There is a strange taboo regarding anger in many cultures. This may not seem to be an important topic, yet a healthy expression of feelings is at the root of individual psychological health as well as perhaps relevant to the restoration of balance within societies that are plagued by violence, child abuse, substance abuse and other disorders.

Depression is becoming widespread. Today it could be triggered, in some individuals, by the global economic downturn, as well as the constant barrage of bad news spewed by the corporate media that seems to derive a perverse satisfaction in spreading hopelessness and fear. However it is generally believed that the original causes of depression are not well understood, so scientists choose the narrowly materialistic and seemingly practical approach of focusing on brain chemistry.

The fact that they do not appear to make the connection between suicide – which is a form of murder, of violence against the self to which depression can lead – and suppressed anger or rage, is significant, as it is a sign of how much anger has become a taboo subject and how little it is understood in our societies, how much it is regarded as undesirable and irrelevant.

There is a profound difference between sadness and depression. Some people confuse them, yet sadness is an actual feeling, depression is an absence of feeling, a general numbness and sense of emotional paralysis and hopelessness that come from the suppression of the feeling process. It forms a self-destructive pattern whereby thoughts and emotions are turned against the self, preventing the vital flow of healthy self-expression as well as growth and reaching out, and leading to stagnation and deep despair.

At the root of all depressions is suppressed and often unconscious anger, the more intense the anger the more profound the depression, suppressed rage often leading to suicide, or to murder and suicide. Such anger, such rage can linger just below consciousness, as parents and other adult authorities often quickly correct children whenever they express appropriate, healthy angry feelings, training them to control such emotions.

Anger is also culturally suppressed. Anger is the elephant in the room no one sees, because most have been conditioned to disregard it as soon as it emerges, to associate it with negativity. Anger is not “nice,” it is not pretty, sweet or cute. It can be hurtful and appears destructive, like a storm.

What makes anger destructive? The steam that escapes from a functioning pressure cooker does not cause any damage; block any means of escape and the pressure cooker explodes. Children and adults who have, most of their lives, been trained to suppress legitimate feelings of anger accumulate such anger to the point of self-implosion as in the case of depression, of explosion in abusive, violent behaviors, or of self-destruction through the weakening of their own immune system, as the suppression of such feelings takes a very heavy toll on the body. It is indeed a lot more exhausting and stressful to suppress rather than to express feelings, which explains the exhaustion that accompanies depression.

What is not understood in this process of the suppression of anger, or of any other feeling, is that such feelings do not vanish just because an individual or society wishes they would. All feelings seek and require expression, and will find a way out regardless of how carefully people attempt to seal them in. This requirement can lead to depression in the sense that depression is the ultimate expression of negation: in this paradoxical process the person can only express forms of self-denial and self-destruction, as all other expressions are blocked.

The other unintended outcome of the suppression of anger is the unconscious expression of anger: offensive, provocative behaviors that are grounded in suppressed rage but that an individual is not aware of displaying, which can provoke angry reactions from other people who are victimized by these behaviors; ironically, the said individual then often reacts with explosive rage to such angry reactions, having been given, from his/her own perspective, a legitimate cause to “let it out” and have intense and apparently irrational temper tantrums.

What is the difference between appropriate and inappropriate anger, between healthy, normal, natural anger and irrational anger? Society does not know or willfully ignores the difference. Parents, most of whom have acquired neurotic traits, do not make the difference in their children. Schools do not make the difference in their students. Some religious and superficially thinking pseudo-spiritual people do not make the difference within themselves or anyone else, so paranoid are they about “evil,” “negativity,” “darkness” or “toxicity.”

Many therapists and counselors busy themselves suppressing both in their patients, focusing on behavior and control rather than feelings and their full expression and integration. In this sense they become a kind of psychological police, unwittingly doing their part in the perpetuation of a repressive and neurotic culture, frequently prescribing or recommending mental straight jackets (medications) to their patients.

If you are either drawn to conflicts, to confrontations, to power struggles, to fights, or are conversely afraid of such things and avoid them at all costs, you have most likely suppressed your anger and are either terrified of the lingering, potentially destructive monster you sense you have created within yourself, or are propelled to let it out regularly for a cathartic release of the chronic inner tension your suppression of anger is causing you to experience.

If on the other hand you have no problem expressing anger whenever it arises in a manner that is not cruel, not underhanded, not mean, not hurtful but direct, real and to the point, and if you feel naturally compelled to walk away from someone who consistently provokes such anger in you rather than being drawn into a fight to the finish or a perpetual struggle as are so many, you are most probably healthy, that is to say free of residual anger. Being free of such pathological anger, you are most likely able to feel all other feelings (joy, pleasure, love) that much more deeply and satisfactorily.

Indeed the suppression of anger, or of any feeling, eventually causes an inability to feel other feelings adequately, until a person no longer knows who he or she is, what he or she wants, having become driven by unconscious impulses, compulsions and the dictates of society and culture rather than by conscious needs, consequently afraid of him/herself, of what could be festering within and lurking below conscious awareness, and frequently inclined to supporting the implementation of social systems, from governments to religions, whose prevalent ideology is one that is characterized by denial, suppression, repression and control.

The police state begins in neurosis, and neurosis begins in the suppression of feelings.

“In an unreal society, the simple truth is revolutionary” Arthur Janov, “The Primal Revolution.”

Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.

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Published: 07 March 2009