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)
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.
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.
