What if Anger Were the Only Emotion You Could Feel?
What if anger were the only emotion you allowed yourself to feel? Anger has become a drug to vast numbers of people, and it’s not difficult to see why. Anger can only ever come from one place; anxiety, which is a result of only one thing; fear.
So angry people are invariably fearful people, and that describes a sizable percentage of the population.
But when you take an anxious person and get them really stirred up, you’ve just added the magic ingredient that turns anxiety into anger: adrenaline. Adrenaline is the only difference between anxiety and anger.
That shot of adrenaline transforms a frightened, anxious person into a furious person. Would you rather feel anxious or feel powerful? There’s nothing like a flush of anger to make you feel righteously justified in your anger, which can give the illusion of power.
It’s not hard to see how this false feeling of power can become addictive. We’ve become a nation of anger addicts, but if someone tried to tell a furiously angry person that the source of their anger was their own fearful, anxious thoughts, I doubt they’d be met with a willingness to admit that possibility were true.
That’s completely understandable. If the only time you feel powerful is when you’re angry, you’ll find ways to be angry most of the time. Anger addicts actively look for things to become and stay angry about, and someone to blame. The source of the anxiety angry people feel is routinely described as “fear of change,” but I suspect it’s not changed that bothers people so much as it is uncertainty.
We all live in uncertainty all of the time, but we like to pretend otherwise, wrongly assuming our sense of well-being is dependent on our knowing what’s going to happen next.
It would be difficult to find anyone who would claim to like uncertainty, but it’s something we always live. We like to think we know what’s going to happen, even though we never really do. There are certain things in our lives that seem to be predictable, which can lead us to believe that our lives are predictable.
The truth is our lives are predictable, right up to the instant when they’re not predictable, and that instant is constantly arriving.
Situations, relationships, and events in our lives all seem predictable until all of a sudden one day, they just aren’t anymore.
Given the changes the world has seen in recent years and the sheer rate at which those changes have accelerated, it’s an especially difficult time for people who see change as a uniformly bad thing and a threat to their well-being.
Staying angry is an ideal way to distract yourself from the anxiety underneath the anger.
If you believe your sense of peace, happiness, and well-being depends on living in a world where change doesn’t happen, there’s plenty to be angry about, all the time. Staying angry is an ideal way to distract yourself from the anxiety underneath the anger.
When you’re looking for something to be angry about, you’ll always find it. And if all you want is something to be angry about, there’s no need to focus on a remedy for the anger. All you need is someone to blame.
Here’s something most of us would be reluctant to admit. Life is change; no change, no life.
Though anger may give the illusion (but only the illusion) of power, what it takes from you, what it robs you of, are qualities and abilities you need to be at your best and to really experience life. You can’t be angry and have access to your own intelligence because anger stupefies you. You can’t be angry and curious, or creative, or flexible. When you’re angry, you have absolutely no perspective. And when you’re angry, you’re unable to listen to anyone else, because your own angry thinking drowns out everything else.
When you’re angry, you can’t really be anything but angry. Does it seem to you like a worthwhile tradeoff to sacrifice all those abilities for an illusion of power?
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