Among Good People dedicated to social justice, progressive causes and personal growth, there is often a high value placed on self-awareness and authentic expression. Being fully present, having feelings and being transparent about one’s experience and perspective are encouraged – at least that’s the intent. However, I often find that the value of authentic expression and feelings extends only throughout the territory of “positive emotions” like love, joy, connection, harmony, compassion, and even grief. “Negative” emotions – shame, envy, contempt, anger – aren’t as welcome. Especially anger.
Anger seems to especially unnerve and threaten good-hearted, progressive people. It’s often treated as an emotion that’s unsuitable for “evolved” people, who should transcend such “inferior” feelings. Maybe it’s because anger typically occurs in the belly and deep torso – long considered an inferior part of the body – instead of the chest or head. Maybe it’s because racial, cultural, class, and gender dynamics (White, middle-to-upper class, female) and these groups’ corresponding aversion to anger pervades many social justice, progressive, and personal growth communities. Maybe it’s just plain old fear.
This aversion to anger is not serving us, because anger serves us. Anger is not an inferior, or even “negative” emotion. Like all emotions, it gives us valuable information about our experience; about our interpretation of what’s going on around us. Anger lets us know we’re experiencing disrespect or the violation of a boundary. As a highly social species, expressed anger has helped humans keep each other in check for tens of thousands of years by showing displeasure with those who violate social norms essential to our survival. It’s helped us maintain cohesive communities and survive multiple threats to our existence as a species.
Anger is power. It’s red. It’s heat. Anger is movement and sound. Anger is a force for change, a force of strength. It’s a “catalyst for necessary destruction, making way for rebirth and renewal.”
Anger is power.
This might be why Good People fear anger. We fear power.
Good People often eschew power. We’ve seen individuals with power abuse and violate other individuals in the home and in the streets. We’ve witnessed people with power disrespecting and belittling other people at work. We’ve experienced institutions and companies with power cheating and decimating entire groups of people in society. We’ve witnessed nations and ethnic groups with power invade and murder other nations and ethnic groups.
So we reject power as harmful, even evil. This is a mistake. Power isn’t the problem, it’s one form of power that’s the problem: Power Over. While there’s evidence that merely possessing Power Over – even temporarily and in laboratory settings – triggers bad behavior in humans I maintain that the real problem is abuse of Power Over, intentional or not. Power is merely a tool or resource.
Also, other forms of power exist, which aren’t only useful, they’re essential to creating change and a world that works better for everyone. In his enlightening work with The Co-Intelligence Institute, Tom Atlee explores three other types of power besides Power Over: Power With, Power From Within, and Power As. He also talks quite a bit about Wholesome Power. This is the kind of expansive thinking Good People should adopt and embody. Thinking of power in limited terms as only one form – which is inherently evil – deprives Good People of one of the engines of much-needed (capital C) Change.
I define power as “the ability to create a result.” Results are desperately needed. Good People who are trapped in Overheartedness aren’t moving us forward. Those who live only in peace, love and kindness aren’t moving us forward. In his excellent book Power and Love, Adam Kahane describes the importance of both Power and Love to move change – that to wield only one is to walk with only one leg. Drawing on Paul Tillich, Kahane defines power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity” and love 