What's The Difference Between Anger And Rage?

All right, team, welcome back to the mantalk Show. I am Connor Beaton. And whether you're here for the hundredth time or the first time, just wanted to say thank you for joining me, that the mantalk show is all about helping you to be a better man, whether that is a better husband, a better father, a better leader within your own life, within your career, business purpose, or just within yourself. Today, we're going to talk about rage, and we're going to talk about the difference between anger and rage, how to deal with those two things differently because they are separate issues and what most people get wrong about rage. Let's just start with a distinction between anger and rage. Anger is oftentimes a secondary emotion. You've maybe heard this saying before, but the concept is simple. It's just that you feel something first, embarrassment, shame, regret, you know, sadness, loneliness, et cetera. And then the anger comes after. So this is just a general way of looking at anger. That's a secondary emotion. But anger is something that we can work with. Anger is a very important emotion within our internal landscape, within our lives and our relationships, because anger is a requirement to set any type of boundary. And if there's somebody in your face, if there's somebody you know calling you names, if your partner has kind of lost their temper and they're, you know, yelling at you, or they're. You're saying really sort of cruel and hurtful things, that's where the anger comes in and sort of says, no, enough. You know, you don't get to talk to me like that. You're breaking the agreements of our relationship. You're crossing a line that is now harmful in some capacity. So anger actually has a utility within our life that is really important. Now, that doesn't mean that we should be angry all the time. It doesn't mean that we should lead with anger. It doesn't mean that we should allow anger to be the primary emotion that we're trying to connect to other people with. Because anger serves a very specific purpose within our lives. As I said, it has a utility. And generally speaking, that utility is to reinforce the structure of a relationship, to reinforce the boundaries of what you will tolerate and won't tolerate, and vice versa. Right? Your partner's anger also serves a purpose and has utility. It's to inform you, hey, you're crossing a line. You're getting close to a line. So that's anger. And we all, everybody has different relationships with anger based on the childhood that you had, based on the family system that you grew up in and oftentimes as men, based on what you saw as a blueprint from your father or a man that raised you, or a man that was a mentor, right? A coach, et cetera. So how did he embody anger? How did he use his anger? So that's anger. And anger, generally speaking, can be dialed up or turned down. You can do very simple things to decrease your anger, to actually sort of vent it or have a healthy relationship with it, right? If you're feeling a lot of anger about something, you can go and, you know, hit a punching bag and direct some of that anger out, and it'll start to diffuse, right? It'll actually start to lessen. You can write out your anger, right? You can journal from the voice of your anger. You know, screw this, I can't believe she said that, Or I can't believe he did this, can't believe this happened, or why did I. Blah, blah, blah, blah. So we can use very simple tools to turn up or turn down the anger, depending on whether or not it's useful or helpful, depending on what's needed in that moment. Rage is different. And the reason why I'm talking about this is because recently on Instagram, I got a question that said, how do I deal with my rage? And I gave three helpful points. And what was fascinating was I got a comment or two from some men that were like, you know, this. This is ridiculous, and this doesn't help. And, you know, you gotta. You gotta punch the anger out. You gotta go yell into a pillow. You gotta go sit in your car and scream it out. And. And the problem that I think, and the misconception that most people hold between anger and rage is that rage is something that can be diffused with the same tactics that you use for your anger, which is not the case because rage is often coming from a very different place. Rage is often coming from a place of powerlessness. And this is one of the things that I said in my definition of rage when I answered the question on Instagram, which is, when we are experiencing rage, that experience is happening because we were put in a. In a position of powerlessness in the past in some capacity. So as an example, if you experienced sexual abuse as a child, if you experienced some form of physical abuse or even emotional and verbal abuse, then rage can be a byproduct of that that lays dormant within you, right? So as an example, you know, I was sometimes physically and emotionally abused as a kid, and the thought of speaking up was ridiculous, you know, because I knew if I said Something. If I did something, it would make it worse. It would oftentimes make it worse. And so what does a child do with all the anger that he's feeling or she's feeling in the moments where they're feeling powerlessness, where they're feeling powerless to set a boundary to stop an adult from hurting them or from abandoning them or et cetera, they suppress it, they push it down. And so what will happen is that later on in that person's life, rather than just getting angry, something will trigger them and the rage will come flooding out, right? And it'll just be boundless. And it's not necessarily something that you can go and punch a pillow and, you know, yell it out. Maybe you can do that a little bit. But the difference between rage and anger is that when you do those things with anger, it's a good way to start to decrease and turn down the dial of your anger, because you're actually expressing it, you're getting it out, and it's kind of decreasing the charge. With rage, when you start to do those things, it actually amplifies the rage. So for people that actually experienced real, genuine rage when it comes out, because they've likely been put in a position of powerlessness before in their past, and they're feeling