Anger can be a valuable tool, but there are only so many things you can fix around your house with just a hammer.
As men, it feels good to run power through our bodies. The perception of power is what all primates use to determine who is the leader and who is not. I find watching nature shows of Mandrills and other great apes to be fascinating. In these videos of males interacting, one of the older apes displays anger at some point. You can see how these power displays keep the young usurpers at bay.
We, humans, are similar to these apes in a lot of ways, particularly in how we approach and handle anger.
There’s clearly power in anger. Our bodies are designed to feel and express it. Anger is a survival mechanism, a visceral expression of life force. Although few people may admit it, it can make us feel powerful to assert personal authority through anger. It aligns our mind, with our life energy, as it moves through our body.
However, problems arise when we don’t express ourselves, and when we let anger bubble up inside of us, fermenting and rising without release. Unexpressed anger often becomes projected onto an external source such as a group, a person, or an ideology, which leads to the continued perception of problems and bruised feelings. Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars was a poignant example. The whole issue that sparked our initial anger can build and fester.
Anger is a natural potent emotion that’s part of who we are, but when we fossilize it into beliefs and thoughts by keeping it hidden beneath the surface, we abandon our power and effectively abdicate our freedom.
Anger shows up differently for all men
If you respond to anger with contraction, withdrawal, and thinking, all those actions will reify your anger.
The act of reification is to make something abstract more concrete or real. It is a powerful form of creative magic. Only when anger is engaged reactively, as thinking and disconnection, is the creative potential lost. Instead, you end up reinforcing and further strengthening your own biases and egoic view, further separating yourself from reality.
Anger can cause us to withdraw into our inner realm of beliefs and thoughts. Once internalized and owned by the ego, anger becomes a protective mechanism that attempts to protect our fragile sense of self. Anger can sometimes look like certainty, appearing in our conversations through short, direct language and a focus on one specific goal at the expense of everything else. This type of anger, when seen in a UFC fight or during an actual war, allows you to navigate through obstacles with speed and focus. It’s a very powerful survival response wired deep into our bodies and nervous system.
Anger can appear as tense facial expressions. In this sense, it’s much like the reddening face of a Mandrill - there’s a bluffing, a threat, that comes through this anger. I know people who’ve used it professionally as part of their whole persona at work to get things done. Just the very threat of them getting angry causes people to comply because it’s so unpleasant.
Anger can also look like moping or withdrawal and doubt. If you were not allowed in your childhood to openly express anger, then it will go underground within as you develop into an adult. If you were shamed for feeling anger, then you’ll be withdrawn and disconnected from your power to cut through obstacles. This is a profound wound for many men. As a result of this wound, many grow up with an aversion to the expression of any anger, especially if they didn’t see it constructively modeled as children, or if it was never shown to have any positive results.
On the other hand, if you lived in a household where anger was the only acceptable emotion, then you’ll likely embody feelings of fear and submission around the emotion of anger. Or you find that it’s the one tool in your emotional toolbox. You’re likely conflicted inside, and you don’t understand how to run anger through your body without hurting others. You might have a binary expression of anger — suppression or numbness that can swiftly shift into a rage.
Anger shuts down parts of our brain, making us less rational, and more easily influenced. As most of us know, we can do some boneheaded things when we are angry, that the next day is totally cringe-worthy or ridiculous. We may even say in hindsight, “What was I thinking?” You weren’t.
Unexpressed anger kills, literally
Another way anger can show up within you, and possibly the worst of all is in the form of low-grade, continuous anger that becomes a source of chronic stress and illness. Anger is not supposed to be stored in the body; it’s supposed to move through it, to ignite us into movement and action.
Anger has both dark and light aspects to how it appears in the world. At the dark end of the spectrum, anger looks more like domination, and demonization —justification for retaliation and payback for past grievances. It can lead to genocide such as seen in Rwanda, where in just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 people were slaughtered. The war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine are a horrifying display of rage and powerlessness by the Russian military and its leaders.
