Anger’s Equal/Opposite: Power
Anger almost always comes from a place of feeling helpless or threatened, so the best way to deescalate someone’s anger is to empower them. How can I regain control of a situation? How can I confirm that I’m not in fact threatened? Even if I am threatened, how do I want to respond? As author Andrew Lester suggests, one of the best responses to anger is to pose the questions (my paraphrase): “What is the perceived threat? Is the threat legitimate? Is my response appropriate?” Simply asking these questions helps us to reclaim our power. In neuroscience terminology, we deescalate our brain’s limbic system and kick things back up into the prefrontal cortex.
Getting to Know Your Anger and Power
People can be very dangerous when they feel powerless. As Lewis’s Law© states, “The less authority people have, the more aggressively they’ll defend it.” You don’t need to fear a gang’s leadership; it’s the low-level gang members trying to climb the organizational food chain who pose the real danger. A police captain overseeing a whole squad poses little danger; it’s the insecure beat cop who’s been in the same position for a decade and wondering how long he’ll be able to hang onto his role. Mall cops, middle management, and church facilities committees regularly wreak havoc, and don’t even get me started on neighborhood watches and HOAs. My scariest experiences in crisis situations have always been with the people who felt their authority was being called into question and thus sought to reassert it. In my work in hospitals, I’ve dealt with angry families, protective gang members, and mentally ill patients experiencing violent episodes, but the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in was when a visiting police officer felt I was challenging his authority, and he instinctively reached for his gun. Authority is a surprisingly fragile thing, and when it’s threatened, anger is a natural response.
On a Personal Note
In my time in hospital chaplaincy, I’ve focused most heavily on emergency departments, and I’ve noticed a trend there: everyone is pissed off. Everyone. Patients feel stuck amid long wait times. Medical teams feel helpless because they’re waiting on other units to admit waiting patients. Family members feel powerless to help their loved ones other than sitting and waiting beside them. Inevitably, people start snapping at each other. Using the emotional balancing technique described a few posts ago, my goal in emergency departments is always to help patients, family members, and medical team members identify the things still within their power. This in turn reduces the anger in the environment and helps everything flow a little more smoothly. Sometimes this strategy works. Other times things get thrown and walls get punched. I still stand by the idea that the best way to soothe angry people is to help them find their power again.
A little empathy with angry people also goes a long way. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that all who are angry are also suffering, and this mindset is powerful empathy fuel (especially around suffering people in an emergency department). Here’s an excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames which has helped me stay grounded in emergency situations:
When we get angry, we suffer. If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering. When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. But we tend to forget. We think that we are the only one that suffers, and the other person is our oppressor. This is enough to make anger arise, and to strengthen our desire to punish. We want to punish the other person because we suffer. Then, we have anger in us; we have violence in us, just as they do. When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately. So understanding the other is understanding yourself, and understanding yourself is understanding the other person. Everything must begin with you.
A Special Note on Cultural Anger
Whole communities and whole countries can feel an emotion together too, and anger provides a salient example where I’m writing in the United States. We recently marked the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, a time when our whole country —despite its economic prosperity, political influence, and military strength— felt powerless for a moment. While there were some immediate displays of sadness and media-fueled fear, the Bush administration had a military response planned out within a week and implemented within a month with almost full support from Congress. The country felt powerless, and we collectively responded with anger by invading Afghanistan. Pundits and politicians would later claim we did it to establish democracy and unseat unjust leadership, but if that were the case, why wait until 9/11 to put such a plan in action? 9/11 was one of the most formative events in my adolescence, so I want to acknowledge my bias, but it feels like the anger Americans felt in that era became deeply internalized. With the advent of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, we’ve become an angrier and more polarized culture, with the COVID-19 pandemic marking a particularly nefarious spike in our fury. If anger is truly a mask for other emotions (as Karla McLaren states) or a response to threats (as Lester states), it makes me wonder: what fears are we protecting ourselves from with all this anger? How can we help Americans feel less helpless and realize the control we have? What emotional reckoning does America need to do to keep from tearing ourselves apart with all this unresolved rage?
Next week we’ll take a bit of a detour and talk about Christianity’s complicated relationship with anger.