What Is Anger?
That churning feeling in the gut which erupts up through the body and makes us see red, anger can vary in intensity from mild frustration to outright rage. Some people may even live with chronic anger from experiences in the past easily triggered by their surroundings. In The Art of Empathy, Karen McLaren talks about anger as a “mask” to protect us from other emotions; we might respond with anger rather than acknowledge fear or sadness or vulnerability. Anger protects us, but when it gets out of hand or blocks necessary introspection, it can cause some big problems.

Words We May Use When We’re Really Feeling Angry
peeved, annoyed, frustrated, flustered, displeased, agitated, skeptical, bored, confused, disappointed, upset, hurt, unhappy, irritated, tense, whatever, stressed, bad, indifferent (see also “I don’t care” and “fine”), sarcastic

What Are Some Healthy and Unhealthy Ways People Show Anger?
Like other feelings, anger is morally neutral, neither good nor bad, but when suppressed for too long or stoked too heartily, it can get out of control. Notice how so many of our words for anger have to do with heat: angry people seethe or stew or explode or erupt. We talk about angry people needing to “vent,” and cartoons show steam jetting from angry characters’ ears. It’s not a bad metaphor really. Fire can be a source of warmth and light; it can be a tool for cooking and building and repairing; or it can be a destructive inferno. So it goes with anger.

I like pastoral theologian Andrew Lester’s definition of anger from The Angry Christian: “Anger is the physical, mental, and emotional arousal pattern that occurs in response to a perceived threat to the self characterized by the desire to attack or defend.” Lester also suggests these threats don’t have to be physical. We may respond with anger when we feel like our values or our status or our identities are threatened, and anger may be at its most dangerous when it’s misdirected toward vulnerable groups, family members, or even one’s self. If you have any experience with social media, you’ve probably seen unhealthy expressions of this sort of anger! Clickbait articles, hot takes, and fired up rebuttals all have a way of triggering our anger, and I would argue that the entire cable news industry is built on this principle too.

It may be helpful here to talk a little about two parts of your brain: the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The highly evolved prefrontal cortex is where your deep thoughts and analysis take place, while the limbic system (down in what we sometimes call the “lizard brain”) deals with quick recognition and response to threats. When you get that heavy-breathing, seeing-red, about-to-lash-out style of anger, your limbic system is in the driver’s seat. We often use the term “fight or flight reflex” to describe the limbic system’s function, and anger tends more toward the fight side of things. Simply recognizing “I am angry” may help you get out of that fight-or-flight mode and bring the prefrontal cortex back into the conversation. While the limbic system serves a necessary protective function for us, not every response to our anger will be productive. We’ll talk a little more in the coming weeks about positive and negative ways to act on anger.

A Special Note on Humor
Like most Southerners, I’m passive-aggressive as hell, and my personal favorite aggression is humor. If I’m angry about a situation, I’ll often make bitingly sarcastic jokes about it, and I know I’m not the only one who does this. As Lester states, anger is one of our most creative emotions, and humor is a way to (A) bring that guttural fire up into the headspace and (B) introduce some control. As we’ll address in greater detail next week, anger often arises from feelings of powerlessness, but making jokes about a situation is a way to reassert control. Thus, humor is a two-edged sword when it accompanies anger; it may help regain some power or even provide prophetic commentary on a bigger issue, but the sarcastic sting may do more damage than good. So use humor cautiously when angry.

Next week, we’ll look at anger’s equal/opposite: power.