Often it is simply impossible to do anything constructive with anger. So techniques like the one in the article are useful, it's not a dismissal of anger as a valid emotion. The goal is to reduce redirected aggression.

Anger becomes unproductive because we shame it and suppress it over and over and over. If we knew how to express anger in a healthy way, we wouldn't need to do that (with the exception of edge cases, like a physical hormonal imbalance)

It is literally impossible for me to think objectively while angry.

Is it possible for you to think objectively when you're feeling sad? Or afraid? Or tired? Or horny? Or in love?

Because of this, do you believe anger should always be suppressed, and never expressed or engaged with?

Could you give examples of healthy expressions of or engagements with anger?

Anger can give you the energy to address an uncomfortable issue that would otherwise remain suppressed. For example your partner doesn't do the dishes. You become angry and confront your partner on the subject.

Now there is an opportunity for you two to work through the issue, and the partner has to feel some of the emotional impact of their behavior, preventing them from dismissing it.

If that issue remained unaddressed, you might deal with the stress by reducing your view of your partner as a capable thoughtful individual, which is a much harder situation to address than a difficult emotional conversation.

Not the person you replied to, but yes. "I feel angry that you keep touching my leg. Maybe you're even unaware that you're doing it, I don't know. Will you stop touching my leg?"

David Whyte has a excellent passage about anger, from his book "Consolations". I'm not sure if this is an excerpt or the full thing (don't have the book on me to check), but in either case it's worth reading: https://www.dannabeal.com/understanding-anger-david-whyte/

The world is nothing but edge cases. Expressing anger requires cooperation. If someone doesn’t want to listen, and you express anger at them anyway, is it not abuse?

I appreciate you pointing this out. If we force someone to listen to our anger, we can see it as abuse. If we force someone to suppress their anger, we can see it as normal. It's almost as if we might normalize suppression and demonize expression.

And it's not just anger. If I want to express verbal affection towards someone and they don't want to hear it, we often call it abuse. But if they want me to suppress verbal affection towards them and I don't want to, we celebrate it as them having boundaries.

And I think sometimes being forced to not say something can hurt as much as being forced to hear something, yet we don't seem to see how it harms people.

That depends on whether they're a legitimate object of your anger. If someone injures you and then ignores your complaints, no it's not abuse to be angry with them.

I mean I think it depends on how the anger surfaces to determine whether its abuse. Yelling and screaming and throwing things, absolutely. But the reason we're scared of anger is because we don't know how to communicate and express it in a healthy way.

But you can also process anger solo with the right tools, or with a good therapist that doesn't shame anger. It doesn't always have to involve another person.

The evolutionary use of anger is to disincentivize others from mistreating you.

I wish my computer understood this when I get angry at it. Unfortunately, many (most?) times that I get angry are because things outside my control aren't working the way I feel that they should, whether they're human, animate, or inanimate. Or even me.

Aside from academic interest, I struggle to see the practical benefit of this study. When I'm angry, in the heat of the moment, there's no way I'm going to stop and write an essay about my feelings. By the time I am in a frame of mind to do so, the anger has passed and not a problem anymore.

And the evolutionary use of shaming anger is to facilitate continued mistreatment.

I strongly agree. I don't think it's only anger that we suppress, but rather emotions in general, especially higher intensity ones. I think emotions are one of the most powerful tools we have for communicating with each other, especially when we pair the physical expression with words detailing the deeper contexts, and yet we seem to somehow think emotional expression is maladaptive. It confounds me and frustrates me and saddens me all at the same time.

Yes, strong emotions are almost always shamed. We need to learn to process those emotions and accept them, not suppress them. Suppressing never works forever, because the emotion is still there, and it will surface one way or another eventually.

And also to express them to others. This is where I think it gets tricky, or has for me. I built an app for micro-journaling how I felt and I got really good at answering "How do I feel?" "What's happening?" And yet when I say these things to others, it can cause huge conflicts because they don't want us to talk about how we feel and I do. A suppression vs expression fight and it seems to happen with almost everyone I meet.

So for me, I feel confident to process and accept them by myself, it's when I communicate them with others it can bring lots of conflict, and yet, if I only express them to myself and not to others, they don't often achieve their function of communication, which I think may be one of the core functions of emotions.

