Val wants to master his anger.
And he realizes that anger is an appropriate response to some situations
and an inappropriate response to other situations.
And assuming he’s neurotypical and healthy, Val will have mastered anger when he can determine
when anger is an appropriate response to a situation and when it’s not.
And the causes of inappropriate anger are two misunderstandings: the misunderstanding
of necessity and the misunderstanding of effectiveness.
Let’s start by taking a look at necessity.
Like most people, Val’s anger first arises when he feels he has been wronged, harmed,
or some injustice has been done against him.
Anger arises as a necessity, so that he can respond to the current situation effectively.
But how does Val know if his interpretation of the situation is correct?
Has an injustice actually been done to him?
His answer to this question is really important to know, so let’s take a look at an example.
Imagine Val driving through the city, and suddenly, a car cuts him off.
How Val interprets this situation determines whether or not he’ll get angry.
The first interpretation is that the person in the other car tried to get ahead at his
expense.
Val feels an injustice has been done to him, and anger begins to arise.
In the second interpretation, Val believes the other person has somewhere really important
to be.
Maybe he’s rushing to the hospital because his child is sick or his wife is pregnant.
And Val believes that, really, he’s in the way of the other driver, and Val feels he
would be doing an injustice to him by not allowing him to get ahead.
Anger never arises in this situation.
In each situation, the arrival of anger depends on Val’s interpretation.
It depends on whether he believes an injustice has been done against him, and it depends
on whether he believes anger to be necessary or not.
So how does he avoid the misunderstanding of necessity?
He needs to, as much as he can, create space and time to gain clarity.
He needs to confirm or disconfirm whether an injustice has actually been committed,
and he should seek proof.
But in the absence of proof, Val will have to make one of two presumptions: either he
will have to presume innocence on behalf of the other person or he will have to presume
guilt.
If he believes he lives in a fair place, presumption of innocence is the smarter choice.
But if he lives in a land of thieves, presumption of guilt is the smarter choice.
Making the wrong presumption is more likely to lead to the inappropriate use of anger.
But let’s say that an injustice has been done, and Val feels that he’s been wronged.
This brings me to the next misunderstanding: the misunderstanding of effectiveness.
Once Val’s anger arises, he needs to channel it into an effective action.
And an effective action is one that restores justice or rebalances the scales.
But how certain is Val that his action will restore justice?
And why?
Let’s go back to the scenario where Val was cut off in traffic, and let’s look at
some potential responses.
The first response: Val decides he will cut the other driver off to get revenge, but this
creates a cycle of them speeding up to pass one another, until eventually, one of them
gets into an accident.
In the second response, Val reports the other driver to the police, who promptly takes the
reckless driver off the road and keeps the streets safer.
In this case, Val might have prevented an accident from happening.
In each situation, the appropriateness of anger depends on how effective Val’s action
is at restoring justice.
So how does he avoid the misunderstanding of effectiveness?
Again, he needs to create space and time to gain clarity.
He needs to confirm or disconfirm whether his action will restore justice, and he should
seek proof.
And in the absence of proof, Val will again have to make one of two presumptions: either
he presumes it’s better to take action or he presumes it’s not.
If he believes the environment is fair and justice will be acted without his intervention,
it’s smarter not to take action.
But if he’s in an unfair environment where justice won’t take place without his intervention,
it’s smarter to take action.
And like before, making the wrong presumption is more likely to lead to the inappropriate
use of anger.
So in the end, Val’s mastery over anger depends on his ability to answer two questions
correctly: have I actually been wronged or harmed in anyways?
And will my action fix that wrong?
And his greatest assets for answering these questions correctly are time and space to
find out the truth.
And ideally, through action and feedback, Val can get better at answering these questions
correctly.
And most of us are like Val, caught in the middle between two extremes: perfect judgment
on one end, and completely corrupted judgment on the other end.
And the more correctly we can answer these two questions, the more we perfect our judgment,
and the more we master our anger and move to the right, but the more incorrectly we
answer these questions, the more our judgment becomes corrupted, the more our anger masters
us and the more we move to the left.
So
what will it be?