On the other hand, this kind of teaching was very destructive to me: I was taught it was shameful to be angry, and my main religious experience was with Buddhism, which says anger is always purely bad. Of course everyone has anger, and so did I, but because I was shameful of feeling it I just expressed it back on myself as intense depression and self loathing
There are two sides to every teaching. The Buddhas teaching may be touted as universal by the doctrine of the teaching itself, but for me it was destructive. Though as always I await a chorus of followers to tell me I was “doing it wrong”
I don't get very angry generally, but this is something that I consider a mild fault. There are some things and situations where the appropriate thing is to be angry (injustice, harming innocents, etc). Of course, many people let their anger push them to behave badly, but the anger itself can be appropriate and can even help you take actions that need to be taken. From the Christian tradition, Psalms 4:4 is sometimes translated "In your anger, do not sin". Anger by itself is not necessarily sin, but what people do with their anger often is.
I totally agree. My therapist taught me that sometimes we need to be angry, or at least seem angry, when someone does something wrong, an injustice as you point out. I’m not sure why people have come to the conclusion that certain emotions must be entirely avoided
I agree. It feels very immature to me. Dogs seem to experience anger like we do, so anger must come from a common ancestor. That makes it older than humanity itself. I think it’s obvious evolution would have ditched it a long time ago if it wasn’t serving us in some deep and complex ways. And that feels right - whenever I feel angry, something I care about is being ignored. My anger clearly wants to protect and care for me and the people I love. Why would I banish it?
Childish anger has an untamed destructive element. But the answer is to let anger grow and mature with the rest of your psyche. Not banish it and pretend it doesn’t exist. If you banish your anger, how could it possibly mature?
I think the purpose of anger is to weed out anti-social behaviors. If an animal is constantly bothering those in its pack, anger is a mechanism to punish them so their bothersome genes or memes don't propagate.
> I’m not sure why people have come to the conclusion that certain emotions must be entirely avoided
I don't think "avoided" is the right term for these teachings, but the emotion itself is generally not fruitful, particularly since it urges you to dwell on it. Injustice should be addressed because it's unjust, not because you're angry at the injustice. What does the anger add to the equation? Maybe motivation? Maybe it's important to explore why the injustice by itself is not sufficiently motivating.
> What does the anger add to the equation? Maybe motivation?
Anger draws attention toward what’s important - for both ourselves and others. It says “hey! Something isn’t right here, and letting it slide wouldn’t feel right!”. It is a constant voice reminding you what you love and what you would sacrifice for that love.
There’s a lot of talk in certain communities about boundary setting. But I see boundaries as a natural part of the domain of anger. Boundaries are only hard to set if you either don’t hear your own anger internally, or don’t let that anger be expressed into the world.
It sounds like you're saying people need anger when they haven't spent time reflecting on what's important in life. If you already know what's important because you've done that reflection, of what use is the anger?
Is that a real thing, that people discover that they know everything there is to know about themselves and their desires, and they’re just “done”? I’m turning 40 soon, and I feel like I have more unanswered questions about myself with each passing year. It feels like life is constantly passing me new situations to navigate. My anger is often the first part of me to notice when I’m missing something important.
Even if you know what matters to you, anger can still be a wonderful tool to communicate your desires and intentions to others. If a homeless person starts creeping on to my partner in the street, I’d almost certainly reach for anger when I tell them that they need to cut that out. It’s a powerful, direct way to speak straight from my lizard brain to theirs. Seems ridiculous to take that tool out of your toolbox.
As with most things in life, there's an appropriate balance somewhere. People tend to say anger = bad because we have mostly experienced inappropriate anger on one extreme and have found that it isn't healthy for you.
Anger doesn't really come natural to me, so I get very confused when others fail to control their anger. I do get frustrated, which seems different to me. That is something I can now easily deal with, after learning about children and emotion. Most of the time it's down to "broken cookie syndrome", i.e. children breaking down in tears do to a cookie breaking in half. It's rarely about the cookie, it's something else and the cookie is just the straw that broke the camels back.
Always thinking "broken cookie" when frustrations bubble up makes it a lot easier to not lash out at people around you and instead address the underlying issues.
I was also taught to suppress my anger, and it still causes me problems to this day.
An autistic friend said something to me a few years ago that changed my perspective on it completely. She said “Seph, I never know with you whether you’re actually calm or you just seem calm. It’s like you’re an oven and whenever I stick my hand in, the oven feels cold. But then one day the house will suddenly be on fire”. I thought I was helping by suppressing my anger, but it was actually stressing her out because she couldn’t calibrate. People want to know if they’re doing something that’s pissing you off so they can decide if they’re going to cut it out. Now, sometimes I think of it as “oh, I feel about a 2 out of 10 anger now. What does 2/10 anger look like?” - and then I try to communicate that. If the situation gets better, my anger dissipates and I relax. If the situation gets worse, fine, now we go up to a 4 out of 10 or something. And I try to express that. My voice and posture change, and I do the human equivalent of growling.
