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Anger: Part 2 - The Search for Wholeness

© Thomas James Martin

Anger shows us precisely where we are stuck, where our limits are, where we cling to beliefs and fears. ~Jack Kornfield

After researching and writing the prior article, Anger: Part 1 - Listening and Learning, I remembered some past teachings from religion and psychology about the usefulness of anger in awakening to greater consciousness. Not that one wants to cultivate anger in itself, but this emotion teaches us some useful spiritual lessons. You might even say that if forces the lessons upon us, serving as it does to deepen our awareness of who we are on all our levels of being.

I was impressed by the discussions about the previous article which compelled me, amateur that I am in this area, to dig deeper into the nature of anger, its place in the shadows of the psyche and the unfortunate consequences of its suppression.

As with so many problems in my life, my troubles with anger begin when I don't own that emotion. To be more explicit, the anger seems outside of myself. After all, is not someone else causing my aggravation, generating my resentments over inconsiderate behavior or threatening me with physical or mental harm?

It's no coincidence that blaming others for problems is one indicator of schizophrenia on such psychological assessment tests as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. By that measure I am in trouble sometimes, but I suspect I have a lot of company as most of us could benefit from some therapy on the matter.

Without oversimplifying this vast and important subject, I would like to suggest that there are four major strands of thought that help bring into the light of consciousness the darker areas of the psyche . I shall examine two of them in this essay, separation and projection, but the other two, shadow and compassion, I shall look at in a future article.

Katherine Rabenau, Contributing Editor for Agoraphobia, hints at these concepts in this message that she left in the previous article's discussion thread:

I have a personal theory about anger and why it is especially difficult in our society. It is because we view it as a "bad" emotion rather than just an emotion. When we feel angry, we feel that we are being bad and since we don't want to feel like we are bad we have to make the person who has caused us to feel this way into the bad person. If it weren't for him or her, we would still be a good person but they have induced this badness into us. I know that I used to get really stuck in that trap of having to prove to myself that I was not wrong for having my feelings. If we could allow ourselves to let our anger flow through us (not acting out on it, just allowing it) in the same way we handle laughter, we would be a much healthier society. . .

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