Handling your anger the awesome way

There is noth­ing on this world as enlight­en­ing as irra­tional, petty hatred.

Noth­ing as puri­fy­ing and renew­ing and cer­tainly there’s noth­ing as fun.

Of course, I’m not talk­ing about hatred on a large scale — like Hitler hated Jew­ish people and hugs or Richard Dawkins hates God. That kind of hatred is all encom­passing and blind­ing. It’s not good. Like with most things it pays to, like the French say (although I’ve yet to hear an actual French per­son say this and sus­pect that it’s use may just be a myth) to carry out ‘everything in moderation’.

This espe­cially applies to hatred.

It doesn’t pay to become car­ried away with any­thing — not in the long term.

That aside, hatred, like I said, is a very good thing to do occa­sion­ally. The Jedi weren’t wrong when they decided the path to the dark side began with fear and anger before lead­ing nicely to hatred. They were just bor­ing, hacky and a bit like one dimen­sional cut price Buddhists without the shaved heads or the con­sist­ency of belief.

Where Yoda got it wrong is that anger is good for you — as human beings born with the capa­city for what we lim­itedly call ‘good and evil’ it’s only healthy to express both these sides of ourselves.

Con­stantly bat­ter­ing down your own hate­ful, spite­ful impulses and stamp­ing what I like to think of as ‘your own bet­ter judge­ment’ firmly under the car­pet in order to be good and kind to every­one, regard­less of whether they deserve it or not, can only be destruct­ive after a while. All your bad feel­ings and pent up rage have to go some­where. Every per­son needs an emer­gency pres­sure release mech­an­ism to dump some of the bad feel­ing before it pois­ons you blood and turns your brain to tumours.

Some people beat their wives or part­ners. Some people drink too much and then start fights with any­thing that looks at them, up to and includ­ing inan­im­ate objects and house­hold pets.

These meth­ods and sev­eral other aggress­ive, viol­ent and stu­pid cop­ing mech­an­isms I could name but lack the inclin­a­tion to, are bad ideas.

While I’m talk­ing to your here about enjoy­ing your hatred and anger more I am in no way con­don­ing the prac­tice of any­thing that makes either your­self or more import­antly, other people miser­able. The name for a per­son who does this is a ‘total fuck­ing douchebag’. This sort of per­son enjoys noth­ing what so ever in life as the sound of their own voice and the misery of oth­ers. They don’t enjoy their own anger at all — rather they stock pile it like a cur­rency and sit rot­ting atop their grubby little pile of gripes and reproach like great bale­ful eyed, crabby dragons. No-one wants to be this per­son. And no-one else wants to be near them.

Then there are the people who con­cen­trate all their anger and hatred inward, focus­ing on them­selves. The things that hap­pen, the every­day annoy­ances — from the quibbles between friends to the scream­ing matched with part­ners — all of these, and in fact everything wrong ever plus some inven­ted wrongs for good meas­ure are their own fault. Respons­ib­il­ity for every wrong thing that hap­pens, pos­sibly through­out the galaxy, lies firmly on their shoulders.

Quite obvi­ously and simply they hate them­selves and don’t know how to stop. Every wak­ing moment of their lives becomes another thing to add to the list of reas­ons they deserve to feel hate­ful. They did some­thing wrong in work des­pite the fact that every­one on the planet is human and makes mis­takes. They didn’t smile enough at strangers in the street even though strangers are ter­rible. Global warm­ing is prob­ably entirely their own fault for using dis­pos­able light­ers and too much toi­let roll.

These people, like their more extro­ver­ted and punchy brethren do not enjoy their anger. The feed on it in much the same way but only in so far as it fuels the com­fort­ing, famil­iar misery without which they would be lost. Hap­pi­ness is sadly not an option for them.

Neither of these two jokers — the abus­ive jerk and the self hat­ing mar­tyr — are doing it prop­erly and cer­tainly can’t be said to be angry or hate­ful in mod­er­a­tion. And like I said way back at the start of this — that’s not the trick. The trick, as we all know by now is self-moderation.

