The other day I rushed to get to an appointment on time and got stuck behind an old person creeping along at 10 miles an hour below the posted speed limit. There was no place to pass and no alternative route to take, he was going to make me late. Anger built up in my body before I thought to call it that. I had already been tense over getting to my appointment on time, but my tension increased once I pulled up behind the slowpoke. My hands clenched the steering wheel tighter, my jaw set hard, my teeth clenched, my eyes drilled into the back of the offending vehicle. If I had seen myself, I would have seen myself turning red.
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I flashed my lights, hoping he would take the hint, pull over, and let me pass; but he wasn’t paying attention. Finally, I erupted. A stream of curse words and invectives came pouring out of my mouth. I pounded the steering wheel and seriously contemplated tailgating and blowing on my horn to get him out of the way.
I became angry, rather than just tense, the moment I acquired a sense of righteousness. I had a good reason to go the speed limit to get to my appointment. Indeed, it was so vital that I got there on time, I might have tried to justify speeding. Moreover, the geezer was wrong to drive so slowly, creeping down the road without giving a thought to whether anyone behind him needed to get somewhere on time. Never mind that he may have been driving as quickly as he could, given his elderly reaction times. If that was the case, then as far as I was concerned, he was violating another rule: that when you get too old to drive, you have no business driving.
Once I realized I was angry, like any good therapist, I did what I recommend my clients do. I examined whether my grievance was reasonable. I still thought it was, but not to the extremity I had taken it. That’s the moment my anger was downgraded to frustration. I still wanted to go faster and the man was still in the way, but my cause was not so righteous. He had the right to go as slow as he thought he needed to, and I had no right to go as fast as I wanted. It only took a second before I reframed my frustration from being frustrated with him to being frustrated because I was trying to make it to an appointment on time when it was impossible. That took me to a reluctantly blissful state of acceptance.
The thing that makes anger anger, and not other feelings such as fear, hurt, grief, or anxiety, is the sense that a wrong has been committed. Someone somewhere failed to follow the rules of civil society.
This sense of righteousness drives anger forward and gives it its purpose. Anger is a prosecuting attorney, a cop walking a beat, ready to bring malefactors to heel. You can see how anger can be useful, in that it protects the social contract from being trampled upon and shredded, but that’s only if it’s righteous.
I think the reason road rage is so prevalent is because we all depend on each other to follow the rules of the road, both those imposed by statute and the unwritten rules of conduct. It’s impossible for the actual police to enforce everything that happens on every road all the time, so each driver appoints himself constable. The alternative is multi-car pileups, confusion, and mayhem.
Why is it then that not everybody is prone to road rage? For that matter, everyone must feel aggrieved quite often, why then do some people have more problems with anger than others? I think it has a little to do with the feeling itself and a great deal to do with a person’s power, status, and privilege in society. For as long as people have been around, some have been more powerful than the rest, and they are the ones who get to be angry.
Reframing a grievance is something an individual can do in a moment, as I did behind the wheel. But societies do it too, just more slowly. And one of the most significant reframings of the last century has been about anger itself; specifically, about who is allowed to have it.
For most of recorded history, the permission to express anger publicly and have it taken seriously was held by those who already held power: the king, the patriarch, or the conqueror. Anger from below was suppressed, pathologized, criminalized. The woman who raged at her husband’s infidelity was hysterical. The laborer who raged at the factory owner’s exploitation was a dangerous anarchist. The colonized people who raged at their colonizers were savages. In each case, the anger was real and pointed at genuine injustice, and in each case, the culture found a way to call it a symptom rather than a signal.
But, since then, things have gone topsy-turvy.
The feminist movement, the civil rights movement, post-colonial literature and thought, all of these have argued that the suppression of certain people’s anger was itself a form of violence. Their argument was not that anger is always right, but that the old hierarchy of whose anger counts was wrong. These movements have had an impact. We are changing the rules about whose anger is permitted. People compete for the attribution of victimhood because, today it gives their anger some authority.
