The first time I sat down to write this article about anger, excited to pull together a few pieces and explore ideas, a close friend interrupted me to ask if I would go with him to urgent care. I silently struggled to adjust my plans. I’d been poised to begin writing, the magnet of me activated and ready to go. Instead, I backtracked my attention, listened to my friend, and traveled with him through an entire long day of driving, talking with the doctor, lab work, and more. All the while, I also grappled with the confounding effects of anger.
Of course I accompanied my frightened friend on his mission to get help—I was glad he’d had the courage to ask—and I could write an article another time. But holy crap was I angry that day. My friend asked for silence while we drove, so he could do breathing exercises to foster calmness. In the car, then while we sat shoulder to shoulder on a couch in the doctor’s office waiting room, through all the minutes of that day, my thoughts ran a parallel track of trying to work through my anger, to get to the bottom of it and beyond it.
That process wasn’t comfortable or easy. There were layers—a lot of layers—beneath my initial feelings of conflicted disappointment and guilt around deciding to give up writing for a day in order to care for a friend in need. The layers took a while to tease apart, but with each new sighting of a further horizon, parts of my body came back to me softer and more present.
In September of 2021, I wrote this in my journal:
What do I feel angry about? Let’s get this release party started. Okay… What the heck don’t I feel angry about? All the millions of times and ways I compromised, starting when I was a small child. All the things I had to do / felt like I had to do to survive. Giving up myself in relationships in order to have a connection—the ultimate no-win compromise. Angry at my impotence and lack of acceleration. I can feel it, right there, all the time, siphoning off my energy.
On the next page in my journal that day, I worked through a cluster map, to sort through and try to make sense of the swirl of anger (click image to enlarge):
From the central ANGER (ringed with angry lines), follow the path that starts with the word suppressed, below on the left. One of those paths leads to thwarted thriving, my initial reaction to my friend asking for immediate help. In fact, many of the paths in this cluster map activated on that day. As I kept working through them in my mind (I didn’t have this cluster map with me), I eventually took the path that starts with the word compromise, in the circle directly above the central word ANGER, and found my way along voluntary to calculated and ROI (return on investment) and further, certain of my choice to steward my relationship with one of my dearest friends, even if it meant delaying my original plans for the day.
If anger signals a breach of some type—of physical or mental safety, of upset expectations, of loss or injustice, or any of a number of other affronts—then the process of depressurization and resolution involves spending at least a moment at the internal dashboard to ascertain the source of the invasion, whether in the moment or later. Sometimes, in some situations, our anger comes to the fore to protect us without conscious thought. We may not register a breach signal of fear or injustice (or perceived injustice) before we react. Our arms come up to ward off a blow, or we snap out cutting words at someone who we think should know better than to act that way or say what they said.
I used to have very little awareness of my anger mechanism, accustomed as I was to the survival mechanism of putting others first. I experienced anger (especially as a teenager) as a force that came over me. I didn’t really think I could do anything about it except try to stop it somehow. Over time, I’ve become much more conscious of internal anger signals. What snagged my interest at some point and started to change my awareness about anger was wondering about the space between the alert and the reaction—the time span between the trigger and the response—and then experimenting with how to consciously choose a reaction. I wrote about this in the mini-manual Personal Boundaries for Highly Sensitive People:
In my experience, boundary issues show up in patterns: this type of situation tends to trip me up around maintaining my own boundaries, and that type of situation typically plonks my feet into other people’s boats, unsettling the boundaries they’re trying to maintain.
Gradually, as I kept practicing awareness around the issue, I moved from reacting immediately to responding thoughtfully. Eventually, I could pause and reflect when triggered. I could decide how to respond, either while still in the moment or after taking the time I needed to process things. Triggers happened less and less frequently, and became more of a source of information about my own self- growth needs—signals alerting me to opportunities for healing and personal growth.
On the morning I chose to help my friend instead of doing my writing, I banked the surge of injustice and got a grip. I knew from long experience that a feeling of being ignored could trigger an anger response for me. That cause and effect pattern took me decades to decode and shift. I learned to consciously study my internal dashboard and figure out which dials to turn to gain peace and resolve the inner and outer conflicts. Part of that work was delving into the origins of my anger triggers and working through long-held stuck feelings to dissolve and release them.
When I started writing my second novel, a large, angry man appeared on the scene, demanding to have his story told. His name was Grant. Since a huge reason I write is to work through issues and themes in my own life, I got curious about what I might need to learn about anger. I invited Grant to the page and opened to his story world in order to discover who he needed as a catalyst to help him heal and live more fully.
The energetic circles around ANGER in the center of the cluster map above remind me of how Grant, in The Infinite Onion, did the same in his own journal when he circled the name of his nemesis, Oliver. Earlier in the story, Oliver speculated about Grant’s anger, offering a perspective that now gives me pause:
Grant’s angry glare held frustration and distress. His desperation showed in his painful thinness, yet he’d signed the contract and tied on the smock. He stood straight and looked me in the eye. Pride. I suddenly saw Grant’s anger as a struggle to manage the hits to his pride.
I softened my stance, took my hands out of my pockets, and sat in a slouch on the edge of the dining table, to give Grant a chance to loom over me. “Look at it this way—what do you have to lose?” I asked. “Maybe this contest isn’t between you and me, but between you and you.”
Anger, like all feelings, are fundamental communications between me and me, between you and you. Where is this feeling coming from? What happened? Why am I reacting this way? What message is trying to come through? What is trying to get my attention? What do I need right now?
In the fifty years I knew my mom before she passed away, she never once expressed anger in my presence, or not that I recognized as such. After Mom retired, she moved temporarily from North Carolina to a small apartment up the street from where I lived in Vancouver, BC, to experience Canada and be closer to me for a year. One evening, we sat at her dining table with art supplies and played with a project.
We’d been taking turns leading each other through creative projects, just for fun. That night, I led her through a process of many whimsical steps. Although Mom was a professional artist and art teacher, she also tended to meet the world with a desire for logical steps and calculation. My unspoken experiment that evening was to get her out of her artistic comfort zone by giving us weird steps to take as we played.
One of the steps involved randomly choosing a card from an oracle card deck and then using that card’s word in the art piece. The card Mom chose was Anger. Boy, that unsettled her. She did not want to play with anger. But she loved me, so she gamely leaned in. By the end of the evening, she’d created a piece of art she treasured and displayed in her apartment—and which I inherited. Now I smile every time I see it on my wall, remembering.
I hope this ramble through thoughts about anger gives you food for your own peacemaking. Wherever you are in your relationship with anger, may you hold its signal close and consider it a friend.
About the Photo | Little Cloud
Western Oregon, 2019
I can’t help but see the little cloud toward the bottom as the protagonist in this one-frame movie. Bullies swoop in from above as night falls quickly, leaving the little cloud alone out in the open, exposed against the last of the blue sky.
How will this tale resolve? Do you see yourself in this image? Which cloud is you?