Exposing the enemy. (Anger)

We live in a world which often seems more violent with every passing day. Terrorist bombings, school-yard massacres, war, and atrocities fill news headlines. At times it even seems that humanity has a collective death wish.

Human aggression has been blamed on many things, including broken homes, poverty, racism, inequality, chemical imbalances in the brain, toy guns, TV violence, sexual repression, sexual freedom, overpopulation, alienation, bad genes, and original sin. However, virtually all of these potential causes have one thing in common which is
Unfulfilled Human Needs and Desires:
Human needs and desires are endless. Virtually all of us would like to have fancy homes, social status in our community, the ability to eat all we want without getting fat, sex whenever we want it, perpetual health, unconditional love, and the ability to live until we're 200. Most of us will enjoy few of these things.

Fortunately, most people are realistic and sane enough not to turn to violence to deal with their frustrations. However, self-control sometimes breaks down - resulting in aggressions ranging from petty theft - to the Columbine massacre - to the mass killing fields of Cambodia.
What causes people and societies to turn to aggression? Throughout history there have been five key factors: neurosis, desperation, envy, greed, and collectivism.

Aggressive behavior is often the result of a brain gone wrong. When these brain abnormalities are properly treated there is often significant improvement. There is substantial imaging research on violence.

Violence is not one thing. Research has shown that there are at least three different types of violence that all require different treatments: impulsive violence (low prefrontal cortex), compulsive violence (high anterior cingulate) and random or senseless violence (temporal lobe). Knowing which type or combination of types is essential to getting the right help'

• Let’s face it—anger is a fact of life. Our world is filled with violence, hatred, war, and aggression. Psychologically, many theories of human development focus on the infant’s struggle with anger and frustration and the primitive fantasies of aggression, guilt, and reparation that result from these feelings.In essence, we grow up with anger right from the beginning of life.

The brilliant French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, taught that aggression results as a psychological defense Jacques Lacan against threats of fragmentation. That is, as infants, we are just a jumble of diverse biological processes over which we have no authority, and our first task in life is to develop a coherent identity which “pulls together” this fragmented confusion. This identity may give the appearance of a unified personality, but it really is just a psychological illusion that hides our essential human vulnerability and weakness. And so, when anything or anyone threatens us with the truth of our essential fragmentation, the quickest, easiest, and most common defense available—to hide the truth of our weakness and to give the illusion that we possess some sort of power—is aggression.

• Even though this might seem like an obviously simple point, many persons still have a deep reluctance to grasp it: Anger is a common human emotion. We all feel it. And we feel it more often than we like to admit.

But before going any further, we need to make a clear distinction between anger and feeling hurt or irritated.

We all feel hurt or irritated when someone or something obstructs our needs or desires. Anger, though, in its technical sense refers to the desire to “get even with”—that is, to take revenge on—the cause of the hurt.

But then, as a psychological reaction to these immediate physical responses, indignation and animosity toward the other driver overrun your mind.

So the psychological process is clear and simple. If a person hurts you, then, in your anger, you want to hurt him back, just as you have been hurt.

• Anger can also be expressed indirectly. If something like a traffic jam, for example, leaves you feeling tense and frustrated, then what do you do? Maybe you go home and find some petty thing out of order and then blow up, just to take out your frustration on your family. Or maybe you go to a bar, maneuver someone into offending you, and get into a fight. Either way you vent your frustrations at the traffic jam by hurting innocent persons—after first manipulating circumstances so that you can believe in your own mind that these persons have somehow hurt you and deserve to suffer for it.

Still, there is more to the story than this, because there is more to anger than meets the eye.

The truth is, anger may be a “natural”—that is, a commonly occurring—social reaction to hurt and insult, but being natural doesn’t make it good for us. Sure, “natural” foods are commonly advertised as being healthy and good for us. But poisons, for example, are also natural, and poisons, by definition, are deadly.

And so there are far better ways to cope with hurt and insult than with anger, because anger itself acts like a poison in your own heart that ultimately degrades the quality of your own life as much as it hurts the life of another person.

So the FIRST STEP in learning a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult is simply to acknowledge that you’re hurt.

This is not as easy as it sounds.

For example, when you get angry you don’t really allow yourself to feel your inner vulnerability and hurt. All you can think about in the moment is your desire to get revenge, to defend your pride, to do something—anything—to create the feeling that you have power and importance. In essence, your outbursts of rage paradoxically hide your inner feelings of vulnerability, so you never recognize the hurt you’re feeling that triggers your hostile reaction. All the bitterness and hostility is a big puff of smoke, an emotional fraud. It hardens your heart toward others so that you can seal off your own emotional pain.

