You Just Want To Be Mad
You need to get in touch with your feelings, says therapy culture. But Not Like That.
It’s ironic. But few things cause a heated argument in the psychotherapy field faster than sticking a bunch of practitioners in a room together who disagree about anger. The discussion might look more like a passive-aggressive Cold War than open conflict, all covert sniping and tight smiles. But it’s there if you know where to look.
The anger about anger.
Broadly, there are four main schools of thought about the nature of anger (or at least, these are the four that rise to the surface of the argument soup in a readily summarizable form):
The mark of a healthy human psyche is the absence of anger in all its forms. We should encourage and teach our patients to purge anger from their minds, because it’s destructive and primitive. Anger has no adaptive uses. It’s barely more evolved than taking a leak in someone’s doorway.
Anger is OK or even encouraged, but only if it’s justified (usually depending on whether or not you are part of a marginalised or oppressed group).1 For everyone else, refer to Group 1.
Anger is (always and only) a secondary emotion. People feel it because it’s too hard for them to feel something else (usually sadness, fear, or shame). We need to get the patient to experience those uncomfortable primary emotions so the anger will disappear. This is basically Group 1 with extra steps.
Anger is information, and to talk about any emotion being acceptable or not acceptable hints at wilful misunderstanding of how feelings work. It’s like attaching morality to needing to pee.
That the first three groups exist tells you a lot about both the field and the people it draws, not to mention the unspoken laws that govern it. Karen Maroda has written at length about the early life experiences that tend to produce psychotherapists: most often, we were children who took on adult emotional burdens and responsibilities, striving to be loving, helpful and good.
“What would have happened if I had appeared before you sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me you loved, but only what I pretended to be?”
(Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child).
Most therapists grew up in environments where they learned that anger was unacceptable and dangerous. And because we live in a therapy culture, these beliefs filter down into the air and water and soil of mainstream thinking like psychic microplastics.
For example, the one thing just about all sides of gendered discourse seem to agree on is that anger is bad. Angry men are toxic. Angry women are unfeminine. Curiously, it’s the same social scolding in both directions: if you are angry, nobody will want to take your pants off (regardless of what you’ve got in them). Biologically and existentially, that tends to be a real worry to the human animal (which is partly why so many people talk to each other like passionless calculators now).
Look: without sticking my head down the genderslop beast’s throat too far, most social shaming exists for a reason.2 Anger (a feeling) tends to drive one towards aggression (an action). Unrestrained rage isn’t particularly compatible with harmonious communal living, because it tips quickly into impulsive, violent aggression.
But more and more, I’m noticing the presence of anger maligned as shameful and unacceptable, the mark of some contemptible inner badness. Anger isn’t viewed as an experiential phenomenon, something that happens spontaneously and largely involuntarily: it’s harmful. The moment your pulse quickens and your shoulders bunch, you’re problematic. An angry body is a harmful body.
Full disclosure: I’m a card-carrying member of Group 4 (those who believe anger is information).
I’m also aware of (and amused by) my capacity to generate an argument about anger entirely on my own, writing into the void. So I doubt it’ll surprise anybody when I say I’m quite an angry person. However.
Whenever I joke about this to people who are getting to know me (think friends or liaisons dangereuses six or so months in) not only are they shocked by this revelation: they usually try to argue with me. Because like most people, they equate anger (the emotion) with aggression or violence (action taken usually (but not always) following angry feelings).
I feel angry at some point every. single. day. But more often than not, I’m the only one that knows about it. I try very hard to make it nobody else’s problem (unless it is their problem, in which case good luck and good night). The goal is to only carry anger through to action (aggression) if it’s something that will serve the people I care about or the wider world.
Used this way, anger is power.
Anger has been responsible for some of my best writing, insight that has rippled outwards and meant something to people, allowed them to understand themselves better and act differently as a result. Anger drives me to have difficult conversations with people I care about. It’s why I try to change things that are stupid and unjust — or put my energy elsewhere if I can’t. I think (I hope) it has been meaningful for my trauma patients, sitting opposite my quiet but unapologetic rage about what was done to them.
But people hear “I think I have more anger than the average person” and assume that inevitably means horrible arguments, screaming obscenities, huffing loudly, name-calling, eye-rolling, complaining to anyone who will listen, impulsively ranting, and generally making life unpleasant for everyone around me.
Thoughtless, ugly aggression.
Recently, I filled in as co-facilitator for a very well-run community anger group for six weeks (side note: all proceeds from Substack go towards supporting me to run therapeutic initiatives for which I don’t receive funding, like research and running trauma groups. So if you like what I do, please consider purchasing a subscription for a good cause).
I’ve summarised the main insights from that group (as well as my own experience in private practice and my brief stint as a rehab case worker) below:
