Our anger meaning perspective arises out of the normative structure and practices of life in the having based, dominator model, conformist culture in which we grow up and live. It tells us that the only power we possess comes from denying others' power over us and taking their power from those same people. We must achieve positional power in every situation. Power feels like a something our identity feels the need to possess to keep that power. When we feel powerless in some situation or through some action, we feel anger in response because we feel our identity threatened. We also, and this primarily, feel the pain of our vulnerability. The possession of power, we feel, protects us from our vulnerability and the hurt it represents. Of course the resort to anger as a choice does the opposite. It makes us more vulnerable because it makes us more exposed in our weakened feeling identity. Anger forms our ego's knee-jerk response to that situation. It attempts to regain power and protect vulnerability through some sort of personal protection and force.
It doesn't work. We may feel some momentary gratification in anger, but it doesn't satisfy our need. Our need, the place where keep our becoming self and our vulnerability, finds its answer in unconditional positive regard. To return to Fromm, he writes, "Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." That love is the unconditional. That love does not seek its power by denying power to others or taking their power from them. That violates the ends principle because it turns others into a means to our end. The unconditional celebrates and accepts the personal power of the other person, the Thou we have come to choose to see in an unconditional manner. Paradoxically, we may make ourselves into someone else's means. We give up our personal power, in order to gain positional power. It's like Faust. We give up our soul, our becoming self, our personal power to gain positional power over others. We choose to lose everything about our being to gain the ephemeral of having. As Fromm also writes, "If you are what you have and you lose what you have, who are you?"
At the same time as our ego wants to protect our identity from a loss of position power through anger, we surrender our personal power in the process. When we discussed anger in class, we did so because many students told many stories about their past anger which they carried with them in the present. When that anger turned up in a job interview or in the workplace, it would hurt them and forestall their success. Once again I introduced the idea of our "locus of control," (and again "locus of balance"). Once we translated "locus," we all agree that such a location should exist within us, within our center. When I asked what happen to that center when someone or something "made me mad," most realized that the location of control, our personal power, shifted over to what we perceived as the cause of the anger. In an attempt to regain our sense of position power, we give up our most important power, that personal power that offers us the power to live fully without dominating others.
Anger reduces us. My students also found it interesting, paradoxical one more time, that we feel angry at people we don't like, at least at that moment. At the same time we don't like them because we choose anger, we give them our personal power, our location of balance. The longer we hold on to the anger, the longer that other person holds on to our power, our location of balance. Many of my students knew people who had done that for years, and that loss of personal power weakened them. Other of my students admitted that they held on to such anger, and now they realized it weakened them. They said they got it. It made sense, but what happens next? They asked about how they could recover from the bad things that happened without anger, or at least, how do they let go of anger as soon as possible. In a phrases used in this writing, rather than trying to say "No" to anger by itself, to what do we say "Yes?" When the time comes, when some anger producing situation arises, we can't just stand there not getting mad. We want to do something. We have to do something. What is that something?