> Anger ends up being destructive because we think we have to suppress it or neutralize it. This just increases its strength over time until it explodes out violently.

Dunno.

One are going to end up in alot of avoidable verbal and physical fights if ones anger is not suppressed.

Just such a simple thing as the comment answer timer on HN helps alot.

The very fact that you believe that anger leads to verbal and physical fights proves OP’s point. When anger can be let out without the culture at large thinking of it as a threat that needs to be neutralized, and instead a charge that needs to be addressed, anger isn’t harmful, it’s constructive and instrumental.

Anger normally points out a boundary that’s being breached in which valuable things to a self - like autonomy, comfort, connection - are compromised. That we have so many angry people and that our culture encourages anger management rather than anger processing points to its rejection writ large

And maybe it does lead to fights when it's let out but little and contextually appropriate fights, and then the people dig deeper and gain a better understanding of their situations.

Anger can tell people that we want them to stop doing an activity and sometimes people don't even know their behavior is breaching those boundaries. One time an ex visited me in a park. I juggled the soccer ball then kicked it to her. She rolled it back and said she didn't want to play. I juggled it for 15 more minutes and then kicked it to her again. She stood up and kicked it with me for like 5 minutes.

Three weeks later, she got angry and said "And you don't respect my boundaries!" And I was really confused. She said, "I TOLD you I didn't want to kick the ball and you still kicked it to me."

I wished she had expressed more anger when I kicked it the second time. I wasn't trying to make her angry. Kicking the ball with her wasn't that important to me. I just didn't know that it bothered her that much and if I did, I immediately would have stopped.

totally. Smaller conflicts are much more manageable and keep people in connection so much more than repressing it.

Exactly that, "keep people in connection." I love how you framed it. When we suppress the conflict, we distance more and more from each other and from ourselves, disconnecting more and more.

Yes possibly there will be more fights. Anger is a fighting emotion. But that doesn't mean fighting is bad either. We often suppress fights and conflict, especially verbal ones, and avoid them until they accumulate so many facets and get so loud that we can't ignore them and then hit each other with years of grievances.

I think it's not only ok to verbally fight but helps us resolve conflict instead of avoid it.

And I think if we can resolve it at the verbal level it doesn't have to become physical.

But I think the cultural suppression of fighting/conflict is even deeper than the suppression of anger. A friend just asked for our definitions of peace and I said I currently believe it's a mythical concept where conflict doesn't exist.

Anger results in verbal and physical fights because it gets suppressed and shamed for long enough until it explodes out. A better route is understanding the anger and the underlying emotion it's protecting (often shame) before it becomes a problem.

Well, I’ll take both fixing the symptoms ( loved one can’t control their anger and hurts everyone around them ) and the syndrom ( therapy sessions to understand the cause of the anger ).

Now, based on my experience dealing with such situations around me, some people have difficulties considering they should even talk to a therapist. They will violently reject the very idea they might have a problem, and will keep hurting people around them. Controlling anger allows having a discussion in the first place, which then can turn into the understanding you’re talking about.

> This attitude is a problem in our society

Need to clarify which society is meant by "our".

The authors of this paper are Japanese, and the participants are local university students. I would assume suppression of anger is the norm for most people involved in this study, since Japanese culture generally aims to preserve harmony.

This is in contrast with some cultures that are more direct in their communications and perhaps not suppressing much at all. It's possible that they would see different results when the experiment is done with a more diverse group of participants.

If you wish to convince others of your views, you'll have to provide a lot more than assertions.

As per the article - [..] can sometimes lead to [..]. I don't know how clearer the article can be, there is no proposed "solution" here that solves everything in every scenario. Its simply testing a hypothesis.

Monks of various religious dispositions, or even just secular meditation adepts, seem to disprove this easily.

A friend of mine went to a Zen Buddhist monastery for a month to start practicing to deal with his anger. After the month he told his teacher the reason why he came - to dissipate his anger - and his teacher told him that he had nothing to teach him because the fact that he was feeling his anger was the practice of mindfulness. The teacher told him he’d be better off leaving the monastery and working on the object of his anger (human-induced climate destabilization).

