The Wisdom of Anger: Part I - Emotion Series #3

I think it's most dangerous if someone's like, okay, I should be good with other people's anger. You shouldn't. Like, you either are or you're not. And if you're not, take care of yourself. And if you are, great, lean in. Just worry about loving your own anger and all the rest of it will take care of itself.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. It may be that the most misunderstood and hated emotion in our society is anger. At some point in probably everyone's life, words spoken in anger have cut us deep to the bone. Actions taken from a place of rage have broken relationships and door hinges and turned families and societies against themselves. But where would we be without our anger? And how can anger point to what we and others love and care deeply about? What does anger look like when we allow ourselves to feel it fully and cleanly? Welcome to our series on emotions and the wisdom behind them. How are you doing today, Joe?

I'm doing well. It's a rainy spring day in Sonoma County.

So Joe, what makes us so afraid of anger?

I think a lot of us have suffered abuse through anger. Right? And I think a lot of us have abused other people through anger. There's a time in like development where you get so angry that you like lose control. You do something that you don't want to do. You say something that you don't want to say. And that often hurts other people. And often we are taught pretty early on that getting angry can get you what you want or can oppress you. If it's a power-over dynamic, one person's oppressed and one person is apparently getting what they want. And so no matter which side you're on on that, there's a certain amount of shame that goes along with it. You can't feel completely 100% good with having oppressed somebody, and you can't feel completely 100% good at being oppressed. And so for all those reasons, anger— this, what I would call this very beautiful, amazing energy— gets tabooed, it gets hated, it gets— people are scared of it. And then it becomes this weapon and this villain. And then the whole society kind of points towards that anger as like an out-of-controlness or something. And they're not, they're not making the distinction between the emotion of anger and somebody using anger at somebody. Using anger to manipulate.

So what is that distinction then between feeling anger in a way that's not meant to manipulate or control?

It's going and getting angry, say, out in the woods. It would be a kind of a simplified example of it. Another example is like, you know, I have this thing about cooking breakfast and my kids have this thing about like waiting, unconsciously waiting for the moment when like all the pancakes have to be done at the right place and the eggs are blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, right? So it's like that moment of like, okay, I'm totally focused. And then that'll be the time my kids might ask me for like 3 or 4 things at the same time. Or my wife will be like, hey, have you, you know, cut the lawn or whatever? And not that I've cut the lawn in like decades or maybe ever, but, and so there's a story one time that was happening and I was just so frustrated. And I put down my spatula and I jumped up and down. I was like, I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry. And my daughter, who was, I don't know, she was like 11, she looked at me and she goes, "That was some pretty good anger, Dad." I was like, "Ah, thanks." That's what anger looks like when it's not at somebody. It's just, you're just angry. You're just frustrated. It just is what it is. But if I was like, "God damn it, kids, stop talking to me while I'm cooking dishes," like I'm trying to control them, right? I'm using my anger to influence them, to scare them into submission. And so, yeah, of course, if you get hacked at by a sword enough, you're gonna dislike the sword, but then you don't get to use the sword in the way that it's useful, that is constructive and beautiful.

So what is the way that is constructive and beautiful when you're feeling anger in the kitchen with your kids?

