Denying or Indulging Anger: Not a Good Idea

DenyIndulgeAngerOn April 2, 2012, a 43-year-old former nursing student named One L. Goh walked into Oikos University in Oakland, California and killed six people and wounded three others with a .45 caliber handgun. After the shooting Goh called his father who told him to turn himself in.

Jay Caspian Kang a Korean-American, wanted to find out why Goh had committed this shocking act of violence. Kang was planning to write a book about school shootings and talking to Goh later in jail revealed that he too was Korean.  Speaking about his father to Kang, Goh said, “You know, my father is a pretty typical Korean guy.” Kang replied, “I told him I knew what that meant.” What that “meant” ought to concern all Americans; what that “meant” should set off warning alarms around the country; what that “meant” is that there is a growing disease in the minds of Americans which is more virulent among the Korean-American population. That disease is called “anger.” We need to understand why?

On April 16, 2007, Korean-American Seung-Hue Cho massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech University. In 2012 Kang published a novel in which the main character thinks about Seung-Hue Cho and struggles with his own repressed anger. Later, following the Oikos shooting a friend sent an e-mail to Kang: “We did it again.”

“Two Korean-American men, five years apart, walked into their former places of education and executed innocent students. This, by definition, is a coincidence, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a single Korean-American who feels that way. I have no idea whether these killings came out of han or hwabyung or some other shared heritage, but it’s clear that the search for an explanation is far more threatening to the Korean-American community than whatever the actual answer might be.” Like humanity in general, Korean-Americans cannot find the courage to face the dragons contained in their P-B narrative.

Kang, the author of the paragraph above is correct that it is no coincidence that two of the shooters of recent mass killings are Korean-Americans. We will find out why in a moment. Secondly, broadening the search for causes of the increasing levels of violence in general in America, we will also find that the answer to this phenomenon is also more accessible than we might imagine.

In his own search for why “we did it again,” Kang began with excursions into the Korean-American community and found that virtually no one wanted to talk about what had happened. This behavior that he would eventually reveal was invisible to the larger American community. “For now, nobody in the mainstream media was drawing the link between One Goh and Seung-Hui Cho, and although all the Koreans I spoke with were well aware that two of the six bloodiest school shootings in American history were carried out by Korean gunmen, most of the people here were hoping to bury that fact.” Here is the common human behavior of denial and it is a key clue to our search for the explanation of mass-shootings in the U.S.

Why the prevalence of denial and why was it so strong in these immigrant communities? One Korean-American community leader in Oakland blamed the killings on socioeconomic factors. Kang was politely escorted out of two separate Korean churches and met with cold-shoulders in attempt after attempt to find out what people were thinking. Finally, the cause of the fear began to emerge. “Overwhelmingly, the sentiment among the older Korean people I talked to was this: The shooting was a shameful act that would bring trouble on the community if publicized and discussed.”

After both massacres Kang found that many people in Korean-American communities circled the wagons to ward off attention and hope that their nightmares would quickly fade.  “And all the people I tried to talk to in and around Oakland who wouldn’t speak with me, who ushered me out of churches and cultural centers or grimly waved me off—their silence, protected so forcefully, spoke to the intensity of their shame.”

We have uncovered the reactions of fear, denial and shame; let’s go a little deeper. Shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre, Kang was having a drink with a Korean-American friend in Upper Manhattan. “He confessed that he felt violently angry nearly every day but couldn’t understand why.” A few years later with this same friend, at the site of the shooting at Oikos University, Kang’s friend noted that both shooters had described their fathers as “typically Korean.”

Obviously the reactions of fear, denial, shame and anger are of a different magnitude among Korean-American males than in the American population as a whole. Why? For the answer to that question we return to the two Korean words, han and hwabyung. These two Korean cultural concepts have no equivalent in the English language (although the reactions they represent are common in the conditioned behavior of virtually all of humanity). “Both describe a state of hopeless, crippling sadness combined with anger at an unjust world. And both suggest entrapment by suppressed emotions.” These suppressed afflictive emotions end up in what is obviously the very dark shadow of many angry Korean-American males.

“Perhaps the best way to distinguish between the two words would be to say that han is the existential condition of immutable sadness [life is suffering], hwabyung is its physical manifestation [reaction]. Those afflicted with hwabying describe a dense helplessness and despair that always feels on the verge of erupting into acts of self-destruction.”

