Understanding and Transforming Anger

When I was about ten years old, I was having increasingly frequent storms of rage. On one such occasion, my father had a rare moment of lucidity and told me the story of how anger had ruined his life. This was far from a perfect transmission of wisdom, he couldn't name the life serving purpose of anger and I was a bit young for the horrifying details he shared. However, I could see how anger was starting to affect my own life and in that moment I made a vow to be free from the damaging effects of anger. I immediately began the first mindfulness practice of my life, though I didn’t know the term mindfulness then. With every sign of irritation or impatience, I paused and relaxed. Over the years, anger storms faded and bursts of anger became rare. Today anger, irritation, and impatience are very rare states. When they do arise, they get my full focus, because I know it means something important must need my attention.

The purpose of anger is to alert you that a need may be threatened. Anger is meant to get you focused so that you can handle a possible life threatening situation. This acute and occasional instance of anger is a normal response to a sense of threat to one or more needs. But it is meant to be momentary. As soon as you assess the reality of what’s happening, it dissolves. Once you are clear about the difference between the facts of what’s happening and your interpretations, you can focus on the universal needs or values that are at stake in the situation and take effective action.

Even when you are clear about the facts, you might maintain a certain level of anger until you take action to meet the need or attend to the value in a particular situation. This is especially true in situations in which someone has crossed your boundaries. In other words, the anger alarm keeps sounding until you take action to protect your needs and thus lessen the sense of threat. In this way, anger is like a fire alarm that sounds as long as there is still smoke.

Unfortunately, anger isn't always this simple. Sometimes anger isn't just a response to the present situation. Rather, it fires up a whole network of related past pain, memories, mental habits, and physical habits. At age ten, I was on my way to creating strong habits of anger. Fortunately, with a wake up call from my dad, I was able to interrupt that formation of habits. Without that, I would likely be struggling with frequent anger today.

Not everyone is so fortunate to receive an intervention. When anger lives in someone as a well-worn habit, it arises from a place of dissociation from one’s heart and is entangled with misinterpretations, a deep sense of threat, a history of pain, and social conditioning that isn’t life-serving. From this state, acts of hate and violence are possible, as we have seen in the U.S. this last week. May we use these tragedies as leverage and inspiration to deepen our commitment to co-creating a wise and compassionate world.

Transforming your own anger and meeting anger from others with a clear mind, compassionate heart, and wise life-serving boundaries helps us all evolve past this type of habitual anger. If you struggle with anger, then you might be working with well worn habits. Even though you engage in the steps of self-empathy, you might find that it still takes days or even months to dissolve it. When this happens, you are likely triggering a cascade of angry habits through repetition of angry thoughts, tense posture, a clenched jaw, a violent image, a memory, a sharp energy, etc. As long as this is happening unconsciously, you have no choice about it, you just feel angry and don't know why. When you bring these habits into conscious awareness, you can bring compassion to these habits and begin to interrupt them through simple practices like breathing, chanting, visualization, receiving empathy from another, progressive muscle relaxation, etc.  The important thing to remember is that this is a practice that will require consistent attention over time for these habits to change.

Begin by setting your intention to recognize the signs of anger. Write down what signs you will watch for and use as cues to practice mindfulness. For example, a sharp tone with your partner, an outburst at a glitch in technology, a moment of tensing up with impatience, are all cues to pause and engage a specific mindfulness practice.  

Here are some possible mindfulness practices:

• You say to yourself, "I’m getting angry. That's okay. Let me just feel my body and notice where I am tensing up.”

• Attend to your breath. Focus completely on one full inhale and one full exhale.  

• Check in with your thoughts, “What was I thinking just now?  Was I replaying an old memory or rehearsing how I want to tell someone off? Was I fixated on how I think things should be or happen? How do I want to direct my thoughts right now?”

• You say to yourself, “I am a little reactive. That's okay. Whatever I notice is okay. I can stay present and find the need behind this reactivity.”

•  Take a few seconds to relax your jaw and listen to the wind in the trees.

• Place your hand on your heart and close your eyes. Feel the warmth of your hand on your heart.

Whatever practice you choose, it needs to be clear and doable enough to replace the angry habit. Telling yourself to calm down is not a clear and doable practice. In fact, it often triggers a clamping down rather than creating calm. If you can't articulate a specific and doable practice, then you are likely holding an aspiration to change, but not actually interrupting the habits of anger.

Intention, mindfulness, and specific action will help you form a new life-serving habit that replaces the habit of anger. Every moment that you engage your mindfulness practice, the next moment is conditioned with just a little more mindfulness, the next with more and so on eventually creating a consistent sense of freedom and peaceful presence. 

Practice

Take a moment now and  reflect on a habit you might like to change, whether it be about anger or something else. Choose a specific doable mindfulness practice for the coming week or if you are currently engaged in one, reflect on it and notice if you would like to make changes or simply recommit.