolence means nonviolence towards all parts of us, including our anger. We need to take care of our anger the way we would take care of a tiny baby, with tenderness.”*
I still recall the wave of shock that washed over me so many years ago when I heard these words of Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. What? Treat my anger with tenderness? Treat myself with tenderness when I’m angry? I remained rooted in place as the full import of those words sank in. It became clear that for so many years, I had been mishandling my anger…and I had been hurting myself unnecessarily.
Like many people with a history of trauma, I had struggled with barely understood anger and rage for years. And as most women do, I primarily stuffed my anger, but there were times when, almost without my awareness, my rage exploded out of me in a flood of words that damaged or even ended relationships. I didn’t understand this anger, but I certainly blamed myself in the way that most of the people around me had blamed me. For so many years, I had treated myself harshly when I was angry…regardless of the reason for anger.
This isn’t surprising. Our culture is a particularly punitive one. The answer to mistakes and missteps is inevitably some form of punishment, from a sharp word from a parent to a penalty imposed by a court system. Most of us have not been taught how to be curious, even kind toward ourselves when we are angry. The message from our culture is: anger is wrong. It is a very stigmatized emotion, and a very misunderstood emotion as well.
Why do we get angry? Anger can be a very healing force in the right circumstances. Anger is often our first cue that our boundaries are being violated. Anger lets us know that we need to stand strong for ourselves or for someone we love. Anger can also arise due to the frustration that arises when we are blocked from achieving a goal, a feeling that we are being disrespected or treated unfairly, or even in response to physical or emotional pain. Anger can range from mild irritation to significant anger to full-blown rage. In any of its forms, it is a normal response to life that helps us adapt to our life situations…if we understand it and know how to work with it.
So, if anger isn’t the problem, what is? As you may have guessed by now, the problem is rarely the anger itself. The problem is our relationship with our anger. When we feel anger, we may feel the urge to either act out (sometimes inappropriately) or to stuff it down (which can become self-hatred, resentment, or even depression). It may have even become an ingrained part of our personality and predominant way of relating to life, influencing the way we experience the events around us. Or perhaps we have developed the habit of stuffing our anger, compromising our ability to get our needs met effectively. In any case, for many of us, due to a combination of our inherited temperament and our early life experiences – including family and cultural experiences of handling anger – the result is an anger problem.
The trick to understanding anger is this: When properly understood and emotionally regulated, anger is an important messenger conveying to us and to others around us the need to set a boundary or defend ourselves in some way. It is unregulated or out-of-control anger that creates issues in our lives. What we need, then, are ways to deeply understand, soothe and regulate our emotions.
Traditional approaches to handling problem anger, or anger management, focus primarily on interrupting the anger cycle and changing the way we think about the events of our lives. These approaches can be very helpful, but they address primarily one aspect of managing anger: modulating its expression. There are a great many ways to address problem anger in the mindfulness- and compassion-based traditions, and these methods help us to understand and begin to calm our anger in a deeper, more organic, truly compassionate way.