Anger for me nowadays, there's a couple things. One is it shows that there's something that I care about. If I'm angry about something, it means there's something that I care about and that I love, right? And so in this particular case, I care that I'm like cooking for my kids, that I'm nurturing them, that, you know, it's like that I'm taking my responsibility as a dad seriously. Like there's love and care there. So that's one of the things that teaches me. The second thing it teaches me is that I have a boundary that's being crossed. There's a way in which I'm not taking care of myself. Right? And so in that case with my kids, you know, there's probably 3 times that they've tried to interrupt me before, and instead of saying, "Hey sweetie, I'm cooking. Could I just have, you know, time to concentrate and then we can talk over breakfast?" I've instead gone, "I should be okay with her interrupting me. I'd be a good dad if she was interrupting me." And I was good with it. "Why am I not patient? Why am I so bothered by the fact that she's interrupting me?" You know, I did something like that. Instead of taking care of myself and saying, "Oh, hon, I'd love to talk to you about that, but let's do it over lunch." So that's another thing. So there's a boundary that I'm not taking care of myself. And so that's the second indicator. And then the third indicator is that there's something that I'm scared about. There's some way in which I'm scared that I'm gonna like make a crap breakfast and then everybody's gonna make fun of me or whatever, they're gonna not wanna eat it or, I'm not gonna, can't remember exactly the circumstance at the time, but maybe I was scared that I was gonna make more work for my wife who'd already worked really hard that week with the kids or whatever it was, right? So there's also a fear there. And so that's also a really good indicator. It's like, what is it that I feel scared, right? And all that together, it's like if you feel that fear and you, feel the care, there's often this feeling of trappedness that comes along with it too, which is like, okay, I'm a bad dad if I don't get the pancakes right, cook the things right. I'm a bad dad if I don't answer their questions. I can't fucking win, fuck. You know, it's like that. And so those are the indicators of what the anger is. And then so that really allows you to open up the whole thing. But all of that is like this very intellectual process. And in the case of this, where you just let the anger move for a moment, you know, "Oh, I'm just so angry." And they're like, "That's good angry, Dad." Like, immediately I have connection again, and immediately I had clarity. And I remember after it was done, I was like, "Yeah." And then we all kind of laughed, and I said, "Hey, can you let me focus for a minute until breakfast is ready?" They're like, "Yeah." And that clarity of action, like, this is what I need to take care of myself, and you just do it. And anger just talks differently than logic does. You know, logic talks like— actually all emotions probably talk differently than logic does in the same way. And logic is like A B C, and therefore A - C B. That's kind of the logic system. Whereas anger is more like blah-blah-blah! Ahh, clarity. So when you really allow the anger to move through, without the resistance, with the love, you find these great moments of clarity and empowerment.

You mentioned this thing about how there's like damned if you do, damned if you don't thing where you feel trapped between these two, like there's these two outcomes you want to avoid, being a bad dad in one way or being a bad dad in another way. So like anger seems to be something that comes up when we feel trapped. There could be times that we are physically trapped and we're angry, but more often than not, we're just psychologically trapped or emotionally feeling trapped. And so that anger is our attempt, our determination to get out of that trappedness. Like, that seems like a healthy impulse to have. How does that become twisted into something that's dangerous and damaging?

It feels like there's a, that's a two-part question. The first part of your question is how does it directly, which is we then use the anger to try to control others. But the deeper question is like, how does that even get to the feeling of trappedness in the first place. And that's usually based on trauma, right? It's usually based on— so for instance, I would be a fine father if I screwed up the pancakes, and I'd be a fine father if I showed frustration at my kids, right? Like, none of those is going to make me a bad father. Maybe doing them over and over and over and over and over and over again on purpose or something would, but Right, so I'm not actually trapped. In that moment, I'm not actually trapped, but I've convinced myself I am. And the reason that we convince ourselves we're trapped when we're not is often because of our childhood, right? Because in my childhood, for instance, if I didn't do something right, I would get yelled at. So I'm trying not to get yelled at. So I feel trapped, not because I'm trapped in this particular day and age, I'm trapped because It reminds me of a situation where I was trapped as a kid. So that's the other thing that happens is that the feeling, oftentimes we're not angry at the situation we're in, we're angry at a situation that we couldn't control from our earlier childhood days. And trauma is basically the experience of being in an old circumstance instead of the circumstance you're currently in, i.e., Somebody who has PTSD thinking that they're back in Iraq when they're in the middle of Illinois. Like you put yourself back into a situation that's not what's occurring today.

So what makes us then so afraid of feeling that anger?

