Awakening From Your Anger

Tag: emotions

  • Transforming Anger into Emotional Resilience

      There have been a number of posts show up in my email this past week that remind me of the need for this blog. In a recent post, Jack Kornfield, a noted American Buddhist, writes “When self-righteous anger arises, we can let it go. Retaining our own fierce clarity, we too can seek justice, yet do so with a loving heart.” There is a lot of self-righteous anger in our societies, Canadian and American. I agree with the sentiment expressed by Jack yet letting go of anger was never my forte. I could have spend years exploring Buddhist meditation, but it likely would not have touched the Family of Origen issues that underlay my anger — it took nearly ten years of good experiential therapy for me to resolve my issues (such work then became the basic of the anger management program that I developed and taught for twenty years).

      Having developed these skills, I can probably lead others to resolution within a few years (if they will do the work). For a beginning approach, check out the thirty or so postings listed under “Postings / Anger Management”. There were originally a series of 30 emails that I sent out over a period of 90 days, twice a week, with the suggestion to read and practice some simple skills. They generally gave people the necessary skills for better management of emotional issues, and if they wanted more, they could choose to work with me via Zoom or in-person.

      Incidentally, I call it ‘anger management’ because that is what attracts interest — it is really emotional life management; the skills are applicable to any emotional issue. I’ll add to this in a moment.

      Another email post from a few weeks ago described how a dozen hooded and masked individuals in Hamilton, Ontario gathered to rally behind the racist and xenophobic slogan popularized by Trump: “mass deportations now”. Such a process is highly unusual for Canada yet seems to be part of the growing rage throughout North America. From my perspective, it is likely that such intolerance arises from a sense of powerlessness related to the major dysfunctionality of our civilization. It is unlikely that such individuals would want to undertake my anger management program. But they do illustrate the needs of our society — such will likely increase given the current atmosphere in the States.

      Another post added to this: “Lonely, Addicted, and Living Without a Higher Purpose? An open letter to younger men struggling.” A second noted: “Road rage has soared in an increasingly angry nation: People are just overwhelmed.” Both of these were protected by paywalls so I did not read the details — I can imagine though.

      All of these have become common stories; all of these require good anger management.

      I was a physician-psychotherapist practicing in Ontario for more than twenty-five years. As a physician in Ontario, my therapy practice was paid though the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP); all any Ontario client had to do was say they wanted to work with me — OHIP paid for it. If I moved to a new location, I could have a waiting list within three weeks — lucky for me, lucky for clients.

      Part of my training included a Master’s degree in Applied Behavioral Sciences, functionally a degree in how people function in groups. After a few years, as I developed my weekend anger management program, I got tired to telling people that if they wanted to do individual therapy with me, it was a two-year waiting list. Eventually I switched to exclusive group therapy, and fed my groups from people who attended by anger management weekends. My wife and I had a day-retreat center where we each practiced our careers (my wife is a brilliant trainer in NeuroLinguistic Programming). Eventually also, I wrote my first book Blowing Out the Darkness: The Management of Emotional Life Issues, Especially Anger and Rage.[1]

      I am not interested in blowing my own horn, but my anger management program was effective for a wide range of people. Every three to six months, someone would stop by our center and tell me that their lives changed after a single weekend workshop. A Probation Officer sent me approximately 60 individuals over the years — only one re-offended after that single weekend. A senior Police Officer believed my program to be the best program he had ever encountered. A Justice of the Supreme Court would on occasion specifically recommend my weekend as part of his dispositions.

      I know that all troublesome issues of anger-rage are resolvable — the limitation is the willingness of the client to do the work (which I will describe in ensuing posts). The other major limitation is for the client to find good anger management. From my perspective, most programs are not very good — they mainly tell people what they should be doing. They work for many people because many people are highly motivated. Yet my groups were filled with people for whom such instructions did not work — they were motivated but they needed more. Specifically I did not tell people what they should be doing!

      As a taster of what is to come: What is the matter with being angry? Or being enraged? … Is it the anger, or something else? I suggest it is something else. The basic issue is not the anger or rage. It is that someone did not feel safe in the presence of anger/rage!

      Stay tuned. The next post will look at safety!

    [1] Although written in 2009, I rebranded the book in 2023. The current book is available on Amazon and other sourses from the publisher: MacQuarrie, Dave. Blowing Out The Darkness: The Management of Emotional Life Issues, Especially Anger and Rage. Metairie, LA: The Ewings Publishing LLC (2023), https://www.theewingspublishing.com/product/blowing-out-the-darkness-the-management-of-emotional-life-issues-especially-anger-and-rage/. Or from davidmacquarriebooks.com.