a sense of powerlessness in the present, and. And that rage starts to come out when they try and utilize some of those same tools that are often recommended for anger. Punching a pillow, you know, yelling into a pillow, yelling into your car, you know, hitting your punching bag, going and chopping wood, going and lifting weights. The problem is that it doesn't actually turn down the dial of your age. It doesn't actually decrease your rage. It actually amplifies the experiences. So it starts to build and build and build and build and build. And if you talk to people that have dealt with genuine rage, what they'll describe is this sensation of becoming more and more and more out of control, more and more inflamed internally in their thoughts and their body, and it becomes harder to actually deal with the rage. So with all that said, what do we do? How do we deal with our rage? Well, this is the. This is the very challenging part. Okay. The work that I had to do and the work that I've led countless men through now is, number one, get very clear on where you were put in a position of powerlessness in your past, likely in your childhood, maybe in your teenage years, and start to really see what you wanted to or needed to express in that place of powerlessness again. Whether it was you getting bullied, whether it was you being sexually, you know, abused in some capacity, or physically abused, or verbally abused, or neglected or abandoned or whatever it was, maybe you were, you grew up in a household where you witnessed somebody else be abused, right? It's very common to watch another parent be abused or another sibling, or you felt powerless because you were the child of an alcoholic or a drug addict and you were powerless to help them or save them. And that can also produce a tremendous amount of rage within us. So step one is get clear on where you were powerless in the past. Step two is what did you actually need to say in those moments? What boundary did you need to set? What comment did you need to make? What did you need to say either to that person, to God, to the universe, to life, to try and make sense of what was happening? And then step three, and this is the hard part, and this took me a while admittedly, because the intensity and the charge of rage is very strong. And for the majority of people it can like come out of nowhere where all of a sudden something will happen, you'll feel slighted, you'll feel powerless in some capacity, and then, boom, rage will come on like a, you know, like a, just like a fire truck, you know, I don't know if a fire truck is the right analogy. Probably a fire is a much better analogy. But just like all of a sudden this, this like napalm exploding inside of you. And so the challenging part is we actually have to learn to build a sense of tolerance with the rage. And so the yelling, the trying to express the rage, none of that's actually going to help. It's going to harm, it's going to actually dial up the rage. So what we need to do is we need to remove ourselves for a moment and we need to be able to sit and breathe into the charge and the intensity. Now why do we need to do that? Because in those moments, not only do we not feel empowered or in control in the situation in our present day life, right? Whether it's, you know, our wife has said something or you know, your partner has done something and you've, you've sort of like lost your cool, not only do you feel powerless with them, but oftentimes the individual will feel powerless and out of control with the rage itself. So the rage will take over, it'll kind of become the protector and the individual will feel a little bit afraid of it. So we have to build up a sense of tolerance with the rage. So what I would do is that when I would feel that rage starting to build or when I feel that rage sort of pop out, I would go and I would sit, and I still do this today. Sometimes when I can feel my anger really bubbling and starting to get wild and maybe out of control, I would go and sit, I would close my eyes, I would set a timer for four, five, ten minutes, whatever I felt like I could muster in that moment. Sometimes it was just like I set a timer for two minutes. I would close my eyes and I would breathe, and I would feel into the intensity of the charge in my body, and I would see if I could build up a sense of tolerance with it and get a sense of noticing if there's anything behind it. Could I tap into that sense of powerlessness? Could I tap into the version of me that was scared as a kid and didn't know what to do? Could I be with the part of me in that moment that was so furious that he was also ashamed of being out of control, of being maybe disrespected, of being embarrassed, et cetera? So I would sit, close my eyes, and breathe. And I would breathe into the intensity. And in doing so, I literally trained myself, and many men have done this. I literally trained myself to build a higher threshold and tolerance for my rage, to understand when it was starting to come on, to understand that it was okay for me to be with it, that I could actually handle it, rather than, oh, my rage is here and now I'm out of control. Because that's. That's what's essentially happening is that when we rage, when we move into that rage state, we recreate that sense of powerlessness that we experienced as a kid. We recreate that state of helplessness and feeling out of control. When we were a child or a teenager, or whenever the sort of instances happened or instance happened. And so we retrain ourselves to say, I can sit with and be with this very challenging emotion and sensation that makes me feel out of control, that makes me feel powerless, and that recreates those situations. And, you know, it took me probably a few dozen times of doing this, but eventually I started to feel more and more not necessarily in control of it. Cause it's not. It's not the right terminology, but I was less afraid of it. It wasn't a villain anymore. And I started to build a relationship with this rage to see, oh, you're just trying to protect me. This part of me is just trying to protect me. And it's trying to protect me from, you know, even sometimes things that aren't necessarily that harmful. So until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.