Yeah, yeah. What makes us afraid of feeling it? I think generally with almost all these emotions, each one has their own particular thing, right? With almost all negative emotions, people feel scared of doing it because they think it's going to make it last forever. And then the other reason, particularly with anger, is that people think they will destroy things with anger, right? And you can see some of the other traditions where the, the angry entity, the angry expression of God, whether it's You know, the Tibetan have, you know, these angry expressions of the divine, and the Hindus have this— these angry— Kali has these angry expressions of the divine. There's this understanding that the destruction and rebirth is part of the natural cycle, and that anger is part of that destruction. And so it's seen as kind of how things get built is by allowing them to be destroyed. And that the conflict and the friction is part of the rebuilding, it's part of the evolutionary process for people. And the anger felt, when we get scared that we're angry, is that we're gonna destroy it, we're gonna hurt somebody, we're gonna end a relationship, we're not gonna be loved anymore. That's the fear. And our brains, you just watch it, our brains don't even notice in this moment that there's another option. It's like, if I can't get angry because I might destroy my friendship, but then it never thinks, oh, well, just go get angry somewhere else. Like, what makes that happen? If you really think about that for a second, it's like, so I'm mad at a friend, and then I tell myself, well, I can't get angry at them because I might lose my friendship with them, so I'll just go get angry somewhere else. Nobody thinks that. Then it's like, no, I'll just repress the anger. So what makes that so? It's because it's not really about this fear of destruction that's happening. It's really about the fear that I will be destroyed by my own anger. If I let anger out, I might lose myself in it.

Maybe in the case of the friend, the fear that we will lose the friend because we know that if we draw the boundary that we need to draw, we might lose the friend.

Right, but even before the boundary, even just like, okay, let's say you've stolen something from me and I'm upset with you and I'm like, well, I can't get angry because then I might lose him and, you know, it was only $20, let's say. But I don't go, okay, well, I'm just gonna like go to the beach and just yell and get really angry at Brett and then I'll come back. You know, it's just don't like, what makes it that we don't think that? What makes it that the only options are angry at the person or repress the anger? What limits our thinking to that small instead of, I'm gonna write something really angry and then I'm gonna burn it up, or I'm gonna go to the beach and yell, or all sorts of ways that you can express anger. What makes it that we just don't do any of that, don't even think to do any of those things?

Yeah, well, it's something that comes up for me is like, so many of us are never really alone in the woods or alone on the beach, or so rarely. In fact, the time that we might be alone might be when we're driving Which might explain how so much road rage tends to come out when people feel alone, but they're actually interacting with others between metal and glass. And that's a moment where they can, a rare moment where they can process their anger without scaring everybody around them or being judged.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have a lot of my clients and they're like, "I don't have a safe place to be angry." I'm like, "Get in your car. Do it on your commute." I had this one, executive that I worked with, and she, you know, when we first started working together, she very much felt, you know, like a victim, like she didn't have control over this big bureaucracy. I was like, look, here's the homework: just get angry every night on your commute. Every night, just get pissed at everything that happened that you want to get pissed at. And literally within like 2 or 3 weeks, her empowerment changed significantly. Her level of empowerment changed significantly. She didn't feel as trapped anymore. And I would say like a kind of a low-level depression started changing for her into much more empowerment. And I've seen that dozens of times. And yeah, maybe if a car's the only place you've got, do the car. If, you know, one executive I worked with the other day went to the beach, you know, went right up to the ocean and yelled at the ocean. Nobody could hear, you know, in San Francisco. There's always a way to do it. And there's always a reason not to. Because our brain will find any way that it can to not be angry. If we were told as a kid that anger was bad, or if we were punished for our anger, or if we got to experience someone's abuse through anger, you know, we'll just, we'll shut it down in us, in ourselves. And we'll suffer depression because of it. And we'll feel like we're, like we can't make the moves that we wanna make. We'll feel disempowered because of it. Because we don't have access to that beautiful energy of anger in a way that's healthy and loving.

What if somebody has just a lot of anger built up and the drive home on a commute isn't enough to release all of it? So it's just opened the floodgates, and the moment they get home, they're still angry and take it out on their family.

Keep driving. Keep driving. There's no— yeah, find a different way. Like, walk in the door, go, oh shit, I'm so angry. Hey guys, look, I'm really angry right now. I I don't want to take it out on any of you. I'm going to go drive and yell for a couple 20 minutes and I'll be back. Right? I can't imagine a husband or a wife going, no, no, no, no, no, no. I need you to help cook. They're going to be like, great. Please don't get angry at us. Thank you.

I don't know. I could imagine that. I could also imagine somebody seeing somebody being like, I'm angry and I need to go drive, think that they're being abandoned by that and try to stop it.

