Monday, April 4, 2011


Lately, I've seen in a few places where people have said anger is an unhealthy or negative emotion. I care to disagree.

Anger is, like every human emotion, healthy. But I do make a distinction. For me, there are two forms of anger. The first I call righteous anger. This is when someone has done an injustice upon you; and I'm using "you" in its broadest sense. It can apply to nations. Say what you want about nationalism, the anger felt by us Americans after 9-11 was normal and healthy. It'd be inhuman to not feel angry, and I doubt even Jesus, the Buddha, or Lao Tzu would be so heartless. Anger is the fire that drives action towards justice. Very useful.

Then there is when things don't go your way, when people don't do what you want them to or don't live up to your expectations. This is ego-anger. The anger of the little king or queen we all feel ourselves to be not having the world bow down to their whims. This some might call unhealthy, and maybe it is (but I think it's really the ego that's unhealthy).

In fact, I'm kind of tired of people denigrating sadness too. It's normal to feel that way at times. I heard a while back they were adding grief to the DSM IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, the Holy Bible of psychiatry. I was majoring in psychology before I quit school, and hearing shit like that makes me glad I got out of the field. As if there's a time limit on what constitutes healthy grieving a dead child, and after that you're sick. Sadness in it's basic sense is normal too. People aren't cheery all the damn time, and telling them their sick for being down in the dumps is itself sick and wrong.

The real issue is what we do with these emotions. Bottling it up, supressing it, this is not healthy; expressing the emotion is obviously better. Yet what's unhealthy about anger is usually the way it is expressed. The expression is the release, the way through it; ignoring it isn't going to work, nor is drugging it away. The nuance is this: you have every right to be angry, even to be hateful; you do not have a right to hit your spouse or kick your dog, and you do not have the right to strap on dynamite and blow up a bus.

It gets tricky, though. How do you safely express your anger when your boss does something stupid that is going to cost you hours of tedium? Do you bury the feeling and keep your job, or tell him what you really think? Part of the solution might be to express, somehow, the emotion in the very moment it rises. Let it rush in, and out, like a passing storm. Or maybe expression in the exact moment isn't necessary; but get it out soon. I find anger and exercise go together great: do some push ups, or run a mile or two. Anger is energy. Hold it too long and it turns to hate.

As for sadness, crying is fine, or listening to sad music, writing a poem or journal, or whatever works for you. I think Freud called this sublimation, the turning a "negative" emotion into some kind of positive. I guess depression is sort of the negetive side of sadness, that of dwelling too long on it, from not expressing it and letting it go. Like hate, it is a trap. We have the right to feel these ways, but they aren't good for us and are the sign of neglected emotions.

I do know one thing. Psychology/psychiatry should be focusing not on pathologizing these natural emotions, but on helping us deal with them in productive ways.


  1. I'm not sure I agree with you about anger being healthy, although maybe it is not anger itself that is unhealthy, but unchecked anger which may become unhealthy.

    Anger may be useful as a catalyst for initiating constructive change, as you say "Anger is the fire that drives action towards justice. Very useful." That is a possible outcome, but not the only one.

    Anger can just as easily become the fire that drives action towards injustice. After all anger is a precursor to hatred and violence. It is in a state of out of control anger, irrational anger, rage or fury, that a person may commit acts of violence, destruction, and murder.

    So it could go either way. Personally I tend to not make sound decisions when I'm angry. Even if there is a justifiable reason for being angry, I find it is better to calm down first, to get control of my emotions before acting, saying or doing something that I may regret.

    An exception to that would be in a life or death situation where I must act immediately, like in a self-defense situation, where acting in a state of anger may give me that extra push I need to successfully defend myself, similar to the flight or fight adrenalin response brought on by may be temporarily useful, but if you remain in a state of anger or fear for prolonged periods of time, it may actually be damaging to your health.

    The emotions of anger and fear are part of your bodies natural alert system to warn you about danger or injustice, so that you don't remain passive when you should be active. It is in that sense only where anger or fear may be considered healthy, as being nothing more than a natural emotional alarm going off in the face of potential (real or imagined) danger.

    But sometimes you may be unjustifiably angry or afraid, based on a flawed understanding of the situation. So unless you must absolutely act now, you should look upon anger and fear as an alarm clock going off, make note of the emotions, and then press the snooze that you can logically reassess the situation from a calmer, more objective, and emotionally detached perspective.

  2. Okay. Let me try this again.

    Anger is a natural emotional response to the feeling, either real or imagined, either justified or unjustified, of being wronged (mistreated, or misunderstood).

