The Positive Power of Anger
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is a part of our relationship. In fact, many survivors of Purity Culture experience a handful of symptoms that resemble PTSD, from intrusive memories to avoidance. As we talk about with our guest (and new Marketing and Communications Coordinator), Maddie Upson, giving oneself permission to be angry can be a helpful way to navigate and process the pain and injustice connected with Purity Culture.
I don’t want to get into the details of what created the PTSD, partly because I want to protect Julia, and partly because I don’t want to access a deeper inner rage while I’m writing this post.
PTSD symptoms most notably show up in our relationship around sleep and nightmares. Typically speaking, I fall asleep first; I’m a fairly deep sleeper, so I’m unaware of most of the ways that Julia’s sleep gets interrupted, though sometimes I’ll wake up with Julia if her body responds intensely.
Occasionally, Julia will go to sleep first, meaning that I bear first hand witness to the tragedy of the hyperarousal that accompanies PTSD. Regardless of how quiet I tiptoe into bed, Julia will awaken, gasp for air, and jerk her body from a laying to sitting position. I can calmly lay down beside her, tell her it’s me, hold her, and we’ll both go to sleep.
The other night, we had a very different experience. I sleep with a sleep mask, and it wasn’t in its usual position, so I turned on my phone flashlight and walked around the bed, searching for the purple sleep aid. Julia woke up and, in a PTSD stupor, began yelling at me.
I did the worst possible thing that you could do in that situation. I yelled back.
For three seconds, the rage that is reserved for the people and systems who hurt Julia got directed onto her. In said rage, I said a couple of really horrible things to her, which created an enormous amount of pain for her.
I’m aware of the negative optics of this, both from a relational perspective (I said some horrible things to a person who needed comfort), and from a gender perspective (I’m a man giving a somewhat violent response to a woman who’s experienced PTSD symptoms because of the violent behaviors of men).
Quick note: Anger does not equal violence. My rational brain knows that. In fact, the violence that Julia received was premeditated, as is true for many experiences of violence. There’s a likelihood that the physiological arousal that coincides with anger—increased heart rate, shallow breathing—were not present during those violent episodes.
Over the last few days, we’ve built some repair processes. She’s described some of her pain, and I apologized for my behavior and explored the source of some of the anger. (I’ve gotta work on apologizing first, then exploring the source of anger, but that’s for another article.)
So what do I do with this? What do Maddie and Julia and countless other people who have been harmed by Machiavellian individuals and unjust systems do with their anger?
There’s a thriving market for anger management and stress reduction, from the booming yoga industry—I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the majority of yoga attendees are women, who are more likely to experience diverse, restrictive versions of systemic injustices than men—to actual anger management courses, most of which are designed for men to regulate their emotional expressions. You know, because men haven’t been discouraged from exploring the complexities of their emotions enough.
Don’t get me wrong. Yoga is helpful. The 7-11 breathing strategy is helpful. Cost benefit analyses are helpful.
But the world is unjust. Economic and social inequality continues to expand.
There’s a thin line between the escapism of EMPish Christians who sing “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through” and the anger management and yoga communities who, at their worst, encourage physiological regulation to the point of either numbness or indifference to the suffering of the world.
And there are people like me and Julia and Maddie and countless voices in the religious deconstruction world and numerous other industries who are crazy enough to believe that the world can be a better place AND that we can promote and participate in systemic changes so that the world can be a better place.
Which brings us back to anger. How can we understand the complexities of anger, and encourage people to diversify their responses to anger beyond “shut it down”?
Alan Lambert, Fade Eadeh, and Emily Hanson write the following in their chapter “Anger and its Consequences for Judgment and Behavior: Recent Developments in Social and Political Psychology,” which can be found in Volume 59 of Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.