Tribalism mixed with anger is a recipe for disaster. There are disturbing signs here in the United States, of anger being fueled and amplified through social media and fanned into flames by political groups. The January 6, 2021, US Capital attack was a case in point of anger and tribalism run amok.
However, when anger is connected to love and the service of others, anger is one of the most powerful emotions that humans can take on, moving us into action with purpose and lightning-like effect, dramatically shifting situations. When anger moves us into acts of service and love, the lighter end of the anger spectrum is illuminated. Anger can be an awakening jolt of clarity and determination. When it arises as a spiritually powerful force for good, it eviscerates our illusions of separation, tribal identity, and superiority — it cuts us and reveals our naked heart, vibrantly alive and vulnerably present with the whole situation, ready to move into action.
The benefits of anger
We have an instinctive desire to not be angry all the time, because being angry costs us something, whether it’s time, energy, or our expansive sense of peace. But there’s also something slightly addictive about it. It feels kind of good to be in our power of anger.
Anger can also help us move out of the never-ending loops of our minds and bring us to a place of certainty and clarity. Anything that helps us gain mastery over our mind might actually be useful to us; in fact, there’s a large amount of untapped potential surrounding how you can work with the anger within you.
What’s missing most of the time is that we don’t have designs for using our anger in any evolved sense. We lose our minds and end up feeling controlled by our anger.
What’s at stake if we don’t learn from what anger wants to give us?
Anger can be a wake-up call, and a call to move into action, instead of remaining stuck in thinking. Repetitive loops of thinking and analysis coupled with anger are a recipe for disaster.
If you don’t learn from your anger and try to understand it better, you’re only serving to reify and strengthen your fear. Anger ricocheting around within the reflective inner echo chamber of your mind can be the very thing that causes you to be fearful all the time.
The angrier you are, the more fearful you are - these are tied together. Similarly, the more fearful you are, the more easily you can be manipulated and used. And the angrier you are, the less free, open, and conscious you become.
Anger warps our vision so that we’re only seeing through our filters of anger and not seeing things as they are
Anger reduces groups and motivations of others to cartoon caricatures, instead of the complexities of humanity and the vulnerable, personal limits that all people have. In fact, when you are angry and you sustain anger for a long period of time, your IQ actually drops. This is why, for example, when you get into arguments with your intimate partner, you find yourself making more stupid mistakes and decisions than normal. You can’t see the whole picture; anger shuts down the prefrontal cortex and you lose access to reason. You literally regress into the more primitive mechanics within your limbic brain.
You can’t connect multiple things when you’re angry - you have to simplify everything down to the smallest and most trivial, superficial symbols to help you manipulate mental objects and then make decisions. So again, it only makes you more stupid if you’re in a sustained state of anger.
Hopefully, there are some advantages to having a larger brain than our hominid ancestors, and there’s hope for us as a species if we can learn how to access this. But we have to remember that we’re still primates and tribal animals, and we can still be manipulated by this force of anger. It’s the strongest lever that exists within social media to activate and incite action in humans. Recently released internal Facebook documents have confirmed this. Anger is the strongest force on social media, bar none.
Anger is energy for action
Anger doesn’t serve rational thought unless you do the inner yoga of witnessing your anger and becoming non-reactive about all emotions. This is part of what meditation is about. Instead of having a vision of some idealized, peaceful, Buddha-like character on a mountaintop, what I teach is the practice of meditation with whatever arises within and around you. Sometimes, the stronger the energy of emotion and thought, the more there is to work with, and the greater breakthroughs you can have.
If you relax your habits of throwing off the energy of anger and directing it externally towards others or internally towards the self, then the energy of anger can be accessed and channeled into actions that produce real effects in your life and the world. Inner anger work can shift how you perceive and understand yourself. Anger can even be channeled into genuine acts of love and courage.
Anger in the service of an awake, open man is part of the power that allows you to love and courageously do what you need to do in the world. If you’re interested in learning more about this, book a free call with me here: https://sunyata.info/contact
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