Up And Out

On weekends, my neighbor plays video games and screams at his TV all day. At first, I judged him (“Men will do anything but go to therapy”). But then I realized: I carry the same rage, I just express it differently. Now, when I hear his trapped anger ricocheting through the walls, I feel compassion for both of us.

Anger gets trapped in many ways. Some people repress it. That’s often my style. Recently someone said, “I was an angry teenager,” and, to my surprise, I said, “Me too.” I was surprised because, when I was a teenager, I didn’t know I was angry. I just thought the world wasn’t as enlightened as I was.

But anger can get trapped through expression too. Call it Boiling Water Syndrome. When water boils, it rises, cools, and settles back into the exact same spot. Many people’s anger is like this: repetitive, uncathartic, a way of staying stuck. The Buddha specifically warned about letting anger turn to hatred, because hatred not only scalds, it's also seeks its own repetition, again and again, in new forms.

When anger arises in me — and it does quite a bit — I work with the mantra: up and out. Let it come up, but also, let me keep some separation from it. My teacher uses the image of a child in a backward-facing car seat, watching the road recede behind him. Anger serves us best when we can hold it with that kind of spaciousness.

A similar idea comes from Internal Family Systems: to separate from anger and see it as one part of an inner family. Mine is usually a five-year-old boy. When I see my anger as a child, I can validate his pain (he really WAS hurt) while remembering that my first responsibility is to take care of him, not to fix everything wrong with this world.

There's a lot of pop-psych discourse about whether anger is good or bad, but that's really the wrong question. Anger is. It exists. What matters is not defending or denying it, but how we relate to it. If we choose a wise relationship, we will also unlock a door to love.