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When do we need to be angry?
When do we need to be angry?
You might be asking yourself: when is it okay to become angry? Or perhaps: when should I express my anger? Normally, we react in an aggressive fashion as our instinctive and natural expression of anger. You have to understand that anger is an emotion which we rely on when threatened. It spurs us to act to save our skins. So, when our survival is at stake, expressing your anger may be required to a certain extent. For example, we could be caught in a traffic jam and then someone blows his top. If the person were to jump from his car and head ranting and raving in your direction, your first reaction would be fear, then you would get angry yourself: I'm caught in the same traffic jam, I'm hot and bothered too - why is this guy after ME? Your choice then would be to either flee or face the angry individual. Either way, your sole concern would be your safety at the moment. Or perhaps your car overturned and you need to get out fast. By getting angry, we trigger a range of physiological responses that allow us to produce the energy that will help us find our way out of the wrecked car before it explodes. There have also been reports of people who have been able to lift significantly heavy objects during moments of crises - only to find out when they have calmed down that they could not lift the same objects at all. It is all part of the flight-or-fight response. Getting angry may not be as dramatic as a car wreck. There is such a thing as righteous anger - religious people would probably be familiar with this, especially followers of Christianity. This is the type of anger which allows you to be indignant when you hear about or witness an event which goes against your values. Righteous anger allows the angry person to become a catalyst for change. You could be at a supermarket and see an adult physically abusing a child - your righteous anger would help you to speak out and ask the adult not to do that. On a broader scale, we have seen examples of righteous anger when the Blacks in South Africa fought against apartheid. Without righteous anger, people would be apathetic and be too afraid to speak out against wrongs. With this kind of anger, individuals are able to initiate changes in their society. Another time that anger can be a positive emotion would be when we are in a situation that severely threatens us. As we mentioned, teenagers have lately been murdering schoolmates and teachers (an example being the recent killings of 32 people at Virginia Tech in the USA) - if you were one of the potential victims and a gun was pointed at your head, you might have gotten angry yourself. It may not have been an overt type of anger where you would yell and punch someone, but you would probably have felt hostile emotions towards the kid with the gun. In this case, that type of anger would be positive since it allows us to stay on our toes and look for the next available exit, when possible. Without anger, we would probably be passive and miss out on an opportunity to escape. Or we could use our anger to tackle the teen with the gun and disarm him.
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