y to approach our problems. Eckhart Tolle said “Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.” Marshall Rosenberg said “Violence in any form is a tragic expression of unmet needs.” Pain must be heard, felt, respected, then healed. Unmet needs must be met somehow. This is how to diffuse anger – not denial in ourselves or others.
Yet sometimes anger doesn’t need to be diffused, it needs to be transmuted – into action. Or anger needs to transmute another emotion, like fear. I recently saw a Facebook post from a younger female acquaintance who was understandably upset by (yet another) man groping her at a busstop. She expressed her profound fear and devastation at this repeated behavior in men around her. I was struck not only by her lack of anger, but the lack of anger of almost everyone who responded (only offering empathy and concern). It makes me super angry to witness one more young woman so programmed to see herself as powerless that her response to a man grabbing her in public is fear and running away instead of baring her teeth, fiercely snarling NO in his face and kneeing him several times in the groin until he falls down. It makes me super angry that none of the Facebook bystanders (except me) urged her to conquer her fear, learn to defend herself, and kick the shit out of the next a-hole who dares to invade her space.
Fear comes when we see ourselves as less powerful than the other. This is often an illusion of our powerlessness, or our limited read of where we stand in the Power Over paradigm. Having, feeling, and expressing anger is a result of taking a stand for our worth; of owning our power. Anger is a sign of awakening self-love. It’s a remembering of self-respect.
We need the self-loving force of anger to drive change not just in our individual lives, but as a collective. Writer Courtney Martin recently said “one of the things I feel like my parents really entrusted me with was this idea that you should trust your own outrage. And being able to honor that anger, to me, is one of the most important muscles of a rebel.” We can be a rebel in our own lives, or a rebel in the world. Or both. The value of anger is its power as a righteous catalyst for individual and collective Change. Let’s not dishonor it.
So what are you angry about? And what are you going to do about it?