Good guys are typically resistant to feeling anger in any form. Indeed, though we watch enough violence on TV and in the movies that the producers keep making them, as a society we are not much in favor of expressions of anger. But wait. Let’s think about that a moment. Why would a society that perpetuates violence in TV and movies be against anger? The reason we like it so much on TV and movies is because we don’t like it in our real lives. TV and movies allow for expression of these intense emotions that our society insists we must repress. So we get to express them vicariously through the voices of actors and the action scenes. Then we toddle off to bed and wake up the next morning repressing and repressing and repressing.
Reality TV is also overflowing with all manner of passive-aggressive sarcasm, and we watch it so much that they keep producing it—ad nauseam. We do that because we want to pretend that we don’t have lives like that, that we aren’t passive-aggressive. All the while we are memorizing that sarcasm to use the next time he says that thing he says, or she does that thing she does.
TV and movies get to do for us what we will not allow ourselves to do—
unless it piles up so high that we feel compelled to do it. We live in a society that teaches us to repress our emotions, particularly anger. But we need some place to put the energy that we repress, because it has an energy and is still bouncing around inside of us waiting for an opportunity to express. So, repression will ultimately mean that whatever we have repressed will come out later in some other way that isn’t pretty.
We are a duplicitous society. We are split off from the conscious awareness of what we are up to in so many ways that we look pretty sick to a healthy outsider (or insider). Just so, we are duplicitous with anger—perpetuating a belief that anger is wrong, all the while encouraging it in various ways.
Violence is the uppermost register of repressed anger. We get violent because we have repressed a lot of anger for a long time. Then one day someone drops the proverbial straw, and without our permission, the rage comes out of us like a tsunami. We need to begin to understand that like every other emotion, anger is not meant to be repressed. Rather it brings a message to us, for us, and about us.
For the good guy anger is particularly pernicious. It is thought to be the ultimate in badness. A person cannot consider herself to be good if she gets angry. Anger means that one is selfishly thinking only of her own needs and wants. No, the good-guy identity is made up of sacrifice, and therefore cannot be made to be angry.
So when the good guy gets angry, he typically represses quickly. So quickly that he doesn’t even allow himself to believe that he ever was angry—even for a split second. If it lasts longer than that, the good guy begins to feel very guilty, ashamed, and unworthy. If the good guy goes so far as to actually express the anger, he then is obligated to take it all back. “I didn’t mean it, please forgive me.” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Then, of course, all the truths that were told in anger are washed away with another tsunami of repentance.
Anger Is an I AM Statement from the Soul
While the specific message of a particular anger may be more distinctive, in general anger says, “I am here, I am real, and I matter.” That message is so profound that when we really get it all the way down to the marrow of our bones, we become more real in response to it. If we get that message before talking to anyone else about our anger, or acting on the anger, the anger becomes an empowering force behind the words and actions we later choose. We are much more likely to be taken seriously when we receive and live into this message before talking to anyone else about how angry we are.
“I am here, I am real, and I matter” are singularly the most important messages a good guy can hear. The good guy is trying her best to avoid making her presence known. She is to exist only for others. She isn’t a real person, she’s an object for others to use. And she doesn’t matter, not even to herself. Anger, when it is used well, is an excellent remedy for the good-guy identity.
George is a good guy who frequently takes on the burdens of others at work. He does all of his coworker’s work because the coworker gabs on the phone to others and spends time standing in the boss’s doorway talking to the boss about golf. But the work has got to get done, and George is just the man to do it. He feels proud of himself in one way, but also carries a low-grade level of irritation around on his shoulders—all day, every day. One day his irritation reaches to a level of consciousness. He becomes more aware that he is angry at Tom, the lazy coworker.
At first he wants to talk to Tom and give him a piece of his mind, but the guilt starts rising even at the thought of that. He might spend several restless nights trying to get his anger to go away, trying to understand why Tom does that, fantasizing what he’d like to say to Tom, then trying again to make his anger go away. One day after work he decides he’s going to meditate on his anger. He starts at first trying to think pleasant thoughts that will make the anger go away. But then the anger seems to get stronger. It is trying to get his attention. So, he decides to be mindful of the anger and let it rise and fall of its own accord while he watches it.
Suddenly he remembers his brother, who used to get all the positive attention from his father. His brother used to do the same thing Tom does—he’d leave all of the work of cleaning up the room to George, while schmoozing with Dad. Ah, that’s why this got to him so badly. It reminded him of some old unresolved anger at his brother. George has been in therapy for a while, so he understands that his brother was just part of the problem. He understands the feeling that he was basically invisible to everyone in his family, except when they needed him to do something for them.