  • Transforming Anger: Emotions as Energy for Change

      As noted previously, I had my own anger management program for 25 years, likely dealing with about 4000 people with various issues of anger. I had long concluded that anger is the canary in the coalmine of our culture – it is the measure of how dysfunctional our civilization has become.

      Thus, I focus on anger as the beginning of change. I strongly believe that unresolved anger is dangerous whereas resolved anger is a powerful source for change. Given the current dysfunction of our culture, we need our anger so as to generate change, ideally for the better. If our anger is unresolved, any change generated is likely to worsen our dysfunction whereas if we come to terms with the nature of our anger, we have choice as to how we use it.

      So, what is anger? First of all, anger is an emotion. So, what is an emotion? My working definition is ‘energy to which I give meaning and direction.’ Emotions are the interface between mind (meaning) and body (direction). My best way of describing them is via what is called the Action Model.

      Something happens in life, a stimulus S. Eventually, we respond, R. In the interim, we Sense it (the earliest awareness is called the F1 state). We Evaluate it via our values, beliefs, memories, and expectations (VBMEs), and we make Meaning of it, our story. We develop a Plan of action as to how to respond and we mobilize our Energy to respond, our emotions. And, ideally, we respond (if we feel safe) — we move our energy into the environment. The system works well (and is prone to various glitches, to be described in later blog posts).

      Think of a time that you have been angry. Feel the residual anger as you now experience it. Notice I did not say ‘the anger you had then.’

      Emotions are a present-time body experience — you cannot feel what you experienced yesterday or at any other time; you can only feel ‘now.’ You can think about yesterday, but you can only feel ‘now.’

      That said, feel your anger. Point with one finger to the location of your anger in your body. For most people, they will point to their upper chest, yet some will point to their jaw or their abdomen or other areas. Although we have the single word ‘anger,’ each individual will have their own unique experience.

      Emotions, in general, are describable as a single word, in the ‘now’ moment, and dependent on meaning. As a child when you were learning language, perhaps someone took your toy, and you were upset. Then mummy or daddy said, “Don’t be angry.” You now had a new word to describe both your behaviour and your internal state. You also learned that the word was fraught with difficulty — you shouldn’t be angry. Yet, at the same time, it is likely that no one taught you what to do with this uncomfortable inner state. Now as an adult, when you encounter this body state again, you know to call it ‘anger’ and perhaps you still do not know what to do with it. If you do know what to do, you likely have a sense of power.

      In general, the simple emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, joy are such that they are characterized by a sense of power — you can do something when you experience them. Anger, for example, is an emotion of uninvited or imposed disruption of your boundaries wherein you are capable of pushing back against the disruption. It is the energy of significant difference in a closed space, a relationship.

      If you don’t feel capable of pushing back, the emotion tends to expand, and we give it a different name — ‘rage.’ Rage is the attempt to mobilize action and power in situations of anger where you feel powerless. Furthermore, if the situation becomes overwhelming, one option is to move to self-righteousness as a further protective mechanism in boosting your sense of power.

      In similar fashion, our sadness becomes despair when powerless and laziness (f—k it!) when overwhelmed. Our fear becomes terror and then fearfulness, and our joy becomes ecstasy and then some form of unitive consciousness.

      There are many other emotional words in our language and the definitions of these words varies considerably. The distinctions I make are:

    • Emotions are a single word descriptor of energy to which I give meaning (mind) and direction (body). I can point to my body as to where I experience them.
    • Feelings are a single word description of energy wherein I point to the relationship I have with others. ‘I feel frustrated’ points to an external person or event. Similarly with ‘I feel included [by …],’ ‘I feel honored [about …],’ and ‘I feel betrayed [by …].’
    • Then, there are feeling judgments, multi-word descriptions of my thoughts about my emotions and feelings. ‘I feel [that] you made an error’ or ‘I feel [that] you liked the meal.’ They represent thoughts that carry an energetic load.

      All of the above is relatively simple to describe, yet there is a problem which will be developed in future posts. It is summed up in a personal story:

    Until my forties, my childhood issues were such that I was emotionally numb. After I had done a number of years of therapy, I said to a friend: “I have learned to feel, and I hate it! It is so g..d.. messy!”

      They are still messy yet now I value them.