What should we do about angry men?

Image courtesy of Steve Rhode on Flickr

BY LEWIS KENDALL

There’s a scene from the TV show Shrinking that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in the context of my relationship with anger as a man.

The show centers around a mourning therapist Jimmy, played by Jason Segel, who is attempting to repair the relationships with his teenage daughter and patients in the wake of his wife’s death.

One of these patients, Sean (played by Luke Tennie) is a veteran who keeps getting into trouble due to outbursts of anger. In the scene in question, Jimmy congratulates a bemused Sean for refraining from attacking a stranger on the street.

“Look, it is fine to be mad,” Jimmy tells him. “I am mad all the time!”

But is Jimmy right? Is it fine to be mad? 

Sean (Luke Tennie) and Jimmy (Jason Segel) in “Shrinking”

A close friend of mine recently got into an argument with his roommate. My friend was so angry, he told me, that he was prepared to physically confront this other man, and he felt ashamed that his anger provoked the desire for violence. He said it felt like a regressed, former self was emerging in that moment to handle the conflict with another man, cementing his belief that his anger is “negative.” Like Sean in Shrinking, my friend eventually de-escalated the situation and was able to turn the other cheek despite the event weighing on him emotionally. But what was anger telling him in the moments before he gathered himself to de-escalate? And more importantly, WHY was this his reaction? Surely, had he listened, things would’ve turned out worse.  My friend’s experience made me think about my own relationship with anger.

Alongside other “negative” feelings—sadness, fear, anxiety, etc.—I’ve spent much of my younger years attempting to relegate anger into a box of what I considered to be useless emotions. And I say useless in the most literal sense; I did not believe these emotions served me any beneficial purpose.

I now know, of course, that emotions like sadness aren’t things that should be shied away from or repressed, nor should they be moralized into binary categories of “positive” or “negative”. Fear, anxiety, grief—these are all necessary hues in the rainbow that is the human emotional experience. Dissociation and avoidance are occasionally appropriate tools, but a huge piece of my unlearning of traditional masculinity has been allowing myself to lean into these feelings, sitting with discomfort and viewing the experience as an opportunity, or as Carl Jung put it, as a “gateway to the realm of the unconscious.”

Yet for all this newfound emotional appreciation, anger’s place still eludes me.

Fury, madness, frustration, these are all such destructive forces to be avoided at all costs, like land mines or hurricanes. Right?

My confusion with anger started from boyhood. As a child, I was afraid of anger because of how it materialized through my father’s occasional outbursts in our home. On the other hand, there were places my rage was socially accepted (on the soccer field, for example). My response to this dissonance was avoidance. I learned to hide it away. I don’t want to hurt anyone, much less make them feel unsafe, my thinking went, so I just won’t be angry. I force myself to internalize my madness, to concentrate it into a ball so dense it pops out of existence. If I stub my toe, I bite my tongue, despite my overwhelming urge to scream profanities. If I’m angry with someone, I channel it into a long run or a hard workout.

But as part of my journey with men’s work and allowing myself to feel the full range of human emotions, I’ve been trying to unlearn these attitudes towards anger. If it is just another emotion like the rest, then what can it teach me? Maybe that I’m afraid. Or that I’ve been pushed too far in one direction. Or that I’m confused and ashamed. Whatever the case, I am curious about my anger. I am curious about the impact of tucking it away, refusing to express myself because I cannot confront the potential impact of that expression.

I still haven’t reached Jimmy’s levels of acceptance, and I think it’s important to remember that the expression of anger, like any other emotion, has its reasonable limits. But in using it as a guide rather than a wall, I’m beginning to explore the value of anger in all its forms. Can it be a protector? Can it help me set boundaries? Is there a happy medium between anger that incites fear in others or violence, and anger that asserts my dignity, my limits, and communicates that with others? I want the answer to be yes, because I’m tired of being afraid of anger.