We know that our identity is determined by our story and that identity drives our behavior. What is this Korean-American identity (beliefs, attitudes and values) that hides or attempts to hide so much anger? Kang makes another important contribution to our investigation. “I don’t mean to say that there’s something faulty and irreparable in the Korean psyche, but these shootings have become part of our identity, and they come, at least in part—and possibly in large part—from a place that many of us know instinctively.” Kang was speaking of the Korean “us” but he could have been speaking for all of humanity.

Winston Chung, a 38-year-old Bay area child psychiatrist, who wrote “Korean Rage: Stereotype or Real Issue?” on his blog, indicates that he is zeroing in on the issue that concerns us in this essay. “He described his family as “typically Korean,” which to Chung meant that his parents attended a Korean church, suppressed traumatic events and rarely showed emotion, save for the occasional angry, even violent outburst. ‘In Korean culture’ Chung explained, ‘denial and avoidance are the status quo.’” In Korea, han and hwabyung are now treated as a clinical disease. In America denial and avoidance are the status quo also but have yet to be classified as a clinical disease. Perhaps they should be.

Most Americans are adept at repressing their emotions but we do not do it the same way or for the same reasons. Continuing to flee from our suffering is the core problem that drives all human self-destructive behavior and Kang reveals why we will continue to see more angry shooters emerge from both the Korean-American immigrant community and from within the global village community at large. “And even though I’ve felt the same slow burn inside myself for much of my own life, I could not bring myself to ask him [Winston Chung] about it.”

The human intellect can be very fluent cranking out theories and conclusions that may sound reasonable at first blush. Many of these constructs synthesized as they are from the basic assumptions found in P-B cannot withstand the scrutiny of human reason grounded in Simple Reality. The pop psychology “How to … books scroll through the best seller lists in a never-ending stream each one fading quickly to make way for the next faddish formula that promises to show us how to cope with our self-created illusions.

Diana Rico in her Ode Magazine article “Prelude to Courage” trumpets the benefits of anger. In the context of P-A we know anger to be an afflictive emotion, a reaction to patterns of conditioning that are anything but positive no matter how they are expressed. The healthy goal with any afflictive emotion is to exercise our authentic power to transform our habitual expressions from reactions to responses thereby transcending the resultant pain and suffering.

Rico’s initial conclusions would arouse suspicion in any practitioner of mindfulness meditation. According to the article anger can:

  • Improve health
  • Enhance intimacy
  • Spur creativity
  • Inspire social change.

Anger Improves Health

The evidence for these claims is more than a little specious. Let’s take “anger can improve health.” What does mainstream science say about the relationship between anger and health. “According to a 2010 University of Valencia study, this universal emotion raises heart rate and arterial tension, which can stress the body, and increases testosterone production, preparing us for aggression.” So far nothing positive connecting anger and health! But we did see a connection between anger and reaction in the Korean-American community and it definitely wasn’t healthy.

Leon Seltzer, a clinical psychologist says in Rico’s article that: “Anger is the one emotion that mobilizes every organ and muscle group.” The body responds to what it perceives as a threat, activating our primal fight-or-flight response [what we in P-A call a reaction]. Repeated stimulation of fight-or-flight can weaken the immune system and exhaust the body … Studies have also linked unregulated anger to headaches, colds and flu, as well as to increased risks of stroke, hypertension, gastrointestinal illnesses, and coronary heart disease.” Still we have not come to the benefits associated with the experience of “unregulated anger.”

We’ve introduced the relationship between anger and the physical body, how about its relationship to mental health? Rico admits that she was taught to be submissive to men and stuff her anger in her Puerto Rican family. “I was in the thrall of what psychologists call passive anger, meaning that the anger came out in other ways—such as self-sacrifice, self-sabotage and self-blame.”

The plot thickens as psychotherapist John Lee, author of Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately and The Anger Solution, applies human reason to defining anger and how to express it in a healthy way. “Basically, anger is a feeling [emotion]. Rage is an action or a behavior that numbs people’s feelings [reaction]. Biochemically when you are in a state of rage, you’ve moved from your prefrontal lobe ‘down to your midbrain, where you can only fight, be in flight or freeze,’ says Lee. That’s why rage is uncontrollable—and frightening. But with healthy anger, you’re still in your prefrontal lobe, where [you’re] capable of managing your responses.”

Rico’s third conclusion is that by expressing anger, many negative health consequences can be mitigated or avoided. As we proceed through the article, listening to the “experts” on how to express anger, we might feel the need to challenge their conclusions.

Anger Enhances Intimacy

John Lee posits something he calls “healthy anger.” “Healthy anger draws people into conversation.” Most of us have been in those anger-driven conversations and few of us would call them healthy. “If I express anger appropriately, you’re going to stay open and listen and in the process you’re going to stay open and get to know me better.”  Simple Reality teaches us that expressing anger is “expressly” what we don’t want to do and the only “self” we are going to get to know when we express our anger is our false self.