Or you might feel hurt by someone emotionally close to you, and, out of fear that your immediate impulse to hurt that person in return will cause you to lose that person’s “love,” you suppress the awareness of your honest inner experiences. If you do this often enough you can end up convincing yourself that everything is fine and peaceful. In this case the hurt becomes anger anyway, only it becomes unconscious anger: you remain hurt while the desire to hurt the other person gets pushed into your unconscious where it stews in bitter resentment. And so, in reality, you are just deceiving yourself and defiling your relationships when you deny that you have anything to feel hurt about. And before you know it you’re wondering why you’re so depressed. Depression, after all, is often “anger turned inwards”—that is, you end up despising yourself because you feel guilty for unconsciously wanting to hurt someone else.

In Western psychology, acceptance of every person’s unique emotional experiences is commonplace, but many non-Western cultures place a high value on social conformity. As a way to ensure a child’s survival in such a culture, families teach children that all expressions of anger are forbidden and shameful. And to accomplish this, parents, along with the rest of society in general, tend to suppress all recognition of individual emotions.

Hurt feelings in response to slight or insult, however, are universally human. If these feelings are suppressed in any culture to the point that they never become recognized or named, they can fuel the ugly cultural darknesses of prejudice, hatred, paranoia, child abuse, domestic violence, drug addictions—and all other dark psychological poisons that defile real love—as well as depression itself, which, sadly, can also feel shameful.

It’s ironic, then, that a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult actually leads to compassion and peace, while the suppression of emotions, in trying to protect the surface peace, only leads to a psychological undercurrent of suspicion and cruelty. That’s why people who become social “doormats” and let others walk all over them, rather than admit that they feel hurt about anything, usually have quite a lot of resentment and “dirt” underneath their appearance of welcome.


So the SECOND STEP in learning a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult is to follow the hurt back into its roots in the past to all those times and circumstances when you felt the same way.

You need to do this because any insult in the present is magnified by similar insults from the past. Failure to recognize old insults only makes the current insult seem far larger than it really is.

This entire process is a bit like what happens when an insect stings you and you feel a pain way out of proportion to the size of the stinger. First you simply recognize that it hurts. Then you have to explore the wound to find the stinger. The stinger represents the insult that hurts you, digging out the stinger represents the psychological task of realizing how this one insult pierces deep into your self-esteem, and the venom which spreads into the surrounding tissues represents the way unconscious resentment about all sorts of old emotional injuries from the past continues to poison you even in the present.

aving acknowledged the wound and explored it, you will be ready for the healing process to begin. But, for healing to take place, you must be careful to avoid anything that irritates, rather than soothes, the wound.

Therefore, the THIRD STEP in learning a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult is to avoid the popular response to feelings of hurt and insult.

So let’s move on to discover just what this popular response to feelings of hurt and insult might be.

So we all suffer insult, and we all feel hurt, and we all tend to sink into fantasies of revenge. Some of us then “get angry” and violently act out the fantasies in real life. And some of us just push everything out of awareness and pretend we are “nice” persons. So what honest alternative is there?

Well, you can get up the courage to explore the human psyche a bit more deeply than most persons want to go and discover something about human nature. Something ugly.

You will discover a concept about human psychology that theology and religion have for ages called sin. But a secular, philosophical understanding of the concept could describe it as a sort of infatuation with the vanity of your personal desires and a reliance on social prestige or power to defeat or destroy anyone or anything that stands in the way of your getting what you want. Or, to say it more simply, most people are narcissistically preoccupied with their immediate desires and have little, if any, altruistic awareness of anyone or anything else around them. Psychologically, this behavior allows you to feel good about yourself (that is, to feel strong and “in control”) by using, hurting, or neglecting someone else. Sin therefore leads you away from true love and compassion, and it sends you right into all the predicaments of self-indulgence. Sin really does hurt others because sin defiles love.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder refers to a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.

But, in its more universal sense, narcissism can be found at the core of almost all psychological dysfunction, for it represents the way we all, like the Greek god Narcissus himself, can “fall in love” with ourselves to hide our own inadequacy and consequently treat others like objects to make ourselves feel strong and competent.

Now, if you understand this psychological fact about human nature—that everyone is drawn away from essential human goodness by a need to avoid feeling weak or foolish—then you have a new way to cope with your feelings of hurt and to overcome your “natural,” hostile slide into anger.
Instead of taking all insults personally, you can realize that every insult derives from that universal tendency in human nature toward selfish, inconsiderate behavior. Given this ugly reality, no cache of guns or bombs or witty insults or curses can be sufficient to eradicate its evil effects from the world, so revenge becomes futile. The only sane response to insult is deep sorrow for all of humanity and compassion for the misguided person who gets caught up in the “popular” way of behaving.

Therefore, the FOURTH STEP in learning a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult is forgiveness.
To forgive someone means that you consciously make the decision to set aside any desire to see a person hurt because of the hurt he or she caused you, and instead you wish that the person will recognize his or her hurtful behavior, feel sorrow for it, and learn to be a more considerate person.

