The Power of Alchemized Anger
Anger is a touchy subject because of its capacity to cause harm. By getting skillful with anger, we can use its powerful energy to set boundaries, heal relationships, and take meaningful action.
Most people I know don’t willingly touch their anger. “What good would it do?” “I don’t want to bring violence into my home.” “I’m trying to hold it all together.” “I’m not an asshole.” “Those days of being animalistic and barbaric are gone, and for good reason.” “I’m all about kindness these days.” There are a million reasons why people cut themselves off from their anger, and much of the time, I don’t blame them. We don’t want to perpetuate violence or destructive behavior, and we often reject and deny our anger in the process.
But I want to suggest a new path: one of becoming friends with your anger, integrating it into your life, and finding healthy ways to leverage it to build stronger relationships and motivate meaningful action.
Anger is a touchy subject because of the power that comes with it and its capacity to cause harm and suffering to both its victims and its perpetrators. Anger has brought down entire civilizations! Many people have a tenuous relationship with their anger and a conscious or unconscious fear that it could escalate into violence. We do have to acknowledge the harmful potential of anger: many violent crimes do stem from the inability to skillfully work with one’s anger, and on the less extreme end of the spectrum, passive aggression and angry criticism cause enormous harm by slowly eroding relationships. With that in mind, I ask that you suspend your judgment for a moment as we explore an alternative perspective on anger.
I’ve spent most of my life disconnected from the emotion of anger. It took me until my early 30s to be able to feel angry. I took pride in being in control, being so “personally developed” that, of course, I didn’t get angry. But unbeknownst to me, the side effect of suppressing my anger was that I had a hard time creating and enforcing boundaries. People walked all over me in business and relationships, I regularly experienced severe migraines (potentially a psychosomatic response to unexpressed emotions), and I had an autoimmune illness at the time, I believe, at least in part because I was repressing my anger. The anger didn’t have an outlet for expression or anywhere to go, so it was coming out in physical symptoms and tension.
Then in 2017, I went to an Evryman Men’s Work Retreat and caught the bug:
Facilitator: “I’m sensing you’re angry, are you angry? Can you get angry?”
Me: “WTF are you talking about? I’m not angry!!!” (says in an angry tone).
There were 50 or so men at the retreat, all there to feel their feelings. It was wild. I had no idea this was even possible or even that all of these different emotions lived inside me. When I got back to New York, I immediately started a men's group. The idea was to start practicing feeling our feelings every Monday night, to go to the ‘emotional gym’ and get our reps in. It was a real leap of faith to assume that this would actually be of benefit to our relationships, communities, and companies. Our goal was to feel all of our feelings, especially the core emotions we all experience as humans: joy, fear, sadness, creativity/sexual feelings, and anger.
I came from a family that doesn’t go there emotionally, so in this arena, I was a true beginner. But each Monday we showed up and did our best to feel what was there. In the beginning, there wasn’t much for me, but over time, I started to build a relationship with myself and soon I discovered that there was a whole river of emotions beneath the surface. The hardest one for me to admit and feel was, of course, anger. I didn’t think it was worthwhile. And I didn’t think I was actually angry about things.
I now know that as humans, we all experience the five primary emotions at different times. They exist within each of us. It was an illusion to think that I was joyful and fearful and sad, but not angry. It’s not as if we can pick from a menu what we want and don’t want to feel. We experience them all, regardless of whether we are aware of them or not, and regardless of whether we want to be experiencing them. And the more quickly we can get in contact with each emotion as it’s arising, the more quickly we can get back to a sense of balance and peace as we move through the day. If we refuse to acknowledge that a certain emotion is there, or we’re unwilling to touch the pain associated with it, it can get stuck and turn into a lasting mood or be lodged into our nervous system and body, ultimately coming out in something like depression or physical illness. It’s imperative that we do our part to check in with ourselves (and our loved ones), understand what is actually going on internally, and express and release it appropriately.
Using Anger to Your Advantage
As I started to build awareness of my own anger, I realized that there were healthy and productive use cases emerging. If I was negotiating a partnership deal, my anger gave me a built-in GPS system of what was OK and not OK for my prospective partner to ask for. I was finally able to set boundaries with my time, energy, and resources with clients and partners based on a clear internal sense of what was healthy and appropriate in the interaction in question.
Skillfully incorporating anger into my marriage has also been a complete game-changer. In the past, I wouldn’t fully reveal myself. I wouldn’t share everything I was feeling because I wanted to keep the peace at any cost. As a result, I wasn’t able to set healthy boundaries for myself and I wasn’t able to bring in any real accountability with my partner. Now I am clear with myself and my wife about where my boundaries are, and if a boundary gets crossed, we’ll be having a conversation about it. As uncomfortable as this can be for many of us, it is essential to keep your partnership on track for success.
There is immense power in the emotion of anger—it is pure life force and raw energy; an electric current that can be used to motivate and fuel action. When you integrate your anger, you are bringing in additional power to support you. Setting boundaries with anger in your tone makes the boundaries more visceral and real for the recipient. Stating that you’re angry in a business meeting (in a non-violent, non-aggressive way) has the potential to capture everyone's attention and shift the meeting in a more productive way. Think of it as a lightning bolt of energy that can zap aliveness into the meeting. There is power to be leveraged here.
Beyond supporting healthy and respectful relationships in your work and personal life, transforming your anger also comes with the huge benefit of increased clarity and energy. There’s so much life force in anger! We’ve all felt it and we know its power. It can and should be used as a motivator and stimulator to conscientious, skillful action. It alerts us to injustices and violations so that we can do something to correct them. That might mean taking a stand up against wrongdoing or even taking action to fight back against your own bullshit or self-sabotaging tendencies. Anger tells us that enough is enough, and it’s time to do something about it.
How to Alchemize Your Anger
To be clear, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to alchemizing and transforming anger. On one side of the spectrum, there are people like me who are habitual anger repressors, who get walked all over and develop autoimmune illnesses, tumors, migraines, and depression. On the other side are the people who have a hard time controlling their anger and experience outbursts that may lead to physical and/or verbal abuse.
Wherever you are on this spectrum, it’s important to get more skillful with your anger. For the repressors, this means expressing and releasing it in a healthy way. You might try a physical outlet like chopping wood, lifting weights at the gym while listening to heavy metal, slamming a pillow on your bed or couch, yelling, exercising, playing sports in an angry way, or martial arts. This provides a safe outlet to connect with and ultimately integrate the anger that is inside of you without taking it out on others.
For the expressors, this can be counterproductive and can actually fuel the anger and make it more difficult to manage. If this is the case for you, it may make more sense to sit in meditation, noticing the sensations of anger, and just allow it to rise and fall while bringing acceptance to it. This helps the anger run its course without further stoking the fire. Internal Family Systems is another great outlet that can help you compassionately connect and integrate the part of yourself that is angry and feels wrong.
The key here is to make contact with your anger in a way that works for you and is safe and non-violent. Finding the right approach may require a bit of self-awareness and experimentation on your part.
I hope you can see by now that ignoring or pushing away your anger is a real missed opportunity. Don’t be afraid of anger; instead, harness its energy skillfully towards achieving personally meaningful goals. Once you learn to truly tap into this new fuel source, you’ll never miss a chance to listen to—and act on—its wisdom.