“Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. It’s helpless … it’s absence of control … I have no use for it whatsoever.”
“Anger is better [than shame]. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”
These two quotes are from the same person: the novelist and essayist Toni Morrison. They seem to express incompatible opinions, and one might assume her “real” view is the former, since the first quote is taken from an interview, whereas the latter expresses the feeling of a fictional abused and bullied child, the protagonist of her novel The Bluest Eye. But taken together, these quotes stake out an ancient human conundrum. Anger disinhibits us while increasing our aggression. On one hand, this combination can certainly be dangerous: we might act against social rules and our own values, and alienate those whose empathy we need in the process. We might even become violent. On the other hand, anyone who has ever revelled in a burst of anger knows how enlivening it can feel. It can bring an awareness of one’s worth, or of the need for justice. And not only does it make us aware; it makes us want to do something. Whether the action we choose while angry is the best one is a separate question. But the exhilaration is undeniable.
As an emotion, anger is ancient – older than our species. (It is hard, though not impossible, to imagine a dog feeling nostalgia; but we all know an angry dog when we see one.) That’s a long chain of evolutionary reinforcement, and it suggests anger has its uses. Yet we have all seen anger do serious damage. Even in low-stakes situations it can indeed seem paralysing, useless, infra dig. Arguably, the emotion itself, like any other, is morally neutral; just information, a particular way a nervous system can fire. Something happens, anger arises: cause and effect in our animal bodies. Perhaps anger’s moral valence lies not in its arising, then, but in what we do with it.
But I’m not sure a model of asserting top-down willpower to “govern” or “control” one’s anger is entirely helpful, either. It sort of just kicks the problem down the road, making willpower the moral issue. Which presupposes we all have roughly the same idea of what willpower is, and roughly the same amount of it – or that we ought to. But I think of people with ADHD, who experience greater emotional intensity and impulsivity because they’re wired that way. Educators on neurodiversity often refer to the ADHD system as having a Ferrari engine and bicycle breaks. If anger arises in the ADHD system, is that morally different, and if so, how? I think, too, of those who have experienced trauma – who might have been rewired to tip more easily into fear, or fawning conciliation, or rage, than before the trauma happened. And on the other hand, there are those people with very strong willpower, as classically understood – the type who never get angry because it would only give away their advantage. I’m not sure living by calculations of control and advantage is necessarily morally superior to letting it all hang out a bit more. We don’t want to scare anyone, and we certainly don’t want to become violent – I think a lot of people can agree on those red lines. But does that mean anger exists only as barbarism, and that the only right way to respond is with “control”?
I’m not proposing an answer to this conundrum here. I’m just noticing that it isn’t often enquired very far into. Even in the “open-minded” space of therapy, there can often be an assumption on the part of the client, the therapist, or both that the goal is to eradicate or reduce anger, or at least control its expression. And I see the good intention in that. If a person feels out of control of their anger, this can cause distress and affect their relationships. But I do think there is still a taboo around anger, in society at large and, to some extent, in talk therapy. This taboo leaves a lot of interesting questions unexplored. It might also leave sufferers in the dark – both those who have been seriously hurt by others’ excessive anger and want to understand what happened; and those who feel their own anger is “too much”, or “too little”, or somehow otherwise “wrong”.
Rather than reaching immediately for normative moral judgements about anger, it might be more helpful to think in terms of what a given person is using anger for.
The answers might be myriad, but as a prompt to thought, I will list below some uses of anger I’ve seen in the wild. Some of these might prompt the question of how “wild” anger actually is. For all that it is supposed to have a bestial will of its own, there can often be a sense of secondary gains – an inkling that someone’s anger, in its current pattern, is doing something for them. (The same could be said for an apparent total absence of anger.) This question of use is important to consider if there is any project of self-development, so as to respect the existing structure. If any emotional pattern turns out to be load-bearing, that load will need to be redistributed before change can be approached. That is, unless you are willing to bring the whole thing down with a crash.
Some uses of anger – an incomplete list
Information about an immediate problem: As Morrison’s protagonist notices, anger can give “an awareness of worth”. If someone is treating you like you don’t have worth – being dismissive, talking over you, endangering your safety, saying insulting things – anger may arise to let you know. Anger can also let you know that your autonomy feels under threat, or that something has just happened that you consider unjust – whether toward you, or someone else.
Information about a chronic problem: Chronic anger, or anger that seems to flare up inevitably in certain situations, might be alerting you to a more systemic sense of threat, injustice, or compromised autonomy. This might be accurate in the present, if, for example, you are meeting with frequent racist microaggressions, or the cost of living crisis is keeping you in debt. Or it might be an old wound from early life that has never been given the proper attention. If you grew up bullied or talked over or dismissed, then anything that feels even remotely similar in the present can raise your hackles.
Finding the energy to act: Again, this could be acute or ongoing. An acute burst of energy might say, “Don’t let that person talk to you like that!”, or, “We need to organise a protest!” But anger can also become a regular fuel source. If we have suffered a lot, we might have reserves of a number of painful emotions – shame, fear, sadness – that are of a sort that tend to slow us down and make us less active. If someone has a lot of pain and also a lot to get done, anger can be preferable to feel. The sadness and shame can get tucked away to feel later, when it’s safe (or never), while the anger keeps us powering on. (In this sense, a person who is irritated by a hundred things throughout the day might be said to be a frequent snacker.) Of course, this comes with consequences of its own: chronic nervous system activation, with consequent tiredness and hyper-vigilance.