The art of self-moderation, once learned is help­ful with everything: from weight loss to binge drink­ing and romance. Basic­ally it helps with any­thing with which you become per­son­ally involved with as a per­son not just with the help­ful exor­cism of anger. It’s sim­ilar, if not identical with the pro­cess of self-editing — a thing which were it in evid­ence more, would make the inter­net a much bet­ter place. Say­ing that you have to do everything in mod­er­a­tion is often there­fore a way of telling your­self and other to employ self control.

Duh.

In terms of unleash­ing your inner hatred these two ideas might seems at first to be very odd. That you should con­trol your­self while indul­ging in an emo­tion mostly thought of irra­tional, imme­di­ate and drip­ping with pas­sion. The two would seem to be quite removed from one another.

This how­ever is not the case and rather it’s mis­con­cep­tion and mis­la­beling of anger as some­thing self-destructive and out with the norm of the desired emo­tional scope.

The real trick to enjoy­ing your anger lies in under­stand­ing that it’s a nat­ural, even desir­able emo­tional state which should be care­ful and painstak­ingly cul­tiv­ated. It resides, this mech­an­ism, in a poin­ted, con­trolled place that burns with affron­ted indig­na­tion just behind the flushed skin of your cheeks and moved you towards a relax­ing, ful­filling cath­arsis. This is what you should be aim­ing for. It’s not what you can do when you’re angry, but what being angry can do for you.

Now it’s all very well for me to say ‘enjoy your anger’ and ‘con­trol your­self’ but what it actu­ally mean? How does it work? What are you sup­posed to do in order to really take advant­age of your hatred?

Luck­ily I think I’ve dis­covered a simple and easy to under­stand answer. Some­thing straight­for­ward and poin­ted to eye endan­ger­ing standards.

Are we ready for it?

What you have to do it pick your tar­gets wisely.

Hate on small, access­ible things that will always, without fail, be avail­able to you like a com­fort blanket. Identify the object of your incan­des­cence and then build your case against it, brick by irrit­at­ing brick until it’s stored, com­plete and ready in your mind. Fold the memory of it like and old, famil­iar snap shot of your­self as a child on Christ­mas morn­ing and keep it safe and cher­ished, packed into a faded shoe box in the back of your mind, until you have to use it. Treat it like a med­it­a­tion — this image of the thing which grinds your gears should become a focus through which you chan­nel and exper­i­ence the burn­ing enlight­en­ment of abso­lute fury.

Then when you’re done, fold it back up and file it away in the shoe box of your minds eye. Not harm no foul and wait­ing for you until the next time.

Remem­ber though — and this is import­ant — as a gen­eral rule the object of your hatred prob­ably shouldn’t be a real per­son who may be hurt by your enmity, def­in­itely shouldn’t be a race or a group of people of shared skin col­our, eth­ni­city, sexu­al­ity or reli­gion as this is tacky, Vic­torian and crass and almost cer­tainly not the Queen who is above reproach. I’m not kidding.

What we’re work­ing towards here is an anger exper­i­ence that relieves pres­sure, clears out your mind makes you feel good. We’re not work­ing towards an explo­sion or a grind­ing of old, sour grudges that only serve to make every­one involved miser­able. Grudges are best worked out, for­got­ten and moved past and explo­sions are often in the wrong place and at the wrong time and people. We want to avoid neg­at­ive con­sequences for every­one since those are no fun for any­one. Ever.

This is why the mod­er­a­tion is so important.

But what should you pick as a tar­get? What should you aim your fury at? What really works super good?

Well, here is where my advice pulls back and your own exper­i­ment­a­tion takes over. Given the per­sonal nature of emo­tions what works for me, or any­one else, may no neces­sar­ily work for you. You’ll need to play around with it, as you once did with your own bur­geon­ing sexu­al­ity, so get busy and try to enjoy it.

Believe me — it’s worth it.