What Is Anger?: Part III
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
What does the historical perspective tell as about anger in today’s world? While there are certainly still noble causes against injustice, contemporary society sees anger on a much more individual, personal level. Spousal abuse, child abuse, gang violence, random drive-by killings… Is this really the same anger? For the greater part of our “civilized” history, a man’s spouse and child were considered property. The concept of women’s or children’s rights was scarcely considered. It is only since the industrial revolution that writers and social activists like Dickens began to pierce the veil of this kind of thinking, and even then, as evidenced by the numerous moral dramas that persist on stage and screen to this day, this type of abuse continues, albeit in a less tolerated fashion.
The bandits and highwaymen were terrorists from medieval times to the late 19th century. It is only in the relatively recent past that we, at least in the United States, have felt “free” to travel. Badland desperados and masked men were the terror of every traveler until the railroad assumed coast-to-coast service. Still, such acts were usually in pursuit of money, and were not acts of unbridled violence. It is hard to imagine a figure on horseback riding down a two-pony wagon in a fit of road rage.
So herein lies the crux of the matter: is there a historical context or any clue to tell us what we are facing as a society? It is only the very recent past that saw a nation transfixed by Truman Capote’s account of “In Cold Blood,” or a society gripped by Charles Manson’s grisly actions. Today, in addition to events like “road rage,” we have teens and children carrying out mass murders in schools, political malcontents bombing government buildings, office workers holding employees hostage… Is this really the anger of primitive “flight or fight” syndrome?
If we look at a sampling of anger definitions from modern counselors and therapists, we find the following:
- “A combination of thoughts, feelings and behaviors when you are frustrated by conditions or treated unfairly. Negative internal feelings accompanied by perceptual disorder.” Kassanove, H. and Fessbach, S. (1963) Anger Management
- “Anger is a delusion that focuses on an animate or inanimate object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities, and wishes to harm it.” Buddhist teaching
- “Anger is a natural response that all people have. It is caused by two basic things: Frustration; not getting what we want, especially if we were expecting to get it, and Feeling that others do not respect us or care how we feel.” Robert John McCrary, Ph.D.
- "An emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation to intense fury and rage." Charles Spielberger, Ph.D. http://www.apa.org/topics/controlanger.html
- “Anger is a feeling…your response to the world not going as you wish.” John Lee, Facing the Fire (1993)
- “Anger is for our protection against something that hurts or threatens to hurt us.” DeFoore (1991)
If we attempt to roll this all into one single working definition, we arrive at, “Anger is a deluded feeling caused by hurt or frustration, with a desire to harm the object causing this feeling.” Notice how close we remain to our New World definition: “A feeling of displeasure resulting from injury, mistreatment, opposition, etc., and usually showing itself in a desire to fight back at the supposed cause of this feeling.” Also, notice that only the Buddhist teaching and the Dictionary suggest that the feeling may not be justified or may be misdirected.
Here then, we find an enlightening insight to our question, “What is anger?” In anger management terms, anger has been put forth as instinctual and programmed biologically. Anger had been argued as having a rightful and needful place in our makeup. However, aggression has not. What is needed then is to remove the aggressiveness from the anger expression. While many of the authors and research itself fail to make the clarification, it is true nonetheless and should be kept in the forefront of our thought when we speak of “Anger.” In anger management terms, we are speaking of the aggressive hostility that results from unmanaged anger. This hostility, the kind of seemingly random and unprovoked violence that spawns everything from murder over parking spots and fistfights over parking tickets to mass killings in schools and the workplace can in no way be mistaken for an emergency survival system on any rational level of thought.
Least we take too literally the meaning or interpretation of aggressiveness when linked to anger, we should keep in mind that acts of aggression are not always accompanied by raised voices and threatening gestures. Anger aggression can take many forms. Passive aggression comes from anger just as non-passive aggression does.