This, too, like the first step, is not as easy as it sounds.

For the truth of the matter is that you cannot forgive someone until you have fully felt the pain he or she has caused you.

Pushing the pain into your unconscious, as described earlier, only makes forgiveness impossible because, as unconscious anger, the dark wish to harm the person who hurt you remains alive but out of sight.

And, with your animosity kept out of sight, it’s all too easy to present yourself as a “nice” person

There are also many persons who deny the concept of “sin.” Psychologically, this denial serves the defense of protecting these persons from the recognition of the ugly parts of their own unconscious. They just refuse to admit that they are fully capable of inflicting their own harmful wishes on another person.

Beware. There is no escaping the psychological effects of injury and anger; either you can face up to all of your unconscious anger and learn real forgiveness, or you can let the deadly poison of revenge become your ugly destiny.

Remember that anger, being an emotion, is not something you can ever “get rid of.” As long as you are alive there will be times when you are insulted and feel hurt. And, as long as there are times when you feel hurt, you will be pulled down into unconscious fantasies of revenge.

But once you notice that you feel hurt you have a choice. You don’t have to accept blindly the unconscious slide into revenge.

On the one hand, you don’t have to “get angry.” That is, you don’t have to become abusive or violent. If you tell yourself, “Yes, I hurt. But it is not so much another person as human nature itself hurting me, and there’s nothing I can do about it, except refuse to return hurt for hurt, sin for sin,” then you can feel compassion for the person who hurt you, and you can be forgiving.

On the other hand, all of this does not preclude the possibility that there may be times when you have to stand up—to defend yourself or to defend others—and say something about the ugliness that everyone wants to ignore or deny. To be quiet—to stifle your feeling offended—is also a fear of love and a slide into revenge.

In these situations—whether in your family, among friends, or at work—when you experience feelings about anything, you need only express those feelings openly.
The key to all this, however, is that you speak up as soon as you feel the first inkling of injury—and this means that you have to be very good at recognizing the feeling of hurt in the first place. You must speak up well before the hurt turns to anger and has a chance to build into anything destructive. You don’t have to understand why you’re feeling what you’re feeling in the moment; just communicate what you’re feeling in the moment.


Venting anger does not work. Even though it might give some immediate satisfaction, venting anger (called catharsis)—whether by yelling obscenities, making obscene gestures, honking the horn of your car, throwing or breaking things, or screaming insults—does nothing to dispel anger. More often than not, it actually pumps up your emotional arousal and may even prolong it.

The Ultimate Remedy:

So, recognize the feeling of anger, but don’t act on it. Instead, do the following.

Cool down. Remember the old, stereotypical advice about counting to ten before saying or doing anything when you first feel hurt? Well, it’s still good advice. That’s because the first reaction to hurt is purely physiological: you receive a rush of adrenaline to prepare you to take action in real danger. But when the hurt comes from an event that poses only a short-term threat—such as when a car cuts in front of you—or threatens your pride far more than your life and safety, then all that adrenaline surging through your body isn’t serving any meaningful purpose.

If you’re prone to violence, then walk away from the provocation as soon as you feel the pressure building.

In most cases, simply taking a few moments to practice some simple relaxation exercises, such as deep breathing, can allow your sympathetic nervous system’s arousal to calm down and dissipate by itself. Deep, slow breathing is an automatic physiological effect of being at peace, so when you deliberately take slow, deep breaths you are indirectly telling your body that all danger has now passed; as a consequence, your body will stop producing adrenaline and your arousal will cease.

Just don’t use this cooling off period to dwell on negative thoughts or you will make matters even worse. In fact, this leads to the next step.

Challenge your negative thoughts. The way we think has a lot to do with the way we feel, so changing your thoughts from a hateful, negative orientation to a calm, positive orientation becomes essential in managing feelings of hurt and insult.
NEGATIVE: “[Expletive!] What a piece of [expletive] junk! Now we’re going to be [expletive] late!”

POSITIVE: “OK. It’s a flat tire. There was nothing we could have done to prevent it. Let’s forget about being on time and just see about getting the tire changed. One thing at a time.”

Or look for a rational explanation:

IRRATIONAL: “[Expletive!] What a [expletive] jerk! He knew this was an important [expletive] meeting! So why is he [expletive] late?”

RATIONAL: “Maybe there was a traffic accident. Maybe they had a flat tire. Who knows? We’ll find out in due time.”

Ask yourself what you’re really feeling. Many persons have such a limited knowledge of their emotional life that they tend to lump everything together into anger. But, if you look closely, you might find that behind the anger are more pertinent feelings, such as disappointment, sadness, fear, and so on.

References:
http://seegod.org/anger.htm
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/anger.htm