I’ve known many angry men. I was one of them, for a long time.
Many of us are raised on anger. It comes in as many different varieties as flavors of baby food, and it gets spoon-fed into us from a young age. Sometimes we inherit the anger of our fathers, who pass down their own disillusionment with life. Sometimes it’s the anger of our peers, who teach us the cruel lesson under the lash of tongue and fist.
Whatever the source, the anger seeps into us. It’s an insidious poison, and seems to saturate our very cells. If we don’t take time and effort to purge it from our systems, it can lie in wait and fester within until we vomit it up. When this happens, both we and the world suffer.
Build That Wall
I’ve lived behind the wall of rage. Mine was built from the emotional, mental, and physical abuse I experienced as a kid. I tried vainly to purge it with the limited tools I’d been given as a young male in America. When I couldn’t get rid of it, I decided to do something with it. I used it to motivate myself when no one else would. I used it to shield myself from others. I even used it as a weapon to strike out at others.
Yeah, like many men, I was paying forward some nasty shit.
Too many men have erected monuments to our rage. We build fortresses of rage and encircle them with those walls. We transform ourselves into living shrines and worship our anger. Why not revere the one force that has kept many of us alive, slogging through lives made swampy with our blood and sweat? Negative fuel or not, sometimes anger is all we have in the absence of positive role models and hope.
Tear It Down
So what’s the solution to this problem? How can we bring down the anger wall?
One thing I know for sure: you can’t break through the barrier of rage with more rage. That’s like adding more bricks to a wall and waiting for it to fall. You can’t reinforce something and expect it to topple. If anything, adding to your own wall—or someone else’s—with more anger will create a burden so heavy it will collapse under its own weight. The result of such collapse is mental illness, violence, and suicide, among other shitty outcomes.
But disciplines such as positive psychology offer us a way out. We can turn a critical spotlight on our anger and challenge the voice of rage inside of us. Using a positive psychology intervention, we can take angry thoughts to court and challenge their validity. Doing this can help loosen their grip on us.
But what happens when one of our friends seals themselves behind a wall of rage? As I said, you can’t breach such a wall with your own anger, or you’ll find yourself in a medieval warfare situation. A direct assault on those walls can cause a man to adopt a siege mentality, which will only make the situation worse. The man behind the barrier can become a bitter opponent who will try to fill you full of arrows and pour boiling oil on you.
You can’t beat force with force. You’ll set off an arms race, where both sides will ramp up the rage until there’s nothing but scorched earth between you. In situations like that, many times the only option is to be the first to raise the white flag of surrender. Giving up the fight in favor of feelings can be the best tactic of all.
This doesn’t mean giving up on that enraged person, however. You can set up camp outside their walls and launch messages of compassion, calm, empathy, and even humor over the ramparts. You may have to wait a long while, but eventually they may just come out of that fortress of anger.
◊♦◊
Are you a first-time contributor to The Good Men Project? Submit here:
◊♦◊
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all-access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class, and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group, and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.