A little anger can put a spark in your step

He was an Arsenal fan and, like many others, was unimpressed by the performance of the team this season. When he started talking about Arsenal and the club’s manager Arsène Wenger, you could feel the anger in his voice.

Why get so upset, asked one of his listeners, who did not know much about football. Because it’s that or break down and cry, he replied.

His answer set me thinking because, in my psychological line of work, anger gets a bad rap. We’re all against repressed anger, of course, but many of us, I think, have a problem with our own anger. We might want the people we work with to be able to express their anger, but I suspect we would like them to arrive at a state of equilibrium as soon as possible.

That Arsenal fan hit on something important, I think. Given the state of his team at the time, he could go around with his head up or his head down. Being able to feel his anger helped him to go around with his head up.

We all know anger can destroy people. We’ve all met the people who are consumed by their anger and who keep it going for years in ways that take them over and harm their families.

But angry people can also be very warm and effective people. I realised recently that it's been 21 years since Christine Buckley, in Louis Lentin's Dear Daughter documentary, set off an earthquake beneath the religious orders and congregations with her account of her time in the Goldenbridge orphanage.

Public personality

Whenever I met Buckley, I was struck by her warmth and energy. But her anger at what had happened to her and others was strong and was certainly a feature of her public personality.Unlike people who are destroyed by anger, Buckley’s anger was a great, creative force that made a positive difference to many people.

Had she followed the prescription of achieving equilibrium, none of that might have happened.

If I may make a generalisation, it strikes me that warm people are often closer to their own anger than those of us who are somewhat colder. We link anger with heat as in “heated arguments”, for instance, but maybe that’s the heat that makes the warmth in some personalities.

It is a flaw of mine that I tend to conceal anger and, if possible, to let go of it as fast as I can. That has been a good thing in most situations, but it is not a good thing in all situations.

Of course, we need to watch out for the trap of ruminating on our anger – such as repeating angry thoughts over and over again – and the trap of exploding frequently in anger.

Road rage

People involved in road rage are more likely than others to have been angry when they started their journey. There’s more to road rage than that, but we can all appreciate how chewing over your anger as you drive along is a very bad idea indeed.

Some silly forms of therapy in the past (and some in the present as well) assumed that expressing one’s anger was the answer to life’s emotional problems. Certain therapists in the US kept a supply of blow-up baseball bats, for instance, for angry couples to whack each other with.

It doesn’t really work, and toy baseball bats are no longer standard issue in the therapy world. And destruction therapy, in which you break up objects around you to make you feel better, is called vandalism where I come from.

My key point, though, is that anger can warm us up as long as we can stop it from burning us up. And if we’re feeling down and put upon, justifiable anger can straighten us up and put a spark back in our step again.

But what if you find it difficult to get in touch with your anger? What if it’s been buried so deep for so long that it feels like it is beneath layers of permafrost?

Try becoming an Arsenal fan. If that doesn’t work, nothing will.

Pádraig O'Morain (pomorain@yahoo.com) is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness  reminder is free by email. Twitter: @PadraigOMorain