Anger is not an easy emotion to contain or process. Until recently I’ve been largely unaware of how much anger I was carrying around inside. Terrifying dreams showed me that I needed to work on this emotion but I had no idea how. I was intuitively nudged towards Anger by Thich Nhat Hanh.
This ended up being one of the most profound things I’ve read this year. The writing is simple and the book is short, but it contains an enormous amount of wisdom and great practical advice. This was indeed the single best book I’ve ever read on anger—and maybe even the best book on any single emotion that I’ve come across.
It’s really hard to do a complete summary of everything so I’ll instead point to some of the main ideas and advice that I found particularly helpful.
How to communicate when you’re angry
The book goes into detail about how to communicate when you’re in anger. Some of these principles include:
-> Not actually communicating while you are consumed by anger but stepping away and taking care of your own anger first (more on this later).
-> You should consider communicating your suffering to the person that you’re fighting with. Thich Nhat Hanh gives some specific examples of how to communicate our suffering to others, especially in our intimate relationships. The idea is to let the person know that you are suffering, not from a a space of blame or resentment, but rather from a sense of love and collaboration. For instance, “Yes, I’m suffering. I want you to know that I’m taking care of my suffering.”
-> Another very important point that we often overlook when we’re in anger is that retaliation will only prolong the suffering.
Even though the advice is simple and straightforward, it can be challenging to apply. Personally, I’ve found that my sense of rightness can get in the way of actually following through on some of the advice. Additionally, and more importantly, anger is an intensely difficult emotion to contain. Since reading the book, I’ve been intentional about spending more time with my anger and this has been very difficult at first. Sometimes it felt like something was burning inside me. Anger can be really overwhelming at times.
How to deal with anger
Looking back I realise that I never really had the right perspective on anger. I always viewed anger as something to fight against, or talk myself out of. (Blowing off steam is also a bad idea but I want to discuss this in a separate post). But Thich Nhat Hanh has some useful ideas that made me consider anger in a different light.
One way to view anger is as if it is a crying baby. The gist of this idea is that you have to be the mother (or parent) to your anger. This means that you have to attend to your anger immediately. This is an immediate act of turning inward and holding (or feeling) the emotion with tenderness and compassion. The reason for the immediacy is that anger can be extremely destructive if left unattended. It’s rarely wise to act from a space of charged anger and it is also unwise to suppress it. Feeling it is the best thing we can do. So, it’s important to be kind to your anger, paradoxically. This is true for anger as it is for most difficult emotions. We often want to push these emotions away but a full embrace and acceptance is what is needed to move or shift it. When I was in deep suffering of my anger, I would often remind myself over and over again, “Allow, allow, allow.”
Another very useful way to think about anger is that it is like raw potatoes. The idea here is that to truly find nourishment from your anger (potatoes) you have to be with it (cook it) for a substantial amount of time. Potatoes don’t cook in five or ten minutes. It has to boil for at least fifteen minutes. It is the same with anger: you have to contain and nurture that emotion for a while, say twenty minutes. It might transform, it might not, but you have to be with it for a while. It’s only after it is cooked that you can receive nourishment from it. Because I want to give credit where credit is due, I want to also mention that Michael Brown discusses similar concepts in The Presence Process, a book which has been tremendously helpful to me. The difference with Thich Nhat Hanh’s Anger is that it unpacks some of these ideas in more detail which allowed me to really experiment and be with my anger in different ways.
There are countless useful ideas and metaphors in Anger but I found these two particularly helpful. Applying these ideas fundamentally shifted something inside me. The first few times that I applied these ideas were by far the hardest. It felt like I was on fire on the inside. But since I was still reading the book I stuck to it. And I’m glad I did. During those first few weeks that I applied the practice of “cooking my anger”, something inside (some internal formation) shifted or at least reduced in size and severity to the extent that I no longer feel as overwhelmed by the emotion. Being with my anger for long periods of time peacefully, compassionately, tenderly made all the difference. Saying that, internal formations are very challenging to deal with.
Internal formations
I’ve been struggling to get clear and good information on internal formations. I’ve discussed my own experiences with internal formations in a previous post. These blocks (or internal formations) are exceptionally difficult to deal with, and as Thich Nhat Hanh points out in Anger, one should bring awareness to these formations gently and repeatedly to dissolve them. This is uncomfortable, to say the least, and there’s no telling how long it might take.
During my reading of Anger, I was much more conscious of my patterned reactions. So, when anger came up during that time, I did manage to “cook it” for long periods of time. This made all the difference because I did dissolve a good chunk of something. Releasing that internal formation brought its own challenges. I felt an endless sense of despair afterwards. This too disappeared after a day or so, but my point is that dissolving an internal formation might bring its own challenges. I’ve often seen that when one of these blocks dissolve it can cause some instability, either psychologically, emotionally or even physically. Often it’s some mixture of all three because it’s all connected. The way around this is to bring mindfulness to every stage of the process.
The benefit of dissolving an internal formation is that something fundamentally shifts for good.
After the above mentioned shift, I get angry less often. Certain things don’t trigger me the way that they used to. Also, it’s easier to contain my anger, and there’s some physical and emotional relief in my heart, a sense of being lighter. I can’t say that I’m done with the work, but knowing where I started, I know that something is better, even if that is just a subjective assessment.
Final thoughts
If you read only one book on emotions or mindfulness this year, let it be this one. What I noticed after a few weeks of applying the principles in the book was that my anger became less severe. The practices hasn’t been a quick fix. But it has brought me long-term relief from habitual anger. Also, the practice of being mindful and gentle can be applied to many other areas of life too, not just anger. This book was truly life changing.
(If you liked this article also see my introductory posts on Emotional Work: Emotional Work: Part I: Why write about this.)
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