One of the things I’ve had to examine the most for the last few years is anger.  It has been a problem of mine since childhood for reasons I did not understand until last year, but that’s another post.  I started therapy about three years ago, and during one of our earlier sessions, he said, “Anger isn’t an emotion, it’s a behavior.”

I didn’t say so at the time and he may or may not have been able to tell, but my initial internal reaction was to think “bullshit” and, ironically, get angry.  I kept trying to argue with him in my head over the ensuing months, but it didn’t work, which also made me angry.  After a while I was forced to admit he was right and had to ask myself why denying anger is an emotion made me angry.  It was because Angry Me felt invalidated, so I had to figure out why that wasn’t true since I knew that wasn’t what he was trying to say.

After a bit more thought, I realized anger is a defensive reaction that is the product of other emotions.  It’s sort of like gravity isn’t a thing unto itself, it’s the effect of the mass of an object in space.  It’s a way of trying to prevent the original feeling by defending against what’s causing it: sadness, fear, frustration, resentment, etc.  In making that realization, I was able to do what my brain does best: break things down into information pathways.  I was also hit with something else my brain does a lot now: movie quotes, in this case from Star Wars.  I heard Yoda speaking in my head: “Fear is the path to the Dark Side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering.”  I found this funny given my therapist has Yoda quotes on his website.

Yoda’s right, though.  I’ve altered his progression from fear to suffering to include other emotions like anxiety, paranoia, rage, and panic, but it still holds true.  I wrote them all down on a piece of paper and traced pathways between the emotions to see how they were related to one another, stopping to ask another round of “why?”s every time I got stuck.  This is all therapy has been for me, for the most part: an endless series of asking myself “why?”  Why do I behave this way?  Why do I think this way?  Why do I feel this way?  Why do people behave the way they do?  I feel like a 50-year-old toddler sometimes.

Obviously the best way to avoid the whole anger mess is to prevent being fearful, which is way easier said than done for most people, especially if one has a traumatic background.  Fear is part of your flesh and bones, which is why living with trauma can feel like walking on the Dark Side sometimes and why so many of us with trauma wind up there, suffering from addictions, mental health issues, violence, and other problems.  However, I disagree with Yoda’s negative assessment that “forever will it dominate your destiny” once you find yourself on the Path to the Dark Side.  That doesn’t necessarily mean succumbing to the Darkness, it can mean overcoming it and even manipulating it to your own positive uses.

This is what is meant by turning a disadvantage into an advantage, a concept I didn’t understand until the last couple of years.  Those of us damaged by life cannot undo those years or experiences, and yes, to a certain extent, our time spent “on the Dark Side” may technically “dominate [our] destiny”, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.  We are not the people we are today without the experiences that made us, and that includes the bad ones.  All that shit can be transformed into something positive and useful, like composting manure into fertilizer.  I’m not saying it’s not nasty and smelly work, but it’s rewarding.

Movies have stepped in to help with the fear as well, in the form of the Littany Against Fear from Dune.  While the recent release has made more people aware of it, I’ve been familiar with it since the release of the David Lynch version of Dune in the 1980s.  In light of the way fear causes divisions within my psyche, I’ve slightly edited it for my own purposes.  Fear isn’t just the mind-killer: it’s the soul splitter.  As I observed in a journal entry some time back, “fear splits me into facets”.  It’s a gradual process, like putting more and more pressure on a pane of glass and watching it crack progressively until it finally shatters.  Now I know the telltale sounds, sights, and signs of a cracking pane of psychic glass and take measures to get the pressure off in whatever form it’s taking, and sometimes that means doing something quiet and repeating the Littany Against Fear a few times.  Fortunately psychic glass heals itself, given enough time alone.