    Anger may be either healthy or unhealthy, depending on the circumstances and the evolution of its expression.

    Uncontrolled anger is unhealthy. The kind of anger that could become hatred, and lead to unjustified and possibly counterproductive violence and destruction.

    Controlled (not repressed) anger is healthy. Meaning that you acknowledge it. You observe it. You determine whether your anger is reasonable. Were you really wronged, or was it just that your ego was hurt (challenged, criticized). If action must be taken to correct a wrong, it is best to act from level headed reason, rather than from a fiery temper.

  3. I sort of agree with Cym's second comment in that, if you feel anger, it is better to express it than to repress it. If you repress it, it eventually will come out, often times as an explosion. The explosion may be at other people (often not the person you're truly angry with) or in the form stress or disease in your own body.

    That said, I don't see the distinction you made between one form of anger and the other. Righteous anger like ego-anger is derived from the same place -- not getting what you wanted or expected.

    Take the example of 9/11. Folks were mad because they didn't expect people to fly airplanes into buildings and kill scores of innocents. Americans didn't want to have to confront terrorism up close and personal.

  4. So I just spent about twenty minutes composing another response, only to have the entire thing completely disappear...and it's REALLY pissing me off! Ha ha.

    Oh well. What can you do? How does the anger help? It doesn't. Not in this case. Let's see if I can remember what I wrote before.

    I agree with what you said about exercise helping to neutralize anger and other forms of stress. If you're feeling upset, go for a run, lift some weights, punch a bag, do some jumping jacks, you probably won't feel angry after wards...because you'll be too tired to be angry.

    If it is better to express anger than to repress it, how else might you express it? Is it necessary to outwardly express anger in order to let it go? Or is it enough to just acknowledge the feeling of anger as it arises, to think about it, and then let it go?

    Most anger is of the knee jerk variety, that if you would just distance yourself for a moment from the source of your anger, take a deep breath and walk away for awhile, you may find that the anger dissipates on its own...or at least it loses some of its strength.

    For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was walking down the street, minding my own business, happy as can be, and some assholes in a truck passing by yelled obscenities at me. I felt really angry and emotionally insulted by it. At first it felt like a personal attack, but then I realized that I was probably just an anonymous arbitrary victim, as they passed by so quickly they could barely even see me and I could barely see them.

    And then I remembered that there are some people in this world that enjoy committing random acts of violence. That they could have done the same thing to anyone, regardless of who they were or what they looked like, and I just happened to be the only target around.

    It may have been reasonable to feel angry at the time, but it would be completely counterproductive to REMAIN angry, because these people were obviously idiots not worth being angry over.

    Like I said before, anger and fear are part of our bodies natural alarm system warning us of danger, keeping us in a state of high alert in order to effectively respond to a threat. But this is an extra sensitive warning system, that sometimes sends off false alarms, where the reponse of anger or fear may be entirely inappropriate to the situation.

    That's why you take a deep breath, relax and clear your head, emotionally distance yourself from the anger, and intellectual revisit the source of the anger when you are no longer feeling as angry about it.

    This deep breath/walking away is comparable to a gun's safety button...a safety measure in place to prevent trigger happy knee jerk responses to danger.

  5. It looks like you we are all in agreement. Most of the negatives y'all are describing is based in how the anger is expressed/dealt with. I've seen the effects of repressed anger in my own family, the explosions that can happen. I actually wrote this in response to watching two of my coworkers get in a fist fight during one of our breaks. The whole thing was ridiculous.

    Cym, you may have a point about one thing: perhaps it isn't necessary to express it, just to recognize it. I don't feel that is the case for "righteous anger,"; but for "ego anger," yes, to sit back and breathe, think about it and let it go is probably the best course. For righteous anger, it's best to keep it as the motivating energy. But even that must eventually be let go, for anger is volatile no matter what, and prolonged anger of any kind is probably harmful, and as I said, will lead to hatered.

    Of course, as most anger in our world today is ego driven, the sit back and breathe approach is probably best for most cases.

  6. Seneca, the Roman stoic, says of anger that it comes on us as a passion, and it motivates outward action. Though it is disgusting, dangerous and unnatural, it provides us a domain to practice self-control --to be skeptical about the causes of anger, to be reflective about our responses to it and to rise above it.

    Some interesting stuff here:

  7. I think Seneca is wrong, it's not unnatural.

    I guess I could have summed up most of this blog post with : Anger, and all emotions, are natural and even healthy (how suspicious would you be of someone who never got angry? It would mean he cared about nothing.), but the unhealthiness comes when we are slaves to the emotion. Seneca had that right, about being reflective and rising above it.