“We need anger, just as we need fear and pain. Anger is the feeling that warns us that something unjust has occurred. It is a signal about that something about the self, or in-group, could be (or has been) harmed, and that a response to the offending party is needed. As in the case of fear and pain, anger is often maligned as something that is “bad,” in the case that it should be controlled or even gotten rid of. Anger obviously has the potential to trigger undesirable consequences, and there are many contexts in which this emotion should be controlled. However, anger, like pain and fear, serves a vital role, and it would be difficult to imagine life without it.”
This is a long read—I’ve spent the last couple of days with it. But Lambert, Eadeh, and Hanson ask different, more helpful questions as it pertains to anger and its role in helping to respond to the injustices of the world. Here are a few key points of their article:
Anger is specifically connected to our sense of threat. The authors actually end the article with this point, but I think it’s important to start here because it reminds us of three important principles of psychology:
a) Our brains are meant to keep us alive.
b) We rely on identifying with groups of people, be they family members, groups of people, or more abstract collections of people, such as the “LGBT community” or “the church”.
c) Individual people may want change, but by and large, systems do not want to change.
As such, things that encourage changes to our individual lifestyle (from actual physical threats, to the privileges that protect our social class, and our own mortality) and the systems that we participate in are deemed “threats” to our survival.
Emotion is a representation of values, and encourages behaviors that reinforce said values. They describe the work of Nico Frijda, who explains that emotions are “signaling devices” that highlights a specific concern, value, or priority, and encourage a person to do something about it, a concept he calls “action tendencies.” Emotions also showcase themselves differently in different contexts. For instance, when I have children, there will be things that make me sad that didn’t when I was childless explicitly because I now have children. The common action tendency of anger is to promote change so that either we or our in-group (i.e. the people we love) can survive and thrive.
Emotion and ensuing behaviors do not exist in a vacuum. They ask the question, “Should one expect similar (or different) consequences of a given emotion depending on the circumstances in which that emotion was initially triggered?” For instance, Maddie describes in our episode the ways that her community of origin discouraged her values of inquisitiveness and equity. She had two choices: a) Assimilate to the values of the religious community, which would have potentially reduced negative attention; or b) Hold onto her values and find communities that responded well to the values of inquisition and equity, allowing her to thrive and flourish while simultaneously grieving the loss/lesser role of her community of origin.
What is justice? Ahh, now we’re getting to a deeper conversation about values. After all, the MAGA-heads may suggest that justice is synonymous with overt white supremacist systems, a la F.W. de Klerk and the presidents that preceded him in South Africa (aka apartheid, and I’m using apartheid as a comparison because Trumpism times itself with the existence of a minority/majority American demographic). Those values are different than those of equity, celebration of diversity/variance, and consensual pleasure that we hold at Sexvangelicals. The authors ask the important question, “What are specific things that anger encourages me to do? And what are the consequences of this?”
Revenge fantasies are important to pay attention to. They rely on the research of Jeffrey Osgood, who defines revenge as “an action in response to some perceived wrongdoing by another party intended to inflict damage, injury, discomfort, or punishment on the party judged responsible.” And they also note that the anticipation of revenge and the outcome and consequences of pursuing revenge are quite different. On a personal level, I can imagine myself taking vigilante justice upon people who have harmed Julia, and derive a great deal of pleasure for it. I would also go to jail if I enacted quite a few of these fantasies, and I don’t want that to happen. There’s also the assumption that pursuing revenge would actually alleviate anger; the authors make a brilliant point about continuation of anti-Islamic rhetoric in the US following the revenge assassination of Osama Bin Laden.
So this week, pay attention to the times that you’re angry. And, after apologizing should anger be accompanied by behaviors that hurt other people, ask yourself the following questions:
In what way did I, or a group/identity that I represent, feel threatened?
What are the values that are important to me that I did not get to inhabit?
What are specific things that anger encourages me to do? And what are the positive and negative consequences of enacting these behaviors?
Lambert, Eadeh, and Hanson close their article with this:
“Anger is clearly responsible for many evils, including but not limited to reprehensible acts of violence against people and groups. However, an important goal of future research on anger should be to understand how to channel this emotion in a way that creates positive change and results in a more fair and just society.”
