anguish, anxiety, rage? It is a special combination of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, when you are (or think you are) severely frustrated by unfortunate conditions and by people’s “unfair” behavior. As Howard Kassinove and his collaborators point out, when you feel angry, you have a negative internal feeling state accompanied by thinking and perceptual distortions and deficiencies (especially misappraisals and attributions of other people’s vice). Your thoughts and feelings lead you to physiological arousal and tendencies to act against the “aggressors.” - with yourself as a valid option.
Your failing to fight for what you want leaves you the alternative of remaining passive when others take advantage of and prevent you from achieving your goals. Thus, most authorities today generally leave you with one of two alternatives for dealing with frustration:
Feel the rage/anguish but sit on it, squelch it, deny and repress it.
Feel the rage/anguish and freely express it.
Unexpressed rage will do you more harm than expressed feelings. Sigmund Freud’s hydraulic theory states that anger and other emotions have a tendency to increase in intensity—a neuronal connection that keeps strengthening—so that if you squelch your emotions, if you don’t give free vent to them, you run the risk of doing some real harm to yourself. Physical harm such as stomach ulcers, high blood pressure, or other sometimes more severe psychosomatic reactions result. In addition, refraining from giving honest expression to your feelings—keeping these feelings pent up inside you—doesn’t help you lose them. Quite the contrary. You will, in all probability, feel much worse.
And now you can easily turn overly critical of yourself for not standing up for your rights with those who have caused the injustice. Conversely, if you let yourself feel authentically and let others know about your feelings, you may encounter problems of quite another nature. For people will receive your free expression in most instances as an outwardly hostile action, and will probably close themselves off from you and defensively respond to you with further hostility.
Let us say that I have promised to share an apartment with you as a roommate and to share the rent, provided you fix up and furnish the place. This seems agreeable to you. You go to a good deal of trouble and personal expense to keep your part of the bargain. At the last minute I inform you that I have made other plans and cannot, will not keep my part of the agreement. You feel extremely angry with me; not only have you gone to considerable expense to keep your agreement, but you are distinctly inconvenienced in that you must at the last minute look for another roommate. You may at first keep your feelings of anger to yourself. But because you have those feelings, unexpressed, your underlying resentment greatly interferes with our friendship. So you see that nothing gets resolved, that your seething interferes with your other activities as well, and that this solution won’t work. You decide to confront me with your feelings, to express them: “I won’t have you treating me like this! I really don’t see how you can expect anyone’s friendship if you treat people so terribly.”
Or instead, given the convenience of my having the capacity and willingness to play it with you, you use creative aggression, express your anger controllably, and “prepare” me for what will come. Receiving my permission to open up about your feelings, you go ahead to express your anger.
Although your perception of my unfairness to you may be correct, your presentation of it (either through the free-expression method or through creative aggression) can do more harm than good. Both approaches focus on my wrong, even if creative aggression allows for a softening of the blow. Through that focus, you can easily set the stage for additional problems with me.
By openly criticizing me for my “outrageous” behavior, you will trigger my instincts to defend it - standard reptilian reaction to something perceived as an attack.
Remember also that I, like most people, may have strong self-downing tendencies. When you point out to me my “error” or my unappealing characteristics, I may carry your implications further than you even intended. Hence, from your critical remarks, no matter how well, how creatively put, I may feel guilt or self-downing, and will frequently try to make you equally self-blaming. We’d better acknowledge these very real problems as inherent in either of the two approaches that recommend expressing your anger. Nonetheless, acknowledging this still does not solve your problem: What do you do with your anger?
So far we have seen holding in your anger brings dubious results. Yet freely expressing it creates many other problems. Creative aggression seems a more workable solution but still shares some of the same difficulties.
Another alternative—that of Christian forgiveness—involves the turning of the other cheek. But in this often hostile world in which we live, this is somewhat impractical. People may feel far less intimidated by you and thus all the more tempted to take advantage of your “good nature.” You may behave beautifully, but unfortunately, that does not mean that others will respect you and treat you equally well.
After examining the above alternatives in dealing with your anger, you may see that each approach may work in a given situation, but not in all situations. Further, each one of these approaches has serious and destructive drawbacks. So let us look for a formula that will allow you to deal with difficult situations and get what you want without damaging your own integrity or inciting negativity in others.