Home » Dorms » Student Lounge

In Your Anger

Fight Club

Last Saturday night found me arguing heatedly with my friend Jeff.¹ I'll spare you the details (except to say that we were arguing about welfare — an issue about which we both have very strong feelings) because I'm not very proud of myself. Don't be like me, kids: I waged a juvenile and only loosely coherent fight. I'm pretty sure I implied that he was a racist, and I'm positive I said, "You're just being a jerk" at least twice — which everyone knows is an airtight argument. In my defense, he was also fighting dirty.

But the larger, more important way in which you shouldn't be like me is that I could have prevented this. Jeff had made comments in the past that made me mad on a social-issues level, and on a deeper level, I felt that he had failed to listen to me and show as much concern for me as I'd wanted during a recent semi-trauma in my life. But I didn't deal with my anger properly, and it continued to lurk in my psyche, growing like a baby shark. And so, that Saturday, it was late and I was tired and my nerves were a little worn from the aforementioned trauma, and everything negative in our relationship came rushing to the surface in one loud moment. Like a giant pimple.

In Your Anger Do Not Sin

Anger is a weird emotion. It has a way of bringing with it other emotions — sadness, guilt, fear. It feels out of control, never very spiritual. I knew this girl in college who once said to me, "Lately I've been doing really well spiritually. I can tell because I haven't gotten angry in a while." And I remember thinking this sounded a little crazy, like being spiritual meant being cocooned, impervious to the stresses of life. This brought up the obvious question, to which the answer has traditionally been "no": Is anger a sin?

When my priest explained to my catechism class how to approach the discipline of confession, he mentioned anger, how those flashes of anger we feel toward others indicate something in our own lives that needs confessing and cleansing.

This unnerved me a little, because I was afraid he meant that anger is inherently sinful. Later, though, he revisited the topic, explaining that anger is a natural response to injustice, that to recognize our anger about the things that hurt us is simply to be honest with ourselves and with God.

And so, if I had to articulate Father George's theology of anger, I would say that anger is not in itself a sin; but it probably indicates something dark in our hearts that needs to be examined and brought into the light, to be set free.

This makes sense to me in light of the famous Ephesians 4:26 and its tie-in verse, Psalm 4:4: "In your anger do not sin; when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent." We need to be careful with anger because it opens the door for us to spread hurt and sin; feeling angry is an occasion to examine our hearts and ask for God's presence and wisdom there.

In All Practicality

So anger should lead us to a pause in which we can look for God's healing. But it's obvious that we need to do more than reflect; managing anger means practically managing the conflict at hand.

Another famous "anger" verse, Matthew 5:23–24, reminds us that God cares about our relationships and that if we've hurt someone, we need to make the first move toward reconciliation. I think another lesson offered by this passage is that direct is much better than indirect — reconciliation is much better than passive, subconscious mini-revenge (which, let's face it, we're all capable of when we let ourselves stew over offenses small and large).

You know the rules of expressing anger: lots of "I" statements rather than "you" statements — "I get upset when you say bad things about Patrick Dempsey" over "You're just being a jerk." Listen to the other person's response. Never use aggressive language. There's also something in my oral communications textbook about the value of a cooling-off period before entering into a confrontation.

Especially if the person to whom you're communicating your anger is of the "difficult" variety, psychologist John Townsend advises would-be confronters to fix their mindset ahead of time: When we're in a conflicted relationship, we need to make up our minds beforehand that we are "for" the other person, that we want what's best for them and for the relationship.² That doesn't mean accommodating hurtful behavior. But it does mean acting out of diligent love and using language that respects the other person.

When defusing anger and conflict, there's just no substitute for gentleness.

A Word about Online Debating

You know it's true: Nothing gets angrier than a debate that ventures toward the political or ideological. And nowhere is the potential vitriol of an ideological debate more evident than in online message boards. (Including the Coffee Shop, perhaps? Never.)

I think this is partly because we don't quite know how to communicate about big ideas. When discussing global warming or poverty, the only language we know how to use is debate-team language. And so lots of our online posts look like detached, impersonal, unfriendly polemics, except when they become personal and seek to inform another person that he or she is insufficiently educated/of the devil/an obvious recipient of lobotomy surgery.³

Not too long ago, I left a post on an online article, and the comment after mine concluded with, "Nice try, Jessica, but you need to go back to history class." Oh, the rage, dear readers — the rage. I wanted to claw his e-face off.

Later, the same poster said something like, "I know I get really passionate, but it's only because I care about God's Word" blah blah blah. This guy had been habitually condescending, arrogant and outright rude, and that made me think he cared more about his own victory than about adhering to God's Word amid the questions and ideas at hand.

And lots of us — myself included — are thusly guilty. When we debate online, we easily get caught up in the competition; our discussion becomes about thrashing other people, subjecting them and their ideas to the ridicule of virtual spectators.

This is wrong. I think we all know it's wrong, and yet it's so very easy to do. And since the only way I've found to abate ideological rage is to express it, I think the key is to take advantage of one of the benefits of online interaction: the opportunity to edit. It's great to articulate your beliefs; it's better to do so in a way that promotes the kind of clear thinking that no one possesses when the gloves come off. Besides that, conciliatory statements seem to be more effective than harsh, belligerent ones. Besides that, it is, in fact, possible that the other person does actually know what they're talking about. It's a slim possibility, to be sure, but a possibility nonetheless.

If we would only pause to reread our posts as if they were written directly to us, I think we'd be well on our way to saner, more effective online debating.

Carry on, posters.

Healing Anger

My fight with Jeff got me thinking about dissatisfaction with relationships — how the fight and the preceding days and the aftermath all made me feel un-looked-out-for. And I remembered that all of us are fighting against selfishness. I remembered the times I caught myself not truly listening to a friend; I remembered the conversations with my roommate in which I changed the subject back to me two or three times.

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

What are some of the most effective ways you've found to handle your anger?

Join the discussion!

We need to find healthy channels for our anger before it hurt us and others. And the healthiest channels are the ones that cultivate an environment of selflessness, of caring for each other and bearing each other's burdens.