A friend of mine some years back stood in line at a Department of Motor Vehicles office in San Francisco. Waiting in the same queue he overheard a man hiss through clenched teeth to no one in particular, “These anger management classes aren’t working!” It was the DMV, after all, and I am confident most of us could sympathize.
However, as a country or community, we do not talk about anger nearly enough — not in a meaningful way; not by means that actually absorb or process rage.
Not only is the crisis of rage a matter of quantity, but also a concern about depth. What prevails in our culture is a fear of our reaction to early life experiences —specifically, traumas that impressed upon us how powerless we’ve felt; a seized state of mind that carries forward to the present.
Sure, there’re therapy and support groups; and medications are available for serious cases of anger mismanagement. However, I think the problem is far more pervasive than we collectively are willing to admit. Denial–whether collective or individual–I believe, plays a crucial role.
While working for a bond trading company some years back, I had a frustrating conversation with a colleague. It was not an isolated occasion, but the latest in a series of miscommunications I had been having with her.
It would have probably been far more effective of me to lower my voice to a whisper when conveying my bewilderment. As my colleague, she took naturally to pretending there was no messaging impasse between us.
However, I hadn’t used a hushed tone. I raised my voice, loud enough to above the quiet din of workday chatter.
Very quickly but briefly the ongoing conversations stopped and necks craned in my direction. Later that day my team lead pulled me aside and politely reprimanded me for the intolerable workplace act of raising one’s voice.
Now consider, for a moment, the daily mass shootings that bear witness to an obviously unharnessed rage. And think of the cliched remarks about the mass shooter after the fact: “He was so quiet. This was so unexpected.”
It is precisely the same set of anger-denying convictions that scruple about a raised voice and experience puzzlement when a “quiet” colleague sprays the workplace with bullets. I consider it psychotic that such a code of conduct prevails in our culture.
Just the opposite of enlightened, such thinking reveals a shuttered conscience–informed by denial.
Believing that anger can be suppressed the way a restaurant packs away its soiled linens behind the swinging doors of the kitchen, is willful naivete.
How lacking is the language of rage in our culture, to adequately convey its scorching magnitude? Or is the agent of wrath simply in want of willing and capable witnesses to anger’s desire for recognition?
Whatever truths such questions lead to, the carnage and frequency of mass shootings reinforce the case that anger refuses our piecemeal attempts to treat or defuse it.
As for my own struggle with anger, I have come to view it as an energy–one of a wide variety of energies (i.e., emotions) coursing through my body, heart and mind.
As with all my feelings, I am aware of the choice I have how much or how little to reveal. When someone stokes my wrath I think of the energy I am about to give away when giving in to anger. Does that person deserve it?
Better question: does this person merit my energy?
Far more often than not, the person provoking my ire possesses little or no merit. My energy is not of infinite supply. Neither do I find myself copiously supplied with time.
Running this string of questions in my thoughts before reacting has saved me on a number of occasions from losing contol of my emotions.
Admittedly, this approach hasn’t been fully integrated into my thinking so that it operates without conscious recall.
This summarizes some of the difficult work I’ve attempted on the matter of my anger; within a cultural context where decision makers tone police one moment and in the next, stand blind as a deer staring into headlights. “Didn’t see that coming.”
Since having that workplace anger experience, I have reflected on my own upbringing. I recall the many times I have had communication gaps with one of my parents — so severe to the point of enraging me as a child. It’s my personal kryptonite that I carry into almost any human interaction.
I wouldn’t expect what works for me to advance the cause of others with the same struggle. But it would help immensely if decision makers of every rank dropped the tone policing routine in favor of genuine engagement.
The point I would emphasize is that it takes as much anger to suppress someone else’s rage, as it does to constructively channel it. I am of the conviction that this goes some distance toward accounting for the prevalence of denial.
The cycle of anger suppression and mass carnage playing out over and over, illustrates a vicious feedback loop of increasingly shorter interval.
As for a public policy solution, or set of solutions, that could derail present trends, there appears no legislative coalition willing to address anger nor reduce the stupefying ease it takes to get a hold of a firearm. Comparing the U.S. epidemic of mass shootings with the relative calm experienced in other industrialized nations, how could anyone refuse a moment of self reflection and ask what it is exactly we are doing wrong?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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