Get Angry — Get Better

Pure anger is a God-given emo­tion. It does a whole lot of good things for you: it clar­i­fies the sit­u­a­tion; it brings you to your full senses; it gives you the energy to make deci­sions long over­due; it is the emo­tion of dig­nity. Anger is not rage. Rage is a sham­ing and destruc­tive shadow of real anger. Rage aims to hurt oth­ers and inflict toxic shame on them. Anger awak­ens the soul to what needs to be done.

Most peo­ple are uncom­fort­able with anger. I am sure the same peo­ple just do not under­stand how Jesus could take a whip of cords and drive oppor­tunis­tic par­a­sites out of the Tem­ple. What Jesus did in that repeated event (at the begin­ning and end of his min­istry), is what we need to do but have ignored. We finally get angry enough to change our self talk, or angry enough to begin choos­ing more pos­i­tive asso­ciates and friends. Anger is the red flag of self-respect. It sets bound­aries and cleanses sit­u­a­tions from the infe­rior, the neg­a­tive, and the unholy.

Free-floating inter­nal anger can cre­ate all sorts of inner mon­sters; repressed anger is the clas­sic emo­tion impli­cated in many forms of depres­sion. In its lesser forms it can come out “sideways” — as in passive-aggressiveness; it is also a major com­po­nent in many, if not most, psy­cho­so­matic issues. Woody Allen once jok­ingly said, “I don’t get mad, I get a tumor.” For as macabre and dark as that state­ment may sound, he hit it right on the head. What does not go out­ward emo­tion­ally goes inward…and often does more dam­age than the unex­pressed out­ward anger ever could have done.

We all have our anger styles. It takes me a long time to find my anger, but when I do it comes with a flash of insight — an admis­sion to some­thing I always knew but would not admit. Once I get the point of the anger-driven insight, the needed changes come. Jus­ti­fied anger can be one of your best teach­ers — and cer­tainly one not to be ignored.