Megan Kamerick talks with Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger
MK: Is anger always a negative emotion?
HL: No, anger is not a negative emotion. Actually, anger is a very important emotion for two reasons.
One is that anger helps us to define the self. It’s our anger that can motivate us to say, “This is what I think,” “This is what I feel,” “These are the things that I will and will not do.” Anger can help us clarify who we are separate from what others want and expect us to be. Just as physical pain tells us to take our hand off the hot stove, the pain of our anger preserves the dignity and the integrity of our self.
The second reason that anger can be a very positive emotion is that anger is a vehicle for change, both for change in a personal relationship and for social and political change, for example, as witnessed by the past decades of feminism. People don’t like, “those angry women,” but those angry women have changed and challenged the lives of all of us. Now for example, we have Black Lives Matter. Anger, if it’s used correctly is a very powerful and positive vehicle for personal and sociopolitical change.
MK: How is anger a symptom of other issues going on inside of us?
HL: Well, now we get into the tricky part because although anger is a signal and it can signal that something is wrong, our anger does not tell us what is wrong or specify what is the real problem and how we might best approach it.
While anger signals a problem, venting anger does not solve the problem. In fact, venting anger usually will protect rather than protest the status quo. Actually, there are two main ways that women in particular and often people in general will mismanage their anger.
MK: Say more about that.
HL: Well, when I was writing The Dance of Anger, it was actually titled “Nice Ladies and Bitches: A Woman’s Guide to Anger.” Only later did that title get changed. The “nice lady” category is culturally prescribed. In this category are women who give in, go along, accommodate, don’t rock the boat and avoid anger and conflict at all costs.
Then for the “bitches,” many women, myself included, get angry with ease, but getting angry may be getting nowhere and even making things worse.
If you look at these two styles of mismanaging anger, they’ll look as different as night and day, but the outcome is the same. The real issues are not identified and addressed. The woman is left feeling helpless and powerless and nothing changes.
MK: Harriet Lerner, how is women’s anger in particular viewed in our society and what kinds of pitfalls does that have?
HL: Women have always been discouraged from the expressions of healthy anger and protest.
Women are encouraged to cultivate guilt like a little flower garden. Feeling guilt about leaving work for children, feeling guilty about leaving children for work, feeling guilty if we didn’t have work, guilty if we didn’t have children, guilty about the idea that we might stop being guilty and get angry instead because if we’re focused on the question, “What’s wrong with me?” this will block the awareness of legitimate anger and we will not be agents of change. We won’t take action.
Women will still say to me, “I don’t call myself a feminist. I don’t want to be one of those angry women.” Those pejorative terms about angry women are not just mean, sexist, stereotypes, but they also serve to silence women.
MK: We often get the advice, “Choose your battles,” meaning you can win everything you want to. There is no point in getting mad about everything. What would this mean in terms of the things that you’re talking about?
HL: When I was a young professional and I went for two years of additional training at a very renowned psychiatric hospital, The Menninger Foundation in Topeka Kansas. I moved from New York and Berkeley to the heart of patriarchy. I took it upon myself to speak out all the time. I became totally ineffective and also, I was in a great deal of pain. I did learn that it was not useful to address every injustice that I saw. Then also, to make wise decisions about how and when to say what to whom.
Part of managing anger effectively is first of all, to calm ourselves down because no one thinks clearly in the midst of a tornado.
MK: How do we do that?
HL: The way that you calm yourself down is any way that you can. It’s important to strike when the iron is cold. To use anger effectively, we also have to be self-focused. Self-focused means we put our energy into becoming good observers of the pattern and our part in the pattern.
MK: Harriet Lerner, you write that “secretly many of us believe that we hold the truth, and the world would be better if everyone else believed and reacted as we did.” How can we ensure that our needs are met while also setting disputes in a non-violent or healthy way?
