Anger

Yesterday, I was leaving a movie when I shared with a good friend that I’ve been feeling angry. This person stated to me, “well that’s a choice.” That experience felt jarring to me given my recent experiences and insights and I suppose I feel the pull to elaborate on my current conception of Anger, my Anger specifically.

This story, like many others’, begins in childhood. One of the most amazing things about developing children is how resilient they are in the face of stressors. The human body is such an adaptable machine. Children and their developing brains are supercharged by neuroplasticity, adapting to changes in the environment to best keep the child safe. These changes in the brain are especially prevalent during the early ages of 2-3 as well as later into adolescence. While we seem to have plasticity throughout our lives, there are distinct periods where changes are registered more readily in synaptic connections. I don’t imagine anyone reading this asked for a neurobiological explanation of childhood development, so won’t spend too much time digging into the neuroscience. You should be glad too, cause I’m a terrible neuroscientist.

So why did I just share all that about resilience and development? Well, it’s important to recognize that children learn through what I will refer to as involuntary behavioral experiments. Children tend to be wildly curious about the world around them and each new action they take will create some sort of feedback in the environment. Let’s imagine a child leaves a mess of toys on the ground at age 3 and they get yelled at. The feedback loop here is likely leave toys on the ground, get yelled at. If this happens enough, that yelling and the subsequent fear of the child will create neuroplastic changes that recruit the cognitive functioning of the brain to necessarily create a part that manages the behavior of keeping the toys put up. In this case, we’ll say the child complies and puts away their toys. From the outside, it seems that our intervention of yelling worked. But it’s also important to recognize the emotional motivation associated with keeping things clean. Does the child keep things clean because it’s helpful to those around them and it helps them feel a part of the family, or out of fear? In my experience, fear works until it doesn’t.

So now we’ve got a child that might comply with parental demands, but out of fear or shame. The parent has effectively wielded fear as a way of getting their child to comply with them. For me, this is where the anger starts. Wielding fear against a child betrays a lack of ability to utilize more adaptive strategies that would instill a sense of value to completing a task rather than fear if they don’t. These are distinctly different motivational systems. Think about this for a moment. Really. Think of how many tasks or responsibilities you engage in out of a sense of joyful productivity or passionate work. Now think about how many of these tasks are motivated by fear that something bad will happen if we don’t do it. It seems that we can run towards accomplishment, away from the ever present fear. Or maybe we can be pulled by something greater, something about which we are passionate. These seem to be incredibly different ways of being to me.

Now that we’ve got that primer out of the way, let’s dig into the Anger. We will get into the implications of the child development stuff soon. For me, the anger come from what I now refer to as The Big Lie. To me, the Big Lie is the sea that I swam in for 35 years. It’s so ubiquitous that you almost don’t even notice it. The Big Lie is the act that parents can engage in when they are quick to punish children for the very things they do themselves. The Big Lie is a parental unwillingness to treat the child with the respect to share their own difficulties with following cultural norms, values, tasks, ideas. In this scenario, the parent works hard to set rules for the child and act as an arbiter of what is right or wrong, good or bad. Yet, in all the punishment, the parent never acknowledges their own struggles with these very same things. The possibility of shared humanity through these struggles is discarded, being replaced instead by a sort of shame. When a parent punishes a child for lying but then lies to their child, they are engaging in The Big Lie. They are misrepresenting to the child their own reality and created a sort of idealized version of what a human is supposed to be. The lack of humility and a willingness to see your child as they are creates a fear based dynamic where children learn that there are special rules for them because obviously they are bad in some way.

The Big Lie permeates our culture and I see the evidence of its impact in so many around me. The lack of self compassion, the drive towards addiction, it’s rooted in shame. It’s rooted in a shame that was borne out a a lie. An untrue narrative about the moral righteousness of the parent and lack in the child. While this might protect the ego of the parent, it’s a disaster for the child. And worse, the ideas that the child forms about themselves during this time are durable and will form the foundation of their understanding of themselves, the people around them, and their value. So a child raised in The Big Lie may actually internalize the lie and act as if it’s true. It becomes a feature of the brain wiring to keep us safe.

So Anger. My anger is all about the Big Lie and I’m slowly learning to accept it, though I’m finding that others don’t. This comment that a friend of mine made was surely meant to be helpful, but it was amazingly invalidating. Because for me, Anger is not a choice I make. Anger is a feeling that moves through me and the noticing of that anger happens very much on it’s own. Now, the behaviors that spring forth from this anger are something to keep in check, but the anger itself, the raw emotion, how is that a choice? By the time I’ve noticed it, it’s already happened. So when I hear “that’s a choice” or “is this serving you,” the question doesn’t even make sense to me. Are my emotions meant to “serve” me? Am I supposed to judge what arises? In my estimation, the idea that anger is a choice sits at the root a lots of psychopathology. We demonize anger as if it’s something bad and the lack of feeling the anger in an accepting way leads to suppression. We use a drug or eat some food or scroll on the phone. Cause we’re not supposed to be angry right? I mean, what reasons would you have? Just look on the bright side, ya know!? Fuck that.

Unexpressed anger builds over time in an emotional pressure cooker and when it explodes, it’s an amazing release of energy, but usually uncontrolled and destructive. I think that’s where anger gets its bad rep from. Not from the casual expression of anger, but the built up resentment that spills out in a fiery explosion. I’ve been holding my own anger in a pressure cooker, though I’ve installed a relief valve that I can use now and you know what? Anger is beautiful. It makes me feel vital and alive and motivated for action! It feels like an energy that could spell equal parts disaster and rejuvenation. Maybe it’s something like walking on a tight rope, riding the line between fire and ice. Without the fire, I’m frozen.

Jonathan Hoffmann