What makes me mad (or not really)

All the discussion of explosive anger in the last few days — why a congressman yelled at the president, why two normally classy tennis champions blew up at the U.S. Open, why a bunch of people who oppose the current administration are doing it so ferociously — leads me to this wandering rumination.

I get irritated fairly regularly. I work at looking cool — and it works pretty well. I am impatient with lots of things, but it only gets loose occasionally.

However, when I do step over the boundaries, when I give myself permission to treat other people as if they are totally wrong and I am totally right (as in righteous), the explanations I give myself for that level of anger aren’t, I suspect, the real reasons for the explosion. When I go over the top, I pretty quickly notice that it's more deeply fueled than that.

Psychologists say our reasons for unrestrained anger are more often about pain, loss, fear and powerlessness than a momentary irritant. And that seems about right.

When I was younger, many of us believed everyone needed to “get their anger out,” express it, hit things, shout and scream. It was a common opinion at the time. In fact, an entire theory of therapy was built around a concept called primal scream. The stuff I read more recently seems to indicate that expressing anger on a regular basis leads, unsurprisingly, to more anger.

There have been times in my life when I decided I needed to get angry. It’s important to emphasize the “I” here. No one “had it coming.” It was more about breaking out of a habit of emotional carefulness I tend to fall into. (Ever feel like you’ve been holding your breath for a long time. I do that.)

It’s important to point out that, what I’m talking about here are emotional outbursts. That different than being deeply distraught over the destruction that greed and ego bring into our world.

Maybe that’s my point. I think most of the outrage I’m seeing in the news these day is self serving, childish and, to a sad level, strategic. It’s about “me.” It’s about "my way of taking control." It needs to grow up into something much more meaningful. Or calm down.

If you feel the need to rage, make sure you’re raging at the right stuff.