I think you’re appealing to the boiled down and stripped away “mindfulness” movement in the west that focuses on creating what I call “Vipassana Zombies” - people who can feel their sensations just enough to recognize and ignore them. A lot of Buddhist teachings are about empowerment and action, and they’ve been grossly misunderstood.

I am choosing to imagine that the monk called your friend to take up the battle of climate justice and revolutionary struggle, which is indeed a very mindful way to utilize anger over injustice.

"You will find peace in action. Join an eco-guerilla cell. Use your rage to guide your contribution to the cause - it is a valid emotion driven by a need for change. Long live the revolution! For Victory! For Justice! For Peace!"

haha not far off. He believes that we should be doing carbon capture by rebuilding our top soil, as that's the most sustainable way of pulling it down while continuing to feed people. He's starting a school to teach regenerative techniques to farmers.

I see it exactly opposite. A Buddhist monk would learn to experience, feel, observe, and detach from their anger, not suppress it or shame it. This is more in line what what I think we need to do.

The more you resist the anger the more it will persist.

There are neurological studies that show that anger cycles can escalate and become amplified with practice. That's not what we want.

Acknowledge your anger, yes. Then acknowledge your control, not only over how you express it, but even over whether you feel angry or not. It is possible to develop the skill to stop being angry. This is far more important than going with the flow.

It's often a bitter pill to swallow, because it means the people that act out of anger, or are always angry, are ultimately responsible for how they feel. It is not someone else's fault you feel angry.

“the skill to stop being angry”

Often that amounts to changing the people or circumstances in one’s life. That’s the point of therapy. A good therapist wouldn’t help a sexually abused child stay in a bad situation and just learn to suppress emotion. Well maybe a cbt therapist would. But a good therapist would try to help catalyze a change in the situation causing the trauma.

The neurological studies to which you refer point to the neurological phenomenon, but you’re mapping that to a single possibility for the psychological process that is coupled with the physical phenomenon, namely, that anger monotonically amplifies over time when reinforced, perhaps to some asymptotic steady state that’s greater than a normative baseline

An equally valid narrative is that, especially in our society where most people have repressed anger, once anger is tapped into, there’s an overwhelm of backlogged emotion that is also released. Anger as an emotion is energetically expensive for a biological system, and it doesn’t make any sense that it would continue to be reinforced indefinitely.

Monks are doing it on easy mode. They have nothing to anger them, zero triggers. It’s the whole point of hermeticism. Remove all sources of stress. Desire nothing. Of course they aren’t angry, they have nothing; nothing to feel angry about.

Totally agree, and I’d go further to say that the reason we don’t want to go near anger as a society is because we don’t know how to grieve. To tap into grief means allowing people to need resources like time and human attention that we’ve over leveraged into economic activity.

My mom passed away about 15 months ago, and while I have worked in emotional expression for 12 years, her passing had me feeling the most raw. I think one main thing that happened with grief for me is that I felt things so intensely, the full spectrum, and it became really hard to not suppress those feelings.

So I think the broader picture is not just grief, but feelings, especially intense feelings. If I feel sad, I want to cry, not work. If I feel tired, I want to sleep, not work. If I fall in love, I want to be with that person, not work. I think many if not most feelings can get in the way of our maximum productivity states. Maybe low level anger and focus, with a little bit of playfulness, can keep us productive, but stray too far outside of that and we don't look as productive.

I would argue, however, that we might be more productive in the long-term, because otherwise we may burn out, communicate less effectively, and become more desensitized to what people need and want, both from consumers and fellow producers.

Plenty of counterexamples. Road rage is one

Why does anger become so bad that it results in road rage? Because we suppress it and shame it, until it has no choice but to surface destructively. And then rather than try to understand the anger, we just double down on suppressing it more, which leads to ever increasing levels of explosive anger

You don't think road rage can be the a manifestation of suppressed anger from other parts of ones life?

I think road rage is a prime example of what OP mentioned: anger bottling up because it repeatedly wasn't expressed and then it shoots out like a hose, 100% of the anger being directed at someone who maybe contributed 2% to the person's underlying anger.