What Not to Do About Anger

I’ve written about goals in earlier posts, and the spiritual attraction thing I’ll leave for the future. This week on my writing pilgrimage, I’m blogging about negative emotions—yesterday I wrote about shame—and so today I’ll share a few of my thoughts about anger.

I am no stranger to the anger demons, and one of the things that makes me angry is when I’m angry and someone tells me not to be. Mention you’re ticked off about something (big, small, significant or not) and just wait. Before long, someone will say these four annoying words: “Just let it go.” 

This is probably the worst advice you can give someone who is suffering. For one thing, it is based on the notion that people can turn feelings on and off by sheer force of will. Anyone who has tried to make themselves love someone or who has forced sympathy they don’t feel knows what a nonsensical idea that is. It’s like trying to like a food that makes you gag. 

Another problem is that telling someone to let their anger go suggests they shouldn’t be feeling what they are feeling, as if their anger is unhealthy, unholy, or dumb. But feelings are what they are: they are part of us, and they come from very primal, deep places in our psyches. Tell a person their anger is wrong, and you’re telling them they are wrong. It may be well intended, but it feels silencing and abusive. 

But the worst problem with “letting go” is that usually we don’t, even when we think we are. Most often, we aren’t letting our anger float off in a puff of vapor, we’re hanging it around our necks and pretending it isn’t there. We’re not releasing it, we’re ignoring it. And ignoring anger is a lot like ignoring a suspicious mole on your neck. It can end up doing you a lot of harm. 

So what can we do with anger? A lot of things. Tomorrow, I’ll blog about some of them, and about how I’ve dealt with the pervasive problem of anger in my own life.