What Makes You Angry?
Apr 3, 2025
What makes you angry? This may seem like an odd or even trivial question. However, in a world seemingly awash with anger, grievance, and resentment, it may be a question worthy of a moment of careful thought. Most of us would respond with a variation on the following: “Of course, when things go wrong, I get cross!” When someone crosses us, we hit back, emotionally if not physically, and with full justification. Anger lurks as a mostly hidden but highly volatile attribute of the shared human experience. We are sometimes angry without even knowing why. Paradoxically, our waking moments are mostly spent in pursuit of the exact opposite: we dream of calm, enduring tranquility, undisturbed by the corrosive, piercing emotional extremities associated with anger. We often just want to be left alone. Despite this earnest desire for peace, however, I believe we are presently in an ‘age of rage’.
In our professional and personal lives, anger is perhaps infrequent, but certainly omnipresent. Parents get angry with their children; and children get angry with their parents or siblings. In the workplace, perhaps less frequently, we may see anger manifested in exchanges between colleagues, supervisors, and clients. Socially, we quarrel and bicker. Politically, we vent our anger at the ‘other’.
Education is no stranger to this emotion. As a fundamentally social undertaking, education is richly endowed and thoroughly infused with the full spectrum of human emotions, including anger. As educators, parents and teachers all must master a wide range of emotional tools and techniques to achieve learning outcomes. The most effective educators have mastered the ‘affective’ domain of learning, including feelings, emotions, and motivations. We promote a love of learning and eschew a fear of failure; we revel in the joy of success and shed tears of sorrow for the despondent; compliance confers affirmation, disobedience begets anger; we laugh, cry, sing, dance, and hug; our emotions are an integral, indivisible part of learning.
But what is anger? It is a simple word with a complex and nuanced set of meanings. It is an immensely broad emotion, ranging from mild irritation, through righteous anger, towering wrath, to a convulsive, blind, unthinking rage. We hope to only see one small (and perhaps tightly controlled) aspect of anger manifested in our classrooms and homes, amounting to a momentary expression of displeasure. Yet, at times we may find ourselves overwhelmed by the full spectrum of anger.
Anger is not a passive state. Anger is always about action. It either gets us something we want or helps us avoid something we don’t want. Our response to danger might be one of three choices: fight, flight, or freeze. Anger is the fuel that energizes our ‘fight’ response; flight is often driven by fear: of pain, defeat, distress, discomfort, or danger. Our anger may stimulate a rapid response to flee. Our ‘freeze’ response is a state of emotional or physical paralysis where we cannot act at all; we are immobilized by an overwhelming sensory overload. It may be that anger is the only force that can break us out of a freeze to act, either towards the threat (fight) or to escape (flight).
In a positive sense, anger can be protective: for example, the instinctive protective response of a parent or teacher when faced with a threat to a child or loved one. Anger can motivate us to overcome inertia to make positive changes; anger moves us to act, even when the odds are stacked against us; our anger steels our resolve, helps us to overcome fear, and eradicates doubt. Anger can be empowering. Anger may also help in the release of emotional frustrations and resentment; it can be cleansing and cathartic.
On the other side of the coin, uncontrolled anger can be harmful, destructive, and debilitating. If we are blind in our rage, we cannot act coherently, rationally. The destruction may also extend well beyond ourselves. Unbridled anger can become a controlling emotion that overwhelms our natural systems of rationality and locks us into a pattern of negative behaviors that is sometimes more harmful than the triggering event itself. Such anger can become an emotional prison.
Our anger may be foreseeable, arising from someone or something crossing our ‘bottom line’, and the unexpected shocking violation of our world. The ‘bottom-line’ kind of anger arises from a known area of sensitivity, vulnerability, or anticipated threat or offence. The rules are well-known, if only to ourselves, and when a certain set of conditions are met, we respond with anger, often measured and planned in advance.
There is also the explosive, unexpected form of anger that is much harder to anticipate or control. It comes from a deeply embedded place within each of us that once triggered can result in catastrophic consequences. As such, it is the emotional equivalent of a personal ‘natural disaster’, wreaking havoc and changing lives, including our own. The resulting damage may stay with us forever.
Perhaps one other thing to consider for those who like to keep their anger in check is the consequence of suppressed anger. If we bury our anger, it may become a hidden, toxic force that manifests itself in other unwelcome and harmful behaviors, such as bitterness, jealousy, spite, deceit, and revenge. Buried anger is just dormant, not dead, but can be lethal.
On the other hand, an eruption of uncontrolled anger comes at a physical and very personal cost. We have all experienced the unpleasant physical aftereffects of rage: heart palpitations, headache, breathlessness, uncontrollable shivering, convulsions, fatigue, or even catatonic immobility. This is part of a physiological early warning system to remind us that such extreme emotions are harmful.
If you find yourself in an angry frame of mind when reading this, please take a moment and a deep breath; consider how you might use your anger creatively and constructively, without creating harm or more anger. Please be quick to act, but slow to anger. And, in the face of an emotional ‘global warming’, anything we can do to bring down the emotional temperature of humanity at this time is a valuable service to the community.
Peace.
Dr. Malcolm Pritchard
Head of School