Yeah, I think, "I need to go drive," or, "I'll be back in 20 minutes," I think is a huge difference between the abandonment or non-abandonment. What I notice is that when somebody's removing their love as a form of punishment, they don't give you a timeline.

Oh, right.

Yeah, like, "Hey, Brett, yeah, I just can't be around you, goodbye." Or, "Hey, Brett, I'm not able to be with myself right now in a way that I wanna be with you, and so give me 20 minutes, I'll be back." "Let's start the conversation again." Hugely different things.

Yeah, it's true.

What do you think the repercussions of having an episode on anger are? Can you—

Yeah, repercussions of having an episode on anger is, you know, people might feel permission to just start abusing people in their lives with their anger under the guise of, "I'm just moving my anger." Right, yeah.

So for sure, we're not recommending anywhere that someone gets angry at another person. I think that's part of the shame cycle. That's part of the blame cycle. And it'll only make the anger more stuck. So, but I think the real repercussion of anger, of an anger episode, or I think one of the real repercussions is there's a series of people out there who've really been hurt by another person's anger, and they are going to be upset that anybody is saying that anger could be a beautiful and good thing. And most likely, because they've been hurt so bad by anger, that they're not gonna be aggressive, about it. They'll be passive-aggressive about it. And so the most likely thing that we'll get is, you know, a series of subtle passive-aggressive attacks, you know, built under like, "I don't feel safe with this episode," or, you know, some way of demeaning the conversation through passive aggression. I think that's like the most likely scenario for an episode on anger.

Or perhaps somebody blaming the episode on anger for somebody listening to it and then taking anger out on them.

Yeah, that could happen as well. Yeah. Yeah. And again, we're not recommending anybody take anger out on anybody. Right. That's just resisted anger. It's like, we're talking about loving your anger. We're talking about letting it move, letting it get out. We're talking about learning to have anger unresisted instead of being lost in your anger.

Yeah. So like something that we're pointing to right now is like, I've, I've been feeling a little bit off in this episode talking about anger because anger is so uncomfortable to talk about or like to bring into like a conversation. And it's so deeply patterned in my system that even right now recording this episode, I'm like, oh my God, people are gonna get angry at me. People are gonna get angry at me. Get angry at us. They're going to take it out on us. It's actually been blocking my clarity and my wonder in this conversation.

Yeah.

Which is a really just interesting observation for myself.

Yeah, I get, you know, having done back in the day, these workshops, these live workshops, there was always somebody who would get angry at me in the middle of the workshop. And I was really good when somebody was just like outright angry, right? They'd be like, "Da da da da da." And I'd be like, "Yeah, tell me about it." Like, please, I want to hear it. What's the wisdom in your anger? What do you care about that's making you like this? Like, I want to respect that. And they get angry, and then they would see that they were met, and like, it would all be done. But the ones that trapped me, especially early on, were the passive-aggressive ones, the ones where the aggression was done through the idea of safety, or, you know, we didn't make introductions, and so I don't feel safe. And, you know, it was that way. And it was hard for me to learn how to deal with that because there was just kind of this subtle attack that wasn't being acknowledged as an attack. And it would undermine the group, undermine everybody else's ability to get things done and to learn what they were there to learn. And what I learned was to just say, "Hey, great. I really hear that you're upset with something I've done. Can you help me by just being really just direct and angry with me about it?" Just as an experiment. Like just instead of being passive-aggressive, be aggressive-aggressive. And as soon as I learned that, you know, and if they were game, they would do that. And then they would have this big smile on their face and I'd have a big smile on their face and they would feel the freedom of actually getting in touch with their anger. It was a whole different thing, but it messed with me because it, you know, at some point in that process, I was like, oh, I hope I don't have somebody who's doing that passive-aggressive thing. You know, dismiss me because I was a white man, or dismiss me because I was a venture capitalist at some point, or whatever, dismiss me because I swore too much, whatever it was, right? And yeah, it's a challenge to learn how to love people's anger in both the aggressive and the passive-aggressive forms. It's a challenge and it's so rewarding.

There's a component of that that's learning to love the anger, but then there's also a component of being okay with feeling the fear of, you know, somebody undermining the entire group. So it seems like there's two things here. There is welcoming and becoming more and more okay with our anger so that we can be with people in their anger and comfortable with that. Yes. And then there's also the attenuating the fear response to anger, the threatened feeling.