In some circles, the very people who used to have the right to be angry have seen their right revoked. In the last generation, an older White man’s anger would have been respected, today he’s seen as a crank yelling at kids to get off his lawn. The White woman whose power used to be second only to the White Man, today is dismissed as shrill. They may have a legitimate grievance or an unreasonable expectation based on privilege but either way, telling a person that their feelings don’t count is not a therapeutic intervention. It is the same move that has always been used to control the people you don’t want to hear from.
I have a question I sometimes ask when a client has a lot of uncontrolled anger. I ask them to put their grievances to the biker test. It goes like this: if a mean-looking outlaw biker treated you poorly, would you show any anger to him? People usually say no. Most grievances, no matter how serious, do not pass the biker test. No matter how transgressive the biker could be, they wouldn’t say anything, because he’d kick their ass. This outcome of the biker test reveals that the person with an anger management problem can manage their anger just fine when they need to. The only time it comes out is when they find someone they can bully.
The only people who would show anger to an outlaw biker would be someone so psychotic they don’t know what they’re doing, another biker, or someone who possesses power greater than the biker. Even a pale-faced magistrate can wield the power of grievance over the biker, if he has on his black robe and the apparatus of the state at his back.
An outlaw biker can get angry all he wants, provided he’s not up against the head biker or a gavel wielding magistrate. Indeed, that’s one of the benefits of being an outlaw biker. They put on the leather, wear the chains, and roar down the highway with a gang of equally terrifying buddies so that they can vent their spleen toward society and break the skulls of whoever comes along.
I have seen an outlaw biker or two in my office over the years, and others like them, sent to me for what’s called anger management, but is actually bald-faced bullying. These clients usually perceive that although I am barely more intimidating than the pale-faced magistrate, I, with my professional license and connection to their probation officer, also have the apparatus of the state behind me. This gives me a chance to speak to them more frankly than others.
I start off by pointing out where they are on the social pecking order, in an attempt to persuade them that randomly cracking heads is not in their best interest, now that the magistrate, his probation officer, and I are on to them. If needed, we go through all the unwritten social rules about anger: who gets to have it, how it can be shown, and whether it’s anger is in the first place. Once we have that established, perhaps we can get into the grievance that got them going. When I succeed in that, I find that under the hard, tough guy there is inevitably a scared little boy, hurting from all the injuries done to him when he could do nothing about it.
I once worked in a program that attempted to treat perpetrators of domestic violence. In that program, we were supposed to teach them to recognize that whenever they employed coercion, threats, intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, minimizing, denying, or blaming, and using children, male privilege, and economic abuse towards their partners, they were actually wielding power and control. This is usually illustrated by a wheel, with the words, power and control in the middle and all its methods as spokes.
The designers of the program were proud of their power and control wheel, but I thought it was horribly misguided. If the power and control wheel taught those guys anything, it encouraged them to employ coercion, threats, intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, minimizing, denying, or blaming, and using children, male privilege, and economic abuse to gain power and control. I took the illustration, painted it yellow, scratched out power and control in the center, and wrote in weakness and unmanageability, instead.
Here’s why. Anger was not a sign of their strength, it was a sign of their powerlessness. The truly strong man, I told them, takes note of his anger and uses something other than violence, coercion, and intimidation to affirm his rights. I liked to say that anger is not the problem, it’s what you do with it. This made quite an impression on them, for, in their way of thinking, I was calling them cowards; but I knew about the scared little boy in each of them.
I would then compare anger and rage to cocaine, a drug many of them knew quite well. Cocaine is just powered rage, except rage is better. You don’t need to go into a bad neighborhood to score it. All you need to do is reach into your stash of resentments and take another hit. It’ll make you feel powerful and forget you were ever hurt. However, there are consequences, like having to go to a domestic violence offender’s group and listen to a guy like me tell you how pathetic you are.