And no, my therapist wasn’t trying to invalidate my anger, he was trying to get me to see it’s a cover for other things that have been invalidated by others throughout my life.  Hence the anger.  It’s the armor and sword I wanted for past battles but didn’t have, just in case it happens again.  One has to be careful using anger in such a way, though.  After a while, the armor fuses to the skin and the hand becomes unable to put the sword away, not unless you put yourself through the psychic alchemical process necessary to free yourself of them.  Even then growing new skin and retraining muscles takes a while and can be painful, like recovering from a burn.

Which is what anger does: it burns and smolders from the inside, consuming everything it touches.  There’s a Buddhist saying that holding onto anger is like holding onto a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at someone else: you’re the one who gets burned.  And speaking from experience, objects thrown in anger rarely hit their target.  It’s an exercise in futility.  The only way to stop the burn is by acknowledging why you’re holding that hot coal and giving it proper validation.  After a while with the right attention you find yourself saying, “I don’t need to be angry about that anymore.”  And another coal gets dropped back into the fire pit, or sometimes pitched over a figurative cliff in my case.

I think I’ve dropped a couple of hundred hot coals over the last few years and have had to visualize healing my burned “inner hands” more than a few times.  Fortunately psychic skin regenerates a lot faster than physical skin.  Now I’m learning the next lesson: not picking up the coal in the first place, which is hard.  To get angry about something is in my subconscious programming.  It’s how the people I grew up around behaved, and despite hating it, I found myself repeating it as an adult.  Now that I know what I know about subconscious programming, I can stop gripping hot coals with the intention of burning myself, which frees up a lot of energy and focus for concentrating on the real problem, whatever it is.  In doing so, I realize that very often my anger stems from a desire to do something about whatever is bothering me, and the more things there are in my life that I can’t control that bother me, the angrier I get.  This is when I practice a combination of acceptance, if possible, and if not, retreat.  In other words, picking my battles (“no, that’s still too many, put some back”).

To make Yoda’s “Path to the Dark Side” more personally relevant, I’ve edited it to include the word “self” in front of the words and added the element of failure: self-fear leads to self-failure, which leads to self-anger, which leads to self-hatred, which leads to personal suffering.  Lack of confidence from a traumatic childhood means I fear my talents and strengths, and sometimes don’t even know what they are, which means I’ve failed at many things in life, which has made me angry about and at many things, including myself, which turned into self-loathing over time, which is definitely a state of suffering that leads to even more suffering.  Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to elements of Buddhism, the purpose of which is the alleviation of suffering.

I’m still angry, but not like I used to be.  Instead of always being right on the edge of blowing up, sometimes without knowing it, I can now feel the first stirrings of anger rising and do something about it before it turns into a problem.  This often means just sitting quietly until it passes, non-judgmentally allowing my mind to spew until it’s done.  I often pass into calmness without realizing it, then ask myself, “what was I so angry about?”, because sometimes I don’t even remember, anger is that much of an automatic reaction for me.  I’m still working on that part, the knee-jerk anger response, as well as a phenomenon that Buddhism calls “beating yourself with a stick for beating yourself with a stick”.  That is, getting angry at myself for being angry, which is an incredibly dumb hole to fall into and one that is impossible to escape from without suspension of negative judgment.

I can slowly feel the old angry neural pathways in my brain gradually giving way to the newer, kinder ones.  Right now they coexist, so sometimes I wind up flipping back and forth between the two mindsets, and those aren’t good days.  Eventually, though, I yank the thread of my thoughts and feelings out of the old rut and into the new groove, and then try to keep it there to deepen the track.  It’s like watching water run over sandstone, slowly carving the rock away to make a new channel, and requiring about as much patience.  Emotions are equated with the element of Water in archetypal symbolism, so I find this metaphor fitting, as is associating anger with Fire, Water’s archetypal opposite.  While Fire can be destructive, it can also be creative, and coupled with Water’s ability to be the most powerful transformative and life-giving force on the planet, I can lay totally new psychic ground where the Path to the Dark Side does not exist and I don’t have to repeat the Littany Against Fear nearly as often.