Psychotherapist Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships, also talks about healthy anger. “Healthy anger requires us to define ourselves and to be the best expert on what values, priorities and desires are not negotiable under relationship pressures … It requires us to change our part in the relationship patterns from which our anger springs.”  It is not healthy anger that provides the motivation in a relationship to choose response over reaction, it is compassion.  However, Lerner is correct in that our “patterns” or conditioned behaviors must be changed if we want all of our relationships including that relationship with Simple Reality itself to be healthy.

Anger Spurs Creativity

In his book Anger, Madness, and the Daemonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity psychologist Stephen Diamond sees anger as a form of creativity. “Diamond looked at the creative process of such artists as Picasso and Beethoven, Richard Wright and Jackson Pollock, and discovered expressive impulses fed by anger.” He could just have easily discovered the “expressive impulses” fed by alcoholism, lust, egotism, self-loathing or a sense of inferiority. The above mentioned artists were living lives characterized by the same suffering that we are all familiar with. While in the act of creation they were not experiencing afflictive emotions of any kind, they were experiencing the “flow” of that connection to the Implicate Order that is the source of all human creativity. For them, being in the NOW was, as it is for all of us, an experience of the blessings of peace, joy, happiness, freedom and compassion.

What the authors and studies cited in this essay fail to recognize is that afflictive energy whether we call it anger, jealousy or fear is just that—energy. It is more than a little confusing for readers and those in therapy to be the victims of the human intellect that thrives on elaboration, theorizing and ultimately obfuscation rather than the simple recognition that energy is energy and we are not the victims of our energy—we choose how our energy is to be expressed—and anger is a self-destructive way to express it. Through the use of meditation and The Point of Power Practice we can choose to use that energy in creative ways including the transmutation of energy into compassion.

Our Muse, our source of inspiration, is anything but anger. Creativity is “inspired,” it is literally, the “spirit within.” That creative spirit is the Implicate Order, the source of all of Creation. Both anger and the intellect will block genuine creative expression.

Anger Inspires Social Change

Rico cites the energy of anger as driving the social changes in Gandhi’s India, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, America’s women’s suffrage and civil-rights movements, and current Native American Indian expressions of anger seeking redress of long standing grievances. We might all want to think that substantive progress has been made in creating sustainable and just human communities as the result of anger-driven social change. The facts are made abundantly clear in Simple Reality that virtually all human energy including anger is an expression of the false-self survival strategy and no amount of relative and illusory “social change” will ultimately change the disastrous and inevitable outcome of P-B and the collective human identity derived from that paradigm.

There is no question that anger is increasing as humanity continues in its process of self-destruction. The British Mental Health Foundation report (2008) showed that “a majority of the [British] population believe that people in general are getting angrier.” In August 2010 CNN released a poll “in which 70 percent of Americans described themselves as angry.”

Not surprisingly, people are not only getting angrier but feel more hopeless because they have no effective way of dealing with their anger or the anger of others. This leads to a Catch 22 situation because “as people feel increasingly powerless over their circumstances, their anger levels go up.”

Rock musician and actor Anand Bhatt speaks from his personal experience not his anxiety-driven and angry mental narrative. Speaking of his meditations he says “I began to realize that others weren’t to blame. I was responsible for my own reactions and emotions.” After hearing Bhatt’s response Rico wonders, “Might it be possible, then, not only to accept responsibility for one’s feelings but develop real compassion for one’s wounds.” The very thoughtful article by Diana Rico crosses the mine-field of over-heated intellects and ultimately arrives at a fundamental P-A principle.

In his book Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective, the Dalai Lama, speaking of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, describes the power we all have of choosing response (compassion) over reaction (anger). “Even if there is a likelihood of some feeling [emotion] of anger arising, we deliberately check ourselves and try to reduce that, and try to deliberately develop a feeling of compassion toward the Chinese.” Notice that the Dalai Lama is not recommending either the repression or the expression of anger. “And so, in the face of the understanding that one’s oppressors are suffering human souls who deserve compassion, all anger disappears.”

There is a danger in letting the intellect define a paradigm (P-B) and the resultant identity (powerless victim). We can over-think or rationalize or even label reactions as healthy when they are the fundamental cause of all human suffering and dysfunction.  So what do we do with anger? We don’t suppress it. We don’t express it. We transcend it. That’s how anger is handled by a truly conscious person; that’s the result we could all experience using the authentic power contained within the narrative of Simple Reality.

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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I?  The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival

 

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