Right, the threatened feeling or the trauma. And that can take time and be patient with yourself and draw good boundaries. I think it's most dangerous if someone's like, "Okay, I should be good with other people's anger." You shouldn't. You either are or you're not. And if you're not, take care of yourself. And if you are, great, lean in.

Yeah.

Just worry about loving your own anger and all the rest of it will take care of itself.

Yeah. It seems like the being, the shoulding oneself to be okay with someone else's anger could easily put you in a position where you're putting yourself in a position to receive more anger than your nervous system can handle.

Correct. That's right.

Which will then make you respond in ways that you didn't want to respond.

Correct. Yeah. If your system goes into freeze, if you are unable to maintain love, Draw a boundary, remove yourself, and learn. And learn to love your own anger, and it'll all work out. But there's no rush in any of this. It's not your job to love anybody's anger. It's your job to love yourself, all the aspects of you.

So Joe, what do you think, given that we have so much anger coming up in our society right now, what do you think society would look like if everybody was doing this? If everybody had at some stage where people are welcoming each other's anger and welcoming their own anger and drawing the boundary and removing themselves from a situation so that they can feel it and process it in a safe place. Like, what would that look like?

Far more peaceful, far more loving. Let's like look at a political debate for a second. If somebody on one side of the fence, as if there were a fence, as if there was a side. But one person on one side of the fence is really emotional and really upset and really getting angry over something that somebody on the other side of the fence did. And it's not this manipulative anger at anything, right? Like, like you see the pundits do, and you have this anger and you— and that they were met with love, yeah, how does that change? How does it change? Like, yeah, I see that there's something really important here that you care about. I mean, the crazy thing is on both sides of the political spectrum, on both sides, is that people feel stuck and trapped in a country that they don't want to be a part of anymore. And they don't feel like they can do anything about it.

Hmm.

So we're incredibly unified in this way. We all agree, we all agree that the country isn't the country that we want exactly, and that we want it to change, and we feel frustrated that we can't get it to change. I don't care what side of the spectrum you're on. And if we can love and accept that in each other, and if we can let the anger express in a way that's not controlling anybody, that's not shame-based or blame-based, then our society has a determination to shift. And that's what you see, like, countries that are on their way up are countries who believe and understand that they have the capacity to change and that they have the capacity to grow and they have the capacity to become more powerful. And there's very few people in our country that believe that anymore. Almost everybody in our country seems to suffer under the delusion that society is in a place where nothing can be done to make it better. It's like a taught apathy.

Hmm.

And of course that makes you angry if you believe that. How could it not? Something you care about so much, like your children, your friends, your family, your country, all being stuck into a situation that that is no good for anybody. Yeah, of course, how would— how could you not be angry? Does it really matter what side you're angry at? Of course you're going to be angry, right?

It seems like there's the sort of the paradox there is that a society that is suppressing its anger is becoming more and more angry in dangerous ways.

Yeah.

And a society that doesn't suppress its anger is just determined.

Yeah, most societies I see kind of repress their anger. Not all, but most suppress their anger. But they, they have better or worse outlets for the anger. You know, it's no mistake that as all of our outlets for anger, whether it be gyms or sports games, or got taken away from us during COVID that it started manifesting in other ways. The anger has to get out. It's gonna get out. The question is like, how does it, how does that get manifested in a way that's healthy? How do you do it in a way that's respectful and loving and not at anybody?

So this was a lot of really good intellectual discussion. And I'm curious if you have any questions for our audience to sit with after this episode.

Yeah, I have 3. The first one is, What's necessary for you to express your anger without hurting anybody or doing it at anybody? What would it take for you to feel safe doing that? And then another question I would ask is, how can you love your anger unconditionally? How can you love your anger the same way that you wish to love the kids that you have or the kids that you hope to have? And the last question I would put out is, what would it take for you to never get angry at somebody again and to allow yourself to be angry whenever you were?

Hmm, yeah, that does sound very interesting to sit with. Thank you, Joe.

You're welcome, Brett. It was a pleasure to be with you again, as always.

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