My friends point is that predictability is a virtue. People hate it when you’re angry all of a sudden, out of nowhere. But they weirdly like it when things escalate and deescalate naturally. To do that, it’s important to be able to accurately communicate exactly how angry you feel along the way so people know where they stand with you. (Even, and especially if that’s just a very slight 1/10 frustration).
It’s a skill as much as it’s an emotion. I wish people practiced their anger more.
> I was taught it was shameful to be angry, and my main religious experience was with Buddhism, which says anger is always purely bad.
I don't know who your teacher was, and I'm sure their motivation was coming from a good place, but I have to say that I think they were wrong about that. Was it a Theravada tradition perhaps?
Anger itself is not bad, but reacting out of anger unskillfully is. Yes, the Buddha many times all over the Pali cannon says to abandon anger, that it is a poison, but that doesn't mean that we should generate aversion for it. How can we abandon aversion if we don't look at our anger directly?
At the beginning we might have to put it aside, but we'll always have to come back to it and deal with it at some point. One of my teachers told a story that sort of relates to this in one of his talks, just to emphasize that we need to look at these emotions and deal with them directly. In case people are interested, it starts after the opening meditation at about the 20 minute mark: https://phuntsok.org/media/Meditation-NYC/080417_Healingthet...
I had a similar experience. It's a strange and surreal form of gaslighting when family members make you angry and then subsequently make you to feel ashamed for becoming angry.
Anger, just like any other human emotion is neither good nor bad. Prescribing a human emotion as good and another human emotion as bad takes a certain degree of self righteousness. After some growing up, I've since learned to try and let my emotions guide me rather than run away from them and that's made all of the difference.
I think that shame is likely worse than anger, though parents worldwide use shame as a method for controlling their kids. Hopefully in the future kids are given more tools for how to recognize and deal with shame.
Thank you for sharing. I feel you. There are many ways that teachings are passed onto us that can be harmful. I did not know how to deal with anger, no guidance whatsoever. So I just kept harming myself and others. The remedy was to accept that I was in a cycle where love and empathy were not reaching me, I was actively blocking them myself. Therapy helped immensely.
> I was taught it was shameful to be angry, and my main religious experience was with Buddhism, which says anger is always purely bad.
Sorry to hear that you encountered buddhist practitioners who made you think that. Don't think shame is part of buddhist teaching. However, this kind of techniques quite common across all religious zealots, buddhist or not.
I don't think you meant to invalidate their experience, but that's how I feel when I've been told similar stuff like, "sorry you went through that ... it's not actually part of the religion ... and all religions are like that anyway." Zealots are often that way because they're more orthodox/literal with their religion, and anyways, why is your interpretation of a religion more accurate than theirs?
Anger is a tool. We get angry for a reason - it unlocks a reserve of strength that we can't usually call on. That strength comes with a price, but that in the evolutionary context of anger (kill or be killed) that price was always worth it. Think of it like in Anime where the hero uses a special power that can defeat really strong foes, but it leaves them spent and vulnerable.
Unfortunately, in modern day life, the power anger gives us is generally useless, so we are paying the price for nothing.
Buddhism is not just the subject matter and the students, your teachers can also fail.
As I understand it, anger is wrong just as pain is wrong in that it’s a sign that something is wrong. Touch a hot object and you instinctively know it was a bad idea, but anger doesn’t come with the same innate revulsion. To be angry at yourself for feeling angry is missing the point, anger isn’t the failing it’s the notification of failure.
Well the point in Buddhism is not that anger is a symptom of pain but a primary cause of pain. The Buddha even says in an early scripture that anger is the one thing we should kill outright, since it’s considered totally destructive. In effect, the root of all evil
I’m not disagreeing with that. Anger is totally destructive. You shouldn’t try to get angry, and mindlessly doing what anger prompts you to do is a terrible idea, but understand what about yourself caused you to feel anger and you can change.
You can also impact the outside world to address the situation, but the situation and how you feel about the situation are different matters.
Sorry if the above is incoherent, I’m operating on little sleep.
There are two sides to every teaching. The Buddhas teaching may be touted as universal by the doctrine of the teaching itself, but for me it was destructive. Though as always I await a chorus of followers to tell me I was “doing it wrong”