HL: I have a wonderful cartoon in my consulting room. The cartoon shows a dog and a cat in bed together. The dog is looking morose and reading a book called “Dogs Who Love Too Much.” The cat is saying, “I’m not distancing! I’m a cat damn it!” It’s a great cartoon because it helps couples to lighten up about differences.
The challenge there is not to get caught up in the same old fights if they’re not going anywhere, but to be able to define a bottom line, to be able rather than to open the conversation by being the best expert on the other person, to open the conversation by saying, “I can’t be in this conversation when I feel unheard.”
Of course, you have to define a position. Of course, you have to be clear first within yourself before you go out to battle. What are the things that you can live with? What are the different things that you can do to make yourself more comfortable? What’s your bottom line? What are those things in the relationship that are not negotiable?
But again, nothing is going to change if all you can do is blame the other person and participate in fights that you know from the past don’t go anywhere.
Megan Kamerick talks with Todd Kashdan, co-author of The Upside of Your Dark Side
MK: You and your coauthor Robert Biswas-Diener write that “Anger is neither good nor bad, it’s what you do with it that matters.” Talk about that.
TK: Anger in general is a very functional emotion. Here are the two reasons we get angry. We find that the actions of other people are unjust, unfair or contrary to acceptable social norms of being nice to each other or we feel angry because we feel that some goal that is really important to us has been frustrated or blocked in some way.
We wouldn’t have Civil Rights Revolutions if it wasn’t for anger. We wouldn’t have Arab Springs where people in Tunisia and Egypt and the Middle East are fight against totalitarian regimes. We wouldn’t have women that fight for equal pay in the workforce if it wasn’t for anger and its cousins, righteous indignation, irritation and frustration.
As uncomfortable as it is, as physiologically demanding as it feels, let’s give an ode to the awesomeness of anger.
MK: Is there ever a danger that such legitimate anger like the examples you just laid out gets dismissed because we have these societal prejudices, “She’s just a bitter woman,” or “He’s an angry black man.”
TK: You just hit it perfectly. The opportunities to express anger and feel it in the company of others is not distributed equally in society. I will get more benefits from my expression of anger than a comparable woman would. I would get more benefits and people would say, “You stand up for yourself. You’re the kind of person I want to be around.”
Whereas someone who is black or brown would be less likely to be treated fairly in response to pointing out that they have been mistreated and pointing out that they should be treated with more dignity and respect.
There are display rule differences where white people, particularly white men are given more bandwidth to how they can express anger compared to other people.
MK: Dr. Todd Kashdan, how can anger be an effective tool when we are navigating social situations or other situations?
TK: When we experience lack of justice and a lack of fairness and a lack of dignity, one way is to lash out at people, but that’s only one of a number of flexible responses we can engage in. Another one is collecting allies and coalitions. The minority can basically overcharge the power and the status of the people who are in the majority.
MK: You write about how anger can be effective in negotiations and in some workplace interactions. How so?
TK: What we know in negotiations is that a mild dose of anger signals that you have power. It signals that you’re in this game. You understand it’s a game. You’re ready to play. When that happens, people are more willing to make concessions and they’re less likely to engage in malfeasance when you’re negotiating.
MK: How do we find a balance so that we can engage in this but not be an alpha bully?
TK: It’s a really good question. There is a little bit of nuance in this. We know that displays of anger work better if you tend to be a more agreeable person in general. The reason is the contrast effect.
If you tend to be a highly quarrelsome person, just generally experience anger and are generally an irritable curmudgeon, your displays of anger are inert because it’s default. We expect you to be angry. We expect you to be irritable. We expect you to be frustrated. There is nothing interesting there in terms of a signal.
If you tend to be kind and agreeable and then you express anger, that works because now you are selective and you’re basically telling people, “This situation is unlike other situations.” This behavior that you engaged in is unlike other ones and you evoked a response. I am letting you know emotionally what that is, and this is a nice situation for us to actually talk in depth about how this is a behavior, or this is a situation that we don’t want to be repeated.
MK: You actually write that anger sparks creativity. How?
