So why do I think this play can be helpful to you? For one thing, it reminds us that anger is an innocent emotion: It’s just trying to help us. It’s an indicator that something is off and needs to be dealt with. Remember, the Furies’ initial goal was to stick up for people who’ve been hurt and stave off the threat of more hurt.
That’s a good goal! The problem is not the anger itself — it’s a certain behavioral response to the anger that needs reform.
For the Furies, and for lots of us humans, the behavioral response is often to seek revenge or lash out. That’s why a long line of Western philosophers — from Seneca in the first century to Martha Nussbaum in the 21st — argued that anger is pretty much always irrational and destructive. But as women of color scholars like Audre Lorde and Myisha Cherry have pointed out, the behavioral response to anger doesn’t have to be destructive all the time. It can be constructive. This “Lordean rage,” as Cherry calls it, doesn’t seek liberation for an oppressed group by trying to beat down the oppressor; instead, it tries to bring everyone onto equal footing, insisting that no one is free until everyone is free.
Your mom, from the sounds of it, had a behavioral response to anger that was destructive. She wasn’t bad for feeling anger, but it was deeply unfortunate that she expressed it the way she did. You’re right to want to try to avoid expressing anger in that same way.
And this is where meditation can actually be helpful: not after an angry outburst, as your friend suggested, but before it.
Over time, mindfulness meditation can train you to notice an emotion as it’s arising — and get curious about it. If you feel rage rising within you, but you can tell it’s the constructive Lordean rage, use it to motivate action. But (and this is much more often the case, at least for me) if you hear a certain story forming in your mind — “He’s wrong, I’m right! I’ll put him in his place!” — that’s probably the destructive kind, and it might be better to give yourself an adult time-out by saying, “I need a little time to process this. Let me get back to you later.”
It sounds like you’ve already practiced this to some degree, and you usually manage to apply it in the moment, which is awesome. You’ve achieved Athena’s first transformation — the one where she respectfully offered the Furies a home, while insisting that they live within certain constraints.
But. But, but, but. You’re human, my dear, so I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t manage to achieve this every time. There will be the occasional outburst. So the real question is, how can you handle that without stewing in endless guilt?
You wrote, “It seems risky to the goal of being a moral person to get in the habit of transcending guilt.” But it’s also morally risky to stay in guilt mode: That doesn’t actually help anyone, and it can just keep your attention resignedly centered on yourself.
Instead, guilt — like anger — is meant to be a useful indicator. It’s there to tell you when you’ve acted out of line with your values. But like other indicators in our lives (think: the smoke alarm), it’s counterproductive or even harmful to just sit with it too long. The point is to change your behavior: Make amends! Run out of the burning house!
I suspect guilt about angry outbursts is sticky for you, though, because of the family mythology you developed growing up. At age 13 — an age when we can’t easily differentiate between the emotion of anger itself (innocent) and a particular expression of it (problematic) — you came to the conclusion that you didn’t want to be like your mom. That’s super understandable. It’s common for us to develop family mythologies where we talk about ourselves or our siblings as being “like mom” or “like dad.” But those mythologies can inadvertently do us a major disservice. I’d encourage you to revisit yours now, as an adult.
You specify that to you, being “like mom” means being “an angry person.” But is there such a thing? The truth is, all humans get angry. In fact, all mammals experience reactive aggression; it’s part of the mammalian response to a perceived threat or stressor — the “fight” part of the “fight or flight” response.
From the point of view of the nervous system, there’s no “justified” versus “unjustified” anger; a threat is perceived, so anger arises. While some people may have less impulse control or be less skilled at managing their behavioral response to anger, these things are on a spectrum and they’re alterable. Anger is not a person’s fixed essence.
A cornerstone of Buddhism — the idea of anatta — is instructive here. Anatta means that a person has no permanent fixed essence. There is no static “me.” My self is always changing because it’s subject to different causes and conditions in the environment: whether my family says encouraging or hurtful things to me, whether I experience a traumatizing war or live in peacetime, whether I have enough nutrition or not, and so on. Same for your mom, and same for you.
If we look at anger through this lens, we see it not as some irrational madness that suddenly takes possession of an individual (à la Seneca and other Western philosophers), but as a response to the conditions in the person’s life. Maybe they’ve endured trauma and, as an adaptive response, they developed a hair-trigger reaction to any perceived threat, making them quick to anger. Maybe they were exposed to aggression at a young age and that diminished their brain’s capacity for impulse control. Maybe they haven’t had an opportunity to learn more skillful ways of expressing their feelings.
Viewing anger this way, we naturally feel an upswelling of compassion. That’s not to say we excuse the behavior, but we understand a bit more where it’s coming from, so we’re less likely to demonize the other person or be angry at them in turn.
The beauty of this is that we’re also less likely to demonize ourselves when we have an angry outburst. We know that we, like all other humans, get angry because we’re humans and we have certain conditions acting upon us. That doesn’t mean we get to be complacent and give free rein to anger when it arises. But it means that we don’t stew in guilt, or in fear of being “an angry person.” If anything, we stew in compassion.
And this, to me, is Athena’s second transformation. It’s the realization that we can actually use anger as a doorway to a really radical compassion, turning “furies” into “kindly ones.”
By all means, keep practicing the first transformation — the mindful constraining of how you behaviorally express anger. But in those inevitable moments when you slip up and get reactive, can you recognize that as evidence that you’re a human animal who is affected by her inner and outer environment? Smile compassionately at your anger and say: Yep, still human!
—Sigal Samuel, senior reporter
