The Structure of Anger

The emotion of anger consists of a complex of thought reactions organized around certain core beliefs. These beliefs are in turn infused with emotional feeling energy that gives the beliefs both meaning and power. The feeling energy is like the gasoline that fuels a car; it is responsible for translating the belief into action. In Mindfulness Therapy, we recognize that this underlying emotional energy is the key that must be changed and regulated. Change the emotional fuel and the beliefs and thought reactions lose their strength and power, which allows them to change and reform into more functional beliefs and thoughts. This is why we place such importance on the underlying feelings in Mindfulness Therapy; even more so than on the belief or content of the negative thoughts. One can spend many hours of therapy trying to change the thoughts and beliefs through education and counterargument, but if the emotional charge remains in place then the dysfunctional beliefs and negative thinking will soon return.

Anger is the Outward Expression of Fear.

At the core of anger, you will almost always find another emotion and set of beliefs that is almost the exact opposite, energetically. This inner core emotion is Fear – an intense sense of vulnerability, fragility, sadness and terror. This is often described as the “inner child” – often quite appropriate, because of course, these core emotions of intense wounding become established during childhood, usually from some form of emotional abuse or abandonment or put downs by an emotionally (and often physically) abusive parent. The child is bombarded with emotional trauma, often over many years, and of course, the child is unable to process this emotional trauma, because it does not have the wealth of life experience of an adult. Unable to process and resolve the emotional wound, it becomes repressed and hidden by layers and layers of avoidance, denial and patterns of secondary reactivity such as guilt and shame. It becomes walled off and abandoned itself, just like the real child, but continues to generate suffering in the form of intense feelings of helplessness and vulnerability. To cope with this inner vulnerability the child learns to project aggressive anger outwards in the form of anger. In a very real sense, he unconsciously uses anger to prevent himself or herself from falling into the black hole of despair and helplessness. Hence the maxim,

Beliefs

There are several classic types of core beliefs that create a breeding ground for anger to ferment and take form. The first group consists of all the Expectations that we cling to with compulsive forcefulness. He should be this way. She should be kinder. I expect my coffee to be served hot, not tepid. Why won’t my father show me that he loves me? I want to be able to talk to my mother as an adult, instead of being made to feel like a child.

The list of expectations can be very long indeed and many people live their whole life in the grip of these expectations, measuring everything according to whether these expectations are met or not. This is of course a very stressful and futile way to live because the world will seldom conform to our expectations and demands. What we get instead is conflict and disappointment, and a deep feeling of disconnection and distrust with our world and with people. Expectations, when compulsive in nature, fuelled by intense emotional energy creates prison bars that keep us in and prevent us from interacting in a free and spontaneous way in our life.

Closely related to the “should’s and should not’s” are the, “If only...” and, “Why can't you/it be different?” Like expectations, these beliefs are based on fantasy thinking, idealistic thinking that is not in touch with the reality of the way things are. Compulsive identification with idealism creates immense inner conflict that can result in outer conflict as anger.

The next group of beliefs are those to do with Causality. The ...because... statements. I am angry because he said this, or because she did that. I am angry because I was treated unfairly or I was cheated. I am angry because I was abused as a child.

There is a certain logic to these causal statements, and they seem perfectly reasonable. However, the truth is something quite different, because there is absolutely no law that says I must feel this way because of that event. There is no law that says I must feel upset because she said an unkind word, or that I feel angry because he puts me down. The event is, at the end of the day, an objective phenomenon, but how I react is not – reactions are subjective and will be different for us at different times, and different people can and do have totally different ways of reacting to the same objective events.

In Buddhist psychology, this belief in causal connections is considered a form of delusion, and one of the core causes of emotional suffering. One of the essential and most important starting points for anyone who wants to change their habitual patterns of anger is to fully and completely understand this principle until it becomes second nature.

                                                            There is No Because...

If you remain attached to this causality belief, even a little then you will never be able to break free from your reactive patterns of anger, because you will always see them as being dependent on external events – on what he did or said, or on what happened to me. To believe this makes law of causality makes you a victim of life and leaves you disempowered and vulnerable to suffering.

Another group of core beliefs are those that are based around a sense of Violation. This can produce immense bursts of anger at the sense of being wronged, being manipulated, deliberately abused either physically, sexually or emotionally. We can feel violated when the other person puts us down or simply ignores us. The withholding of love and attention is a form of passive aggression and an expression of anger through stony silence. We feel violated when someone tries to manipulate or control us; taking a position of authority, and making us feel insignificant. There are many forms of emotional abuse, too numerous to list, but all too familiar to most of us. In almost every case the aggressive actions of abuse arise out of unresolved inner fear.

Whatever the core belief, the emotion of anger is always centered around fear: The historical fear left through childhood trauma, the fear of not getting one’s ideals or expectations met, the fear of external causes repeating.

Resistance is not the way