TK: Yes, it’s Robert and I’s favorite finding in our book The Upside of Your Darkside. Anger weirdly does not make you vigilant or sensitive to searcher for threats. It makes you search for rewards.
When you’re in a state of anger, you want to take a step forward. You want to approach and attack the problem. You want to remove the barrier that is in front of you and with this motivational fuel, basically you start to see the different ways that you can get around this situation. Your mind basically expands very quickly in terms of all the different kinds of possibilities of how you can deal what is obstructing what you care about.
MK: How do we know when it’s okay to be angry? How do we stop this from becoming problematic or toxic but being a healthy expression?
TK: Let me throw a wrench into everything I just said since you asked. Leslie John, she has this great body of research that hasn’t even hit the presses yet where she has been studied how useful is anger when you get accused of doing something you didn’t do. What they found in the course of six different studies is that people get more angry when they are accused of something that they didn’t do than when someone tells them that they did something wrong that they did do.
They had a study where they actually showed them clips from Judge Judy and all those crappy day time fake courtroom reality TV shows. What they did was they took out whether they were actually guilty or innocent. People who expressed more anger during these court cases were described as being less trustworthy and less likable.
That’s an important data point. When we are accused of things that are wrong, we have a tendency to want to express our anger vividly because it’s just such a horrible experience. You’re being told that you engaged in vices that you didn’t do.
What we know based on this brand-new science is that you will persuade more people if you can try to attempt to be more calm and have more equanimity when accused. Later, when you’re with your close friends and loved ones, you can let that anger out and express that and vent in terms of what that experience was like.
Are we trying to persuade someone with our emotional expressions? Are we trying to have someone learn something about us or us learn about someone else? Are we trying to just be as candid and as honest as humanly possible?
I would say that we have to think about what our motivation is in terms of the emotions that we are expressing and sometimes, while it hurts, it really hurts as a human being, it’s sometimes better to conceal and suppress our emotions in the short term because we have a goal of trying to influence, persuade and get some momentum on a goal that we care about that is other than us being exactly who we are and how we feel at the moment.
MK: And Dr. Todd Kashdan, if you’re lashing out personally at people with ad hominem attacks perhaps not as effective versus “I don’t like this situation. I want change.”
TK: We want to avoid attacking the person and focusing on the actual behavior and situation. The way to prepare yourself mentally is when you’re not angry, when you’re calm. Take stock and do audits of moments when you’re angry that you wish you would have handled yourself better and moments that you were angry that you were proud of yourself because you stood up for yourself.
MK: Is there anything else that you would like to add that I didn’t touch on?
TK: I think it’s important for me to express that the pen ultimate psychological tool for humans is being psychologically flexible, to be able to match your behavior to the demands of situations. All of these tools are value in some situations. The problems arise when we overly identify and obsess over particular tools.
Megan Kamerick talks with Aaron Balick, author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking
MK: How do social media and online interactions perhaps feed our tendencies to show anger and outrage?
AB: The most helpful way to think about this is to think about how online interactions mediates our relationship to the social world. It does this in a variety of different ways depending on the social media that you are on.
One of the main ways in which most kinds of social media mediates our relationship with the social world is that they reduce interpersonal complexities. If I’m addressing an audience for example, I can see people’s faces, I can see their body language. If I say something offensive or not very nice, I’m going to get some feedback for that which will moderate my own behavior and what I’m saying.
MK: How does the performative aspect of social media feed into outrage or anger?
AB: They are almost two separate questions, the performative part and the outrage part.
The performative part is which tribe you are signed up to and what you get outraged about which creates an in-group around you and an out-group around you. That is an identity situation.
The anger and outrage are more of a sensation situation. What people often don’t talk about, which I think is really interesting is that the expression of anger and rage can actually feel good because it’s sensational.
