How to Deal with all this Anger
Rage defines our moment, and righteous indignation can be motivating. But what about when our anger becomes destructive or debilitating?
1.
It’s hard to choose a single affective quality that defines America right now, but I think the defining one is anger. The Trump regime’s rage, and that of its core constituency and propagandists, is well-documented. To choose but the most recent example, which I saw this morning, consider when an American government communique has spoken like this:
But my focus this week is not on their rage, but on ours. On mine.
I’ve struggled with anger for my entire life. I grew up in a safe and supportive home, but both my parents had violent tempers. There was occasional physical violence, and very frequent verbal violence: shouting, insults, threats. It wasn’t until my twenties that I realized this was not a universal experience. Together with self-judgment and shame, anger is the quality of mind I’ve worked with the most in meditation, therapy, and other modalities. In a way, having a husband and child has helped in this work, since it’s made it more urgent, more necessary.
There are, of course, many kinds of anger, many experiences of it, many ways in which it can help or harm. Some anger is merely irritation or impatience, but the rage I feel in response to that illegal, inaccurate, and hateful USDA notice may be different. Perhaps it is “righteous indignation.” Perhaps it motivates me to take action, donate money, write articles, and vote for candidates who might reduce the amount of hate in our politics, rather than increase it.
But even in the latter case, I often experience anger as corrosive. It is exhausting, it makes me miserable, and it bleeds over from politics into the rest of my life. A year ago, as the 2024 election results came in, one of the predominant emotions I experienced was dread — not only of what Trump would do, but of this weight I remember carrying around during his first term, which is now omnipresent. The “background hum of dread” I once called it.
Probably the best way to deal with anger is to do something — to take action. And I hope you are doing things that are impactful, even if you’re just impacting your family or neighbors; that’s a great place to start. But here, I want to focus on how I’ve been dealing with anger internally, in my own body and mind. Since lately, I’m experiencin a hell of a lot of it.
2.
In some of the contemplative traditions that I love, the best thing to do with anger is extinguish it. In Theravadan Buddhist dharma, anger is dosa, one of the three poisons that are the root of all negative states, and so you want to recognize it, recognize its causes, and learn the ways to prevent it from arising in the future. (Satipatthana Sutta 4.1) This doesn’t mean repressing anger; if it’s present, it’s present. But it does mean avoiding the conditions that give rise to anger, and cultivating qualities that help it dissipate more quickly, such as lovingkindness.
This does work, in my experience. It can be as simple as changing the mental channel for a moment, and that goes internally as well as externally. There is a gradient between staying informed as a responsible citizen and being unhealthily obsessed with rage-inducing news, and mindful attention to where I am on that gradient at a particular moment is extremely helpful.
But there are other ways to work with anger that I like even more.
One is to attend closely to what is really going on when anger arises. Lama Rod Owens, a (self-identified) queer, Black Buddhist teacher, has written what, for me, is the definitive dharma book on anger, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. One of his central insights is that anger contains information: it shows us where our love is, where our grief is, where our values are. “Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event,” he writes.
This investigation is similar to something the late Joanna Macy developed in her ‘work that reconnects.’ Beneath the despair and rage we may experience about ecological devastation is a profound love for the world that can be nourishing and reconnecting. After all, if we didn’t care, we wouldn’t ache. In this way, our anger and pain can bring us closer to what we believe to be true and important. It is the opposite of spiritual bypass; it is spiritual attention. And when I shift, however subtly, from the rage to what is motivating it, the content of my thoughts shifts from what I hate to what and who I love.
A second way I sometimes work with anger is to situate myself that space between stimulus and response. (Viktor Frankl did not actually say “Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response.” But Lou Reed did say “Between thought and expression, there lies a lifetime.” That is good enough for me.) Some Buddhists love micro-analyzing this space — the ‘wheel of dependent origination’ divides it into a dozen components — and there is a value to doing so. The conditions for anger are present, and anger arises (or sometimes doesn’t). This is not to be repressed; it’s just cause and effect. But the next moment sometimes offers a choice: whether to respond, how to respond, what to do. And here, there is indeed a pseudo-Franklian moment of freedom. It’s not repressing anger to choose not to express it in an unhelpful way. I can stand there feeling the anger, allowing it, not judging it — but not speaking, or writing, or banging something. That, I count as a “win”: the negative space of not acting unskillfully.