But his anger said, “I AM, I am here, I am real, and I matter.” So that got him to thinking about his job, and how much he hated it anyway. One of the reasons he was so mad at Tom was because he was having to do more of the tasks of accounts payable, which he already hated doing. He felt bad about hating his job this way; this was food on the table, right?
George had been not mattering to himself and hadn’t really been present in his own life. All he’d done with his career was survive. His anger was just about to save him from survival so that he might begin to really live. He began to realize, as he sat and meditated, that he’d always wanted to work with people, specifically he wanted to work in human resources. When he got through meditating, he started looking online for some schools in which he could get a degree in human resources.
Things don’t usually get that clear that fast, but they can. And in George’s case, not only did he understand that his anger was triggered because he was still carrying some old unresolved emotions about his childhood, but he also realized that he was not taking himself any more seriously than his family did. In this case, George could go on to change his entire life now because he allowed himself to feel the anger.
Anger Reminds Us That We Exist
Anger is our friend. It is our friend because when we forget, it comes up to remind us that we exist, that we are real, that we are here in the room with others by whom we wish to be seen and heard, and that we matter. We have a primal need to exist, to be real, to be here, and to matter to ourselves. That is true for all of us. For the good guy, anger could literally be a salvation.
Sarah has lived in the good-guy identity all of her life. She believes that she is becoming a better person the more she sacrifices for and helps others. She feels that it is selfish to think about herself, to want for herself, to say no to others who need her. But lately she has started to think of herself as a very selfish person, because she has been getting angry at her narcissistic mother (as stated earlier, many good guys are raised by people who are similarly personality disordered). Narcissistic parents need the child to worship them, to take care of them, to put them first above all else, to make them happy and proud, to carry their moods and respond to these moods with healing and help, to read their minds and give them what is desired without any need for asking. The child of the narcissist learns how to intuit the needs and wishes of the parent, to serve and to walk on eggshells around the potential for a temper tantrum or a shut-out in which the parent refuses to speak to the child, or other more covert punishments.
Sarah’s childhood fits this pattern perfectly. Her mother controls her every move. Even when her mother is not around, she feels that somehow her mother will find out about what she is doing and be ashamed of her. Deep down Sarah aches to have her mother’s approval and lives her life in a fantasy that one day she will get it.
But lately she’s beginning to see that her mother blames her for things that she herself has done. She sees that other siblings were able to get help from the mother, but when Sarah was literally starving while she made sure her siblings were fed, the mother refused outright to help her, saying, “I raised you to be independent.” There are several other things that she’s begun to see about her mother, because her anger has finally allowed her to see these things. The anger has come up to say, “I AM, I am here, I am real, and I matter.”
Of course, these also sound like very selfish messages to Sarah, and she feels enormous guilt for having these feelings. She’s begun to feel so tremendously ashamed of herself for these feelings that she has considered killing herself. So she goes to therapy to see if the therapist can make the anger go away. The conflict between anger and guilt rages in the safety of the therapeutic alliance and the messages of each become clearer and clearer until she begins to see that the guilt is saying, “I AM not, I should not really be here, I can’t allow myself to be real for that would be wrong, and I don’t really matter to me or to anyone else.” She also begins to understand that the anger is saying just the opposite.
Now she knows where the problem is. The problem all along has been that she’s been taught not to exist so that only her mother exists. She has allowed her mother to be the only presence in her life. And while she finds it very difficult at first, she begins to assert herself with her mother. Her mother becomes more demanding at first, pitches more temper tantrums, and tries to get her daughter to come back to the empty fold.
But Sarah has found a peaceful truth inside of herself, and she is not going to give up, because anger is an energy that must be heard and authenticated. Anger is saving her life. Eventually Sarah is able to set herself free from her mother’s demands so she is now able to have the partner, job, and hobbies that she prefers, rather than choosing those of which she thinks her mother will approve, or which are selected because they remind her of her unresolved issues with her mother. As a result, her mother is now given responsibility for her own life. She may simply find someone else to use or, given this chance, she might make choices that allow her to awaken as well.
The voice of anger cannot be forever forced underground. I see many clients who, because they can no longer hide anger from themselves, come to therapy. When they get there, of course, they want me to help them make the anger go away—because that’s what we’ve all been taught to do with anger. But alas, I will not help them to get rid of it. I will, however, help them to hear it and hear it well. If they are living in the good-guy identity, hearing the voice of their anger might be the thing that begins to move them out of the good-guy identity and into the authentic Self.