I think I may have a new hero. Yes, one who displaces the team of researchers who have long held the top slot in my pantheon of greats – the one which posited that most teenagers are awful not because they suffer from low self-esteem but have rather too much of the stuff.
Isn’t that brilliant? I’m going to give us all a moment just to admire this matchless insight – the sheer, unadulterated beauty and good sense of it. The way it jibes with everything we know about human nature, with everything we remember from our own adolescence, how much less mental gymnasticking it takes to understand teenage strops, angst, rudeness and all the vile rest of it as a product of thinking you’re absolutely too great for the world you’re moving in instead of too inadequate. It’s how I imagine a mathematician must feel watching an equation simplify and come right.
Anyway. Good as that is and they were, the team’s reign is over. Sam Parker is my new man, my pole star, my homie, my ride-or-die – delete according to taste, age and/or demographic. For he has written a book, and that book is called Good Anger and the title alone has been enough to blow my tiny mind.
Good Anger. I mean… what? The idea – the idea that anyone can even entertain the idea! – that anger might be allowable, that it might be capable of being channelled as a force for good is the most profound, absurd, frightening, liberating one I have ever heard. It appeals to me on a cellular level. Mostly because my cells are all poisoned by repressed rage.
I was raised, like most people, and certainly most girls, not to express anger. In fact, I was raised not to express most things, from hunger to happiness, unless explicitly asked. That’s northern Catholicism for you.
But only now do I find myself questioning this policy of anger denial. I have questioned the others over the years (hunger first, otherwise you don’t have strength for the rest). But anger is the last redoubt. Because to deny the existence, expression or legitimacy of negative emotion seems, on the face of it, very sensible, does it not? After all, where is it going to get you, shouting at someone or trying to kick them in the face? Nowhere except possibly the police station or crown court. Plus, at 5ft 2in, I was unlikely even to have the satisfaction of successfully connecting with someone’s face before I was hauled off to jail. The whole thing was a non-starter.
Except of course that a moment’s actual, independent thought – or reading a few pages of a book in which someone has distilled the results of five years of thinking about it for you – reveals that the project is fundamentally flawed in a million different ways.
square WILL GORE I breakfast in bed every morning – it’s a game changer
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For a start, anger is… anger. It is not aggression, not violence, nor even hostility. It is, as Parker and the vast phalanx of doctors and psychologists he has interviewed for their expertise and understanding of our stupid little human brains and how they will warp and implode under, say, massive cultural and/or religious conditioning, especially when it is conducted by generations of formidable battleaxes fuelled by Crimplene and gin. I may have added that last part. My apologies. But part of Parker’s book is about the ways in which repressed rage can manifest itself at odd moments, so perhaps he will forgive me. And if not WELL, LET’S TAKE IT OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW, COME ON.
Where was I? Oh yes. Anger is an emotion, not an action. It may lead you – especially if you think you’ve a chance of getting away with it – to kick someone in the head, but it is not synonymous with that. Moreover, it is an emotion that can be inspired both legitimately and illegitimately.
For example, yesterday on the train I was enraged by the fact that someone had called their children Crystal and Dylan and that that was too many Ys – and one too many Crystals – for a single family unit. This was not legitimate. Becoming enraged by them running up and down an overheated train carriage, y(y)elling at the tops of their voyces, however, was. And what did I do with that rage? I sat on it, of course. I said nothing. I expressed no feelings outwardly and came home and drank until my stress headache was replaced by a hangover.
You see, I’m sure, the problem. We are a nation – possibly a world – of people unable to express a legitimate feeling healthily. This cannot be a good thing. It costs sufferers psychologically and emotionally as it feeds into depression and anxiety, and – if you keep it up for long enough – physically too.
Imagine if we could treat it as we treat any other primary emotion, like happiness, sadness or fear. (I include hunger here too, but believe medical opinion dissents. FAT FKNG DOCTORS. Sorry, it’s happening again.) Imagine if we could use it as God/evolution intended – as information, as our brains and bodies trying to tell us something is amiss and that we should seek to rectify not the feeling but the thing.
What a strangely peaceable world, with no more internal wars raging, or bursting their bounds at inopportune moments it could be if we let all our good anger out.
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