Unmasking Anger

Many people believe that anger is "unspiritual," a damaging misconception that often causes us to stuff it inside. Spiritual traditions such as yoga and Buddhism can teach us how to react skillfully to anger without repressing it.

By Alan Reder

Laughing, Boorstein recalls a decade-long grudge with a colleague over a comment he made to her. "Every time I thought about him, I got a wave of fury: 'How can he have said that about me?'" she says. Then while driving to a meeting she knew her antagonist would also be attending, it hit her: "He said it because it was true, and it had taken me 10 years to be able to say that about myself." In other words, the anger had obscured the fear that this person might be right. By the time she arrived at the meeting, she had lightened up and was glad to see her former accuser, as he was to see her.

Ven. Thubten Chodron, an American-born Buddhist nun and author of Working with Anger (Snow Lion, 2001), finds similar insights into anger from traditional Tibetan Buddhist sources. Besides unhappiness and fear, she lists habit, inappropriate attention, and attachment as key sources of anger. Sometimes we get angry because we.ve developed the habit of reacting angrily instead of with patience and compassion, she says. We become angry through inappropriate attention, by exaggerating negative aspects of people, situations, or other objects of our ill feelings. Our attachments lead to anger, she suggests, because .the more attached we are to something or someone, the angrier we get if we can't have it or it's taken away from us.

Stephen Cope—psychotherapist, senior Kripalu Yoga teacher, and author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (Bantam, 1999)—finds the ancient yogic view of anger equal to anything he learned in his professional training. Yogis understand anger as an energy existing, like all emotions, halfway between a physical and mental experience. Like heat or other energies, anger wanes naturally, says Cope, if we don't hold it back with psychological defenses—say, denying or repressing it: "Anger tends to arise in a very visceral wave. It arises, crests, and then passes away."

Collateral Damage
Anger may be superficial and transitory, but that takes nothing away from its real and present dangers. Angry people hurt themselves and others, sometimes grievously and indiscriminately.

Brian Hanrahan, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, admits that failure to manage his anger cost him his marriage. In the early '90s, his wife, Sheila (not their real names), began meeting with a man from work in the evenings before coming home. They weren't having sex, she insisted, but Brian still stewed over someone else occupying her attention.

As Sheila began spending more time with her friend, Brian's anger heated to a boil. His outbursts, sometimes in front of the kids, made their home life so unpleasant that Sheila finally moved out. Meanwhile, her other relationship crescendoed and then ended, just as Brian suspected it would. But his marriage had ended too. "If I had let her fascination run its course, she might have come back," Brian says slowly, his shoulders slumped as he tells the story.

Obsessed with what he perceived as Sheila's rejection of him, Brian started a daily journal to address his pain. The entries documented that he had put the marriage on hold well before Sheila did. It was a recipe for marital disaster, but he didn't get it until it was staring at him in his own words on paper.

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