I’m lucky I got out of there alive.
But is it true? Is anger just a drug we take when we don’t want to feel powerless? What about the CEO berating and humiliating his subordinates, or a general beating up a soldier for being too scared to fight, or a cop kneeling on a man in the street until he suffocates to death, or, for that matter, a jealous and wrathful God smiting all those who cross him? Are they weak too?
Maybe. We never know how they feel in their hearts, despite the way they look to us from the outside. In the same way that the biker puts on his regalia of intimidation to hide the scared little boy, so too could the CEO, the general, and the cop be drawn to their very professions so that they can wield their anger with relative freedom.
Also, the CEO, for all his trappings of power, is still powerless over the vagaries of the business cycle and even the actions of those who report to him. The general depends on those same terrified soldiers for his own defense. And the cop kneeling on the man in the street is mindful of the fact that he’s not in his own neighborhood and an entire community can turn on him in a minute. Fear brings out the worst in anyone, no matter how powerful they are.
What then is the Old Testament God’s excuse for being angry? I would not pretend to know the private thoughts of God. For all I know, He has a scared little child deep within his soul, but I do know that sometimes people will act angry when they are not actually angry. Anger is a performance.
To illustrate this, let me tell you the story about an encounter I had with a bull.
I used to have a part-time job at a livestock auction, driving cattle in and out of pens according to whomever had bought them. One day, someone let a bull into a pen not realizing I was there first, with no exit besides the gate the bull was blocking. This was the scariest bull I had ever seen outside of a cartoon. He was jet black and had red eyes, a ring through his nose, and pointy horns he was planning on putting into my guts. He had just been exerting himself and steam rose off him. I was not angry with the bull because he had not done anything to me, I was terrified and knew my fear could not protect me as well as the appearance of anger. So I made out like I was furious. I raised the cane I used to drive the cattle and charged directly at him, shouting and striking him between those pointy horns with so much force I broke the cane. This was a masterful performance of anger that could have earned me an Academy Award, but it did not need to. All I needed to do was intimidate the bull, and that is exactly what it did. He stepped aside, and I got out of there with a story to tell.
Similarly, a CEO who can fire people doesn’t need to rage; the general, who can execute skedaddlers by firing squad, doesn’t need to beat them up; and the cop who is already arresting him, doesn’t need to kill the man in his custody; but they’ll do so anyway, if only to warn the rest that they’re crazy sons-of-bitches. Performed anger can be a tool of domination, as much as a confession of helplessness.
In fact, there may be no such thing as unperformed anger. Performance is the whole point of it; whether the audience is a roomful of terrified subordinates, a slow driver who can’t hear you, or just yourself, in the small hours, rehearsing grievances no one else will ever witness. Anger needs a witness. Even when you are that witness, you are performing for someone: the self you are trying to convince that you are not afraid.
Fortunately, the bull didn’t know about any of this. He just moved aside.
That’s the moment my anger was downgraded to frustration... I reframed my frustration... James Gross, “Antecedent- and Response-Focused Emotion Regulation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998 — the foundational paper on cognitive reappraisal. (Fun coincidence: Gross’s own paper opens with “What happens when we get so angry with an erratic driver” as its motivating example.)
The thing that makes anger anger… Aristotle’s own definition, from the Rhetoric (Book II): anger as “a desire, accompanied by pain, for a perceived revenge, on account of a perceived slight.”
…the permission to express anger publicly... Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981, collected in Sister Outsider, 1984) is the clearest primary-source statement of this exact argument. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her (2018) is the accessible general-reader book behind the broader historical claim.
This outcome of the biker test… Larissa Tiedens, in “Anger and Advancement Versus Sadness and Subjugation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001 says people confer more status on those who express anger than sadness, and anger reads as competence, which is consistent with anger getting selectively aimed at people who can’t retaliate.
There may be no such thing as unperformed anger... This is Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of the self, found in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