What ‘skillful’ means in a given interaction is, itself, a reflection that will be different for each of us. Rereading Lama Rod’s book recently, I was struck by his statement that as a large-bodied Black man, he had learned that expressing his anger in public can be dangerous, since it might be perceived in our racist culture as a threat. Reading that, I contrasted Owens’s experience with the legacy of queer rage that I inherited from ACT-UP, in which expressing rage was ennobling: it showed we weren’t weak, we were strong, we were standing up for our community. Because of the different prejudices the dominant culture has against these two groups, the valence and value of expressing anger are completely different. Who is allowed to express anger, and who is not? When is a woman judged for seeming angry, while a man is praised for it? While anger, itself, may be a universal emotion, the expression of it is conditioned by social structures that affect us in different ways.
Finally, the space between thought and expression points, for better or for worse, to the truth of impermanence. I would say that around 99% of the expressions of anger that I later regret were made in the moment of being angry. Had I waited a few minutes, even a few seconds, the anger would have subsided and I could have made a tactical choice of how best to communicate. Again, sometimes the best choice is to communicate. The right kind of expression can be politically valuable. The wrong kind of silence can be relationally toxic. The point isn’t about one choice being right; it’s about having agency to make a choice.
3.
Despite all I’ve just said, I’ve often wondered about the people (including our president) who seem to thrive on anger. There are moments when I feel this way too, particularly if no one else is around so there aren’t any external consequences. Usually, I find the somatic experience of anger to be quite unpleasant, and I hate the fruits of regret, but in the moment, there can be an energy to anger that feels vital, even invigorating.
And while it’s common in therapeutic or spiritual circles to hear people say that these people must be in deep pain all the time, I don’t know if that’s true. Some of them claim to be pretty happy, even if others (like our dear defense secretary) have a series of broken relationships and addictions that suggest they are not. I did do two minutes of exhaustive research on this subject, and found one study showing that anger helped people solve puzzles, win prizes (often by cheating), and do well at some video games. It also does seem to help someone become the world’s first trillionaire. Are all these very successful people actually miserable? I have no idea. Sounds like sour grapes to me.
I can only say that this is not the kind of person I want to be. I have seen the destructive power of anger in family relationships and in myself, and I don’t want that. I see the ugly face of weaponized anger every time I check the news. I am, as I’ve written here before, caught in a thirty-year-long oscillation in which I am drawn to and then repulsed by political engagement and journalism. And some anger is clearly the price of admission to that world.
I want to close with a meditation practice and a provocative quotation, not coincidentally both drawn from queer Black teachers who have had plenty of reasons for rage, and plenty of experience with its costs.
First is one final teaching from Lama Rod Owens: a six-step mindfulness practice for when anger arises. It has the absurd acronym SNOELL, which stands for See, Name, Own, Experience, Let it go, and Let it float.
The first step is seeing what is going on: noticing that you’re activated, often with the body as the primary clue. Heartrate elevated? Tensed muscles? Something is happening, so Name it. If this is rage, name it as rage. And Own it: this is taking place, it’s not getting repressed, it’s here, it’s what’s real, and it’s in me. It’s not someone else’s fault, even if someone else’s words or actions caused it to arise. It’s not my fault either; it’s just my material to work with, not theirs. This is an important transition from the stimulus to the present-moment experience. We’re not focused on what was said or done anymore; now we’re focused on the experience of anger itself. So Experience it — again, not repressing or exacerbating it, but just allowing the mental and physical experiences to unfold. It could be a pleasant rush of energy or an unpleasant marination in dreck. But it’s just a temporary experience to have.
Finally, those last two steps. The first is short-term: let it go. This may last only for an instant, but for that instant, perhaps with an exhale, you can let go of the anger. If it comes back a second later, fine. Still you’ve let go of it for that moment, and who knows, sometimes more than a moment. ‘Let it Float’ is a bit longer-term. Maybe after letting go of the anger, it’s still right here. Okay, so just let it float there. Here’s the anger. In the extremely annoying cliché, it is what it is. You don’t have to do anything about it.
I find this six-step practice with the silly acronym to be quite useful – give it a try if you like, and please buy Love and Rage to learn much more.
Finally, some closing words from Audre Lorde, which I’ll leave for you to ponder on your own:
Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy.
Thank you for reading and subscribing.
It feels good to take a break from writing about enraging things, to write about rage itself. I’m working on a semi-long-form analysis of Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist for Arc Magazine, and will hopefully be able to share that soon. I’ve also continued to put videos online from last year’s symposium on psychedelics, law and religion, including these cool ones last week:
Thanks for reading and for being a paid subscriber. Please spread the word so that this work can continue to grow, and please take care of yourselves out there.