What is anger really all about?

I just heard this morning of another school shooting; this one in Illinois. I really know nothing more about this incident, but most likely, anger of some kind is behind it. Anger is one of the biggest issues involved in delinquent behavior. Many delinquents are chronically angry. Just why this is no one really knows, but researchers are looking for possible causes and ways to prevent anger and help angry kids get in charge of their behavior.

Behavioral  scientist are looking at the relationship of environment to delinquent behavior. A tough, crime-ridden neighborhood, for instance, can demand a survival-of-the-fittest attitude. Kids learn at a young age from their parents, siblings, and friends that if someone hits you, you hit back. You don’t want to be seen as weak because the weak are prime targets of bullies and gangs. Anger is a defense mechanism, a way to survive.

The problem with anger as a defense is that it can be hard to turn off from one situation to another. And it grows. Picture a kid who gets in trouble for some minor mischievous behavior in school. When a teacher gets after him (or her) for his misconduct, the child will sense that he is being attacked and respond with anger. A student with a poor self-image may even see a teacher’s correction as confrontational and again respond with anger. Because of his anger he is sent to the principal’s office, to detention, or is suspended. The cycle just spirals out of control—yet this child is only doing what he was taught to do to survive. The child begins to hate school, which is really the only way out of the survival-of-the-fittest environment.

In any neighborhood, rich or poor, teen anger is often a grief response to losing one’s childhood. Kids in a high-risk neighborhood often have NO childhood as they are forced to pass from toddler to adolescent, maybe even to adulthood, in order to survive. They have plenty to grieve. In a more affluent atmosphere, very young kids are often given everything any adolescent or adult could want and are left without any goals, or any desires, to pull them into adulthood. They, too, have missed childhood.

Neither group of teens has had the time nor the opportunity to just be kids. They are either ducking bullets or drug dealers in the ghetto or they’re busy playing adults in supervised team sports, music lessons, dance lessons, and every other kind of distraction helpful adults can plan for them. Not that all structured play is bad. It isn’t. But in excess, it can squeeze out childhood and cause its participants to miss being kids. In short, kids need to do kid things! Although neither group consciously recognizes the loss, it is present subconsciously and causes grief to set in. Grief, as Dr Kubler-Ross taught us, leads to anger. Yet I believe that anger, if properly directed, helps to overcome grief. It’s nature’s way of dealing with loss.

Regardless of its cause, anger has some other uses also related to defense. Kids and adults alike often use anger to project superior knowledge. They forget (or don’t know) what Bertrand Russell said about anger: “The degree of one’s emotion varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you become.” They strike out when they feel cornered by lack of knowledge or lack of protection and like a trapped squirrel or other wild animal, they attack when threatened. Just knowing that they will get in more trouble if they get angry is not enough. Sometimes teens, like adults, just can’t seem to get a grip on cause and effect.

Anger does not need to be eliminated, and  as a matter of fact, it cannot be eliminated. To quote the National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center: “Anger is a completely normal, healthy emotion. It is a common reaction when people have been insulted, wronged, hurt, or treated unfairly. When people know how to control and manage their anger, it can actually play a positive role in their lives, helping them to stand up for themselves, to fight against injustices, and to recognize when there is a need to make changes in their lives.”

Think of the young people who followed Dr. Martin Luther King—both black and white—and revolutionized civil rights in our country and in the world. Getting angry at social injustice or in defense of liberty is what made our country free and has propelled justice throughout all of history. There are many places in every community where righteous anger is needed and should, perhaps, be used more often. Substandard schools in the inner cities, starving children, hazardous work places, and outrageous salaries for company CEOs readily come to mind; but there are many other causes where anger, rightly used, can be beneficial to individuals and to society. Many of these causes are championed by teens and young adults but are not the challenges most of us face when we become angry.

Unfortunately, many teens, like the adults who mentor them, do not know how to control their anger. Instead, they let their anger control them, and violence often is the result. In one national survey of junior high and high school students, a third of the students agreed with the following statement: “When I am really angry, there is no way I can control myself.” Of the students who agreed with that statement, more than three in four reported getting into physical fights. Students who disagreed were much less likely to report fighting.

Anger is an emotion, a feeling. We cannot control our feelings and should not even try, but we can control our actions. Napoleon Hill said, “No one can make you jealous, angry, vengeful, or greedy unless you let him.” In other words, be in charge of your own actions. Don’t let someone else control how you behave and live!

There are many things we can do to control our anger; we will discuss them in the next blog.

If you have read Messengers in Denim, you will remember much of the above was taken from that book. I beg your forbearance in reading it again, and ask you to share this information with your friends who have not read Messengers.