It tends to be a contagious emotional component across social media then everybody gets outraged at something together and the expression of that outrage feels good to get out. It’s not necessarily socially productive, but it can feel emotionally like a good thing even when it’s a bad thing. It’s like eating chocolates when you’re tired of eating chocolates but you keep eating them anyway.
When you put both of those things together, you have a Venn diagram sweet spot where you can have your identity solidified in your position about being outraged about something while moving this anger contagion around that everybody plugs into and (in air quotes) “enjoys together.”
MK: What is the impact of that on us and on society?
AB: It’s really not particularly brilliant because what happens is we get regulated up. A good metaphor for that is something like road rage. If you get into your car and you’re already stressed out, you’re more likely to scream and yell and somebody out the window. The more we’re on our social media, particularly in those areas that make us angry and upset all the time, that level of stress and anxiety tends to stay relatively high.
MK: It feels like there is more of this anger online and it also feels like it’s an outburst where the underlying cause might be anxiety or loss of control.
AB: You really put your finger on it there actually. My mind was going towards anxiety. You could have a part time job as a psychotherapist.
What is anxiety? Anxiety is about a lack of certainty, not knowing where things are going. What is certain is having something to be angry about.
There is an argument that people are searching for a kind of righteous certainty by finding out what to be outraged about. Some of these things are very legitimate things to be outraged about and we should be angry about them, but then we always have to come back to the uncertainty and the anxiety. How do I deal with uncertainty? How do I deal with not knowing what’s coming next?
MK: Dr. Aaron Balick, I read an interview where you said, “Social media, aided and abetted by mobile technologies, often bypass our self-critical systems and give us a sense of omnipotence.
AB: Yes, I think the aided and abetted part of this is when our social media became part and parcel of our smart phones. Those of us who remember the early days, in order to get online, you had to go home and get on a lap top and it was a cumbersome experience. Now it is just there all the time.
What happens is we don’t pause to protest and decide what to do with the material that’s arising. Rather than sitting with that feeling for a moment and deciding what kind of productive action might be taken from it, we just attach that new story onto a tweet and start yelling.
MK: I have a number of friends who have decided to check out of social media entirely or some channel such as Facebook, but for many of us, that isn’t an option. Professionally, we need to be there, or we like to be in those spaces to keep in touch with far flung family and friends.
Help us find some best practices on engaging in healthy ways.
AB: The biggest problem that people have in this area is they tend to use their mobile devices and their social media in their default positions as given to us by the developers. That basically means that you’re getting the default notifications. Your phone is buzzing or dinging or notifications are arising while you’re doing something else. What you’re doing is having a passive relationship to your technology which means you’re allowing your technology to take control of you rather than the other way around.
What I always suggest people do in the most wholesome sense is to have an active relationship with technology meaning you make decisions about what is a healthy way for you to engage. That’s going to be different for all sorts of different people, but my main take homes are generally turn off your notifications all together.
I don’t even have email on my phone because I find it really unhelpful to read an email on a phone because I can’t respond to it properly.
When you do decide to look at email or your Twitter or Facebook, you’re choosing to look. You can go in and look for ten minutes and then put it away. Limit your use. Choose when you’re using it. Decide when and why you’re using it. Pay attention to your feelings. If you’re scrolling through something and you’re starting to feel worse and worse, listen to that and turn it off.
MK: Building on that, a much bigger question. Is it possible to promote more kindness and understanding online?
AB: I don’t know. A chocolate bar tastes better than steamed broccoli. Emotions like anger, outrage and righteousness are just spicier than nice things. It’s not very nice, but we are moved by highly sensational emotional content.
I do think that there are a variety of different cultures that exist inside social media ecospheres. To put that into plain English, you can follow a bunch of people who are pretty ratty and unkind on Twitter or you can unfollow them and follow people who are kinder. You create an online kinder landscape that you encounter.
I’m not suggesting that we should silo ourselves because that is also a problem. You can find people that are outside of your general political spectrum or belief system that you don’t disagree with but are not nasty in their disagreements and that way you get both sides where there is a level of decency and décor.
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