Most of us choose to resort to anger when some situation or action offers us a choice to feel powerless. That feeling comes as a choice. We don't have to feel anger. Most people I worked with deny that anger comes to us as a choice. It just happens "naturally" because the situation demands it. Anger has come to us for so long, we may not remember how and why we first chose it, as I can't, but it has become part of our matrix of meaning perspectives. Even after all that, most of us can recall a situation that we use as a motivation to anger at one point and the same situation at some other point, we choose calm. It can depend on what we call our "mood" for one thing. If we feel we are "in a bad mood," many things that might not bother us typically now motivate our choice for anger. That idea takes us back to the father who showed love to the child he cared for in one mood and rejected her I another. That's a choice.
A student in our computer training class called me to help her. When I sat down and asked what I could do for her, she answered in this remarkable way: "You'll have to excuse me. I'm in a bitchy mood." That phrase struck me as if it were the first time I had heard it. She got the help she wanted, and I asked her if I could talk about that phrase to the class. She said she had no idea why I would talk to anybody about what she said. She had hardly noticed she'd said it, but I could go right ahead. Full of enthusiasm, I did.
I drew a closet on the board, and I said that I had just heard a phrase which just stuck me in a new way. I acknowledged the student and her permission to speak and told the story. I said, "If I say, 'I am in a bitchy mood,' I must have chosen to get into that mood." That being the case, I got an image in mind which I began to illustrate using the closet on the board. I hurriedly sketched the closet in with all kinds of costumes: "So I get up in the morning, I look into my mood closet, and I find a wide variety of things to choose from. Some are just beautiful and help me look and feel my best. Some are just comfortable, and they help put me at ease. Still others are business like and help my image for an interview or something like that. Then in the corner, all scrunched up, is this ill-fitting, completely itchy, uncomfortable, and ugly piece of clothing called "bitchy," and that’s what I choose to put on for the day. Why in the world would I do that?" After some laughter, students opined that it must have been something that happened the day before that made the mood a bad one. That would probably make the rest of the day a bad one. Things would irritate me more and would open me to angry reactions to things that might not bother me on a better day. On the other hand, why would I choose to allow that previous problems from the previous day make the rest of my day just plain lousy? We decided that one very good reason was that something still bothered me, something that offered me a sense of powerlessness or helplessness, and that helped me choose a bad mood to put on for the day. We also agreed that the bad mood would do nothing to increase my power to deal with anything. If anything, it would decrease my power to deal whatever happened that day or to deal with what was still bothering me.
Out of that discussion came another which associated all kinds of unhappy and unproductive behaviors with the sense of powerless that we choose: worry, fear, anger, resentment, envy, grudge holding, and revenge. All of these and more remain a choice in all circumstances because, as Frankl discovered, we all have the freedom to choose our response. When we choose actively, we actively choose to free the essential, personal power within our becoming self.