Let's Talk About ANGER!

Be honest, did that bold title scare you a bit? What is it about even the word, anger, that makes people feel uneasy?

The Enneagram does a beautiful job of introducing us to the idea that while we may rely too heavily on one emotion over another, we need all three and we can find balance as we learn why certain emotions feel more common to us than others.

Rethinking Anger

We need anger. Anger is action. Anger is the body saying, something isn't right. Anger is one of our three survival emotions for a reason.

We need ANGER to:

• Point out moments of threat and engage our defences.

• Help us protect people, places and things.

• Show us when a boundary has been crossed.

• Motivate change in moments of injustice.

Many times anger feels like a reaction because we haven't taken the time to examine why it bubbled up in the first place. When you're putting out a dangerous fire, you don't concentrate on the flames, you look for the source. It's the same with anger, squashing the flames of an angry outburst gets us nowhere - actually, it typically leads to an even more volatile situation down the road. We need to look behind it and see what is sparked the flames in the first place.

Self-Observation

For a long time I felt like my anger came out of nowhere. It would sometimes even feel like it exploded for "no good reason." Maybe on the surface that appeared to be true, but when I reflect, there have almost always been repetitious irritating and frustrating issues that I have stamped down over and over again, trying to convince myself things are fine, that lead up to a moment of anger.

For me, this came from the messaging I internalized that "being angry is bad." Nice people don't get anger, did you know that? (Please catch my sarcasm.) I know it's not just me, the negative messaging around anger runs deep and wide through many social spaces. I suppose some of it is for good reason, any overused emotion can lead to pain and suffering, but anger seems to still top the list as "one of the bad ones."

There are many difficult things around this negative messaging. If you've been told over and over again that something is bad it usually leads one of two ways, first, it tries unsuccessfully to stay hidden, or the opposite, it explodes and the negative messaging is applied even more deeply to the core of who you are. Negative or moralistic messaging gets us deeper and deeper into the problem we are trying to avoid.

If the theory around the Enneagram is true, 1/3 of all people around the world have anger as their dominant emotion - Types 8, 9 and 1. And as we learn to balance our dominant emotion with the other two survival emotions, sadness and fear, ALL of us will need to embrace and experience anger. Anger is not something to get rid of, anger is something that needs to be understood.

Overcome

I have spent this entire blog trying not to jump to the other side of the issue of anger ... but here it is. Some of us have been hurt by anger. There is nothing I can say in this blog to excuse the pain caused by anger. Adults are responsible for their actions related to overused emotions and I am in no way interested in excusing abusive actions.

You may not be ready to look at anger from a new angle, and I completely understand, but let me present a new idea to close:

What if we chose to fight anger with anger. I'm not talking about violence. I'm talking about the power inside of us when we know something isn't right and we have the motivation and ability to make a change. Anger doesn't have to be loud. Anger doesn't have to be at someone. Anger is the inner knowing, the fire that burns inside, when someone is crossing a line. I'm talking about the energy in the air before a thunderstorm, the pull of a riptide before a wave crashes - that is action energy, that is anger.

We've been limited in what we've seen as anger - anger seems to just be the red faced emoji - but it's not. Anger NEEDS to be, and is, way more than that. Anger NEEDS to be, and is, more than that one moment of outburst we fear.

Tune into your anger next time; I wonder what you'll notice. We need more people moving into action because they are angry at all the ways people around them fall victim to an outdated and dangerous kind of anger.