Defence of boundaries that have been crossed too many times: Other people and their inanimate emissaries (insurance claim rejections, spam emails, ebikes strewn across footpaths) will impinge on all of us from time to time. But a person whose edges are porous and sensitive – like a neurodivergent person with sensory issues – or a person whose humanity is less respected in some contexts – say, because they are muslim, or a woman, or a refugee, or childless, or working class – will likely experience incursions on their boundaries more often. These may come to feel unbearable. I suggested above that someone who gets irritable many times in a day might be drawing energy from this. Another explanation is that the anger creates an outward surge that fills up the angry person’s psychic and somatic territory and symbolically pushes the intrusion out – be it an ignorant comment, a fellow bus passenger’s tiktoks, or whatever.
Letting overstimulation or dysregulation out of the body: Anger can carry a great deal of pent-up energy out of the system, like a waveto the shore. Sometimes, no one in a situation need do anything wrong – it just all feels too much for someone. Anger can discharge that too-much-ness.
Doing as you were taught: Children learn largely by example. If they have often seen people react with anger, they will learn both neurologically and socially to react to life with frequent anger as well. People who grew up in this kind of experience may not want to get angry, but if they weren’t guided through alternatives, these might feel awkward, or might not even register as possibilities. This is a real developmental gap that therapy, coaching, or personal development work can help to bridge. I find that suspending moral judgement of the anger option actually helps other options to show themselves. If a stirring of anger leads to instant shame, then the system will divert its energies into shutdown, rather than being free to explore other options.
Playing out a family pattern: We might hate the role we were cast in by our family of origin, or we might be rather proud of it – or feel a complicated compound of the two. In any case, there is more psychic pressure than we may realise to keep on playing this family role. We can be loyal to a bigger pattern of identity, also – the way the whole family defined itself against the world. So we might be angry because our parents and grandparents were angry – because “you have to know your rights”. Or we may be the angry one in a family of cool customers, not realising that this job was assigned to us – to be the one who feels the anger for the whole system. Perhaps the most tragic manifestation of familial anger programming is when somebody suffered as a child because of a parent’s rages, and then finds themself in adulthood struggling with excessive anger of their own. They might vow “never again” yet blow up on their loved ones again a month later. Or they might become a doormat, or numb, because they refuse to feel anger and “be like mum or dad”. Arguably, unless that person makes their own terms with anger – working out, from a position of choice, how they’d like to feel and express it – then refusing to get angry is another way of being controlled.
Punching down: A person who feels their own status is unsteady in the social order may feel angry, ashamed, and worried about that. And they may displace those feelings onto a more vulnerable, demonised group, because they can’t safely attack the more powerful. In this way, they feel the pleasure of anger, and get to assert their status – with none of the danger of picking on someone their own size. This kind of anger can become quite distorting, because it is unjust, which pricks the conscience, and it requires one to lie to oneself – and lies have a habit of metastasising. It takes a lot of courage to admit to oneself if one has been doing this, but it is an important thing to wake up to.
Controlling others: Anger expressed as aggression or hostility can make others afraid. Anger expressed as moral superiority can induce shame. That fear and shame can then be used to try to keep others in line. An early environment that was very chaotic and unpredictable – or, conversely, one in which the parents exerted extreme control – can lead to patterns of seeking to control others later. But other people pretty universally don’t like it, so this isn’t a great long-term relational strategy.
Revenge and punishment: If someone feels seriously wronged, they might want to cause pain to the person who wronged them – for satisfaction, or out of a sense of balance. “Revenge is a wild kind of justice”, Francis Bacon said, and punishment should properly be left to the authorities. But a wronged person doesn’t always trust the authorities to give them justice. I don’t think there’s any way to adjudicate this in the abstract; I’m just noting that this is one end that anger can be turned to. One way this drive for revenge can distort a person’s life is that the original wound and villain are forgotten, or dismissed as the irrelevant past; but the nervous system knows that a wrong remains unaddressed; and the harmed person then goes about in the world seeing the villain everywhere in other people – and perhaps lashing out at them in place of getting justice for the original harm. This is an area where talk therapy or personal development work can be transformative. If the story can be told again in a way that feels satisfying and true-enough – not the perfect one-and-only-truth, but a corrective that our sense of justice is crying out for – then not only will we be less likely to project villainy onto others in the present, but justice can be restored through other channels that don’t require the cooperation of the (often oblivious, dead, or unavailable) original perpetrator. A sense of justice might be achieved through connecting with one’s own truth about what happened; through salvaging a good life for oneself despite the harm that was done; and perhaps, in time, through concrete altruistic action, such as advocacy work for other victims.
Anger may be diverse in its manifestations and uses, but it is basic to the human experience. Most of us will confront our relationship with it sooner or later. I have expressed some skepticism above about the classical “willpower” approach to anger; this does not mean I see no place for will at all. We can’t grow as people without will; therapy doesn’t work without will. But by suspending our assumptions about anger and becoming curious about why anger is arising in a person, and what their system is using it for, we can arrive at a place of greater awareness and choice. We can choose how we want our own anger to flow through us. We can choose how we want to respond to the anger of others. And if anger still bursts its banks sometimes and it feels like choice has deserted us, we may be better able to survive the discomfort of that, and go about making amends.