Sermon Excerpt: The Myth of Ventilating Your Anger

Jesus didn’t tell you to forgive just because it was good for someone else. He told you to forgive because it is good for you. Forgiveness is absolutely necessary for your own wholeness.

Now I have a question for you. Just for a minute, put on your Oprah Winfrey/Jerry Springer/The View hat - whatever the talk show of the week is - and think about the messages most of our popular culture gives to us about anger. If you are watching television tomorrow and they are talking about anger - what advice are they most likely to give?

The message I think you are most likely to hear, by far, is that you should “let your feelings out.” In fact, this perspective is so endemic in our culture they may not even have to say it; it is just assumed by everyone that self-expression is critical to health. If you are angry, you should express your anger.

One of the greatest myths, or even lies, of our culture is that if you let your feelings out, if you express your anger, you will feel better. Pop psychology says we need to express ourselves, lay it on the line, tell it like it is, get “the truth” out there. We are told that our relationships will be better, “more honest” if we put everything verbally on the table.

Of course, when you have a serious grievance in a relationship, you need to resolve it in some way. It should be discussed or considered or something. But do you really need to express your anger? Does expressing your anger really improve the situation?

Last summer I very much wanted to get a good picture of my three children before the middle one left for Germany for an exchange year. Two of the kids were happy and willing to participate in this venture, but the third one was ticked off about something else and wanted nothing to do with it. So we tried to take a few pictures, and they all ended up having two beautifully smiling children and one gargoyle. And I was ticked. I mean, I was sooooo angry. Right at the very end, the gargoyle finally made one sort of half-hearted attempt to smile for the camera. And I gave up. In my anger I said to that child “You know 10 or 20 years from now you’re going to look at these pictures and say to yourself ‘I was such a jerk that day.’” “No mom,” the gargoyle said. “You are going to look back at my one smile and say “that was a lie.’”

But you know, I’m grateful for that one decent picture. I’m going to hang it on my wall someday soon. I would have done just fine without that child expressing his anger so obviously. It didn’t help me, it didn’t help him. It didn’t help the situation. Do we really have to express, physically or verbally, our every thought, in the name of honesty?
There’s a rather horrifying story in the book where A.J. Jacobs thinks he should be utterly honest about everything. In a restaurant they run into an old college friend of his wife’s. They are thrilled to see each other again. They talk for a few minutes, and then the old friend says, as you might expect “We’ll have to get together soon.” And Jacobs, in the name of honesty, turns to her and says “Well, I don’t really want any new friends right now, so I’ll take a pass on that.” At which point, his wife murdered him and his book came to an unceremonious end [LOL!].

Where did we come to confuse politeness with a lack of integrity? Where did we start to confuse discretion with outright lying? Who convinced us that we are fools to forgive too quickly - that it’s necessary and imperative and critical and socially appropriate to let everyone know just how angry you are, and then, only then, after everyone’s feelings are thoroughly hurt, can you possibly even consider letting go of your anger?

Did Jesus say, “First, blast your neighbor or your wife with every negative thought and feeling you have, make sure you have it all out of your system, and then forgive him or her?” Because if he said that, I missed it.

You see, if the cultural rule is that you should or must express your anger to be honest, there is a converse to the rule that is also a wildly popular idea - that is, if you don’t express your anger, it will dwell in you and you will have high blood pressure and heart attacks and all kinds of nasty things happen to you when the anger from within comes out and attacks you. Our anger, or so the theory goes, is a tangible thing, and it lives in us, we store it up inside and it becomes like a toxic sludge. You’ve got to ventilate it, let it out. So for your own good - you’d better not forgive too quickly.

And so we hurt people. People we care about. People we love. We think that we have to say everything on our minds, “tell the truth” as we call it, let it all out. And in so doing we cause all kinds of harm. How many times have you told someone else about someone or something else that has angered you. Do you feel better afterwards? Maybe. But do you feel better because expressing your anger has reduced it? Or do you feel better because in expressing your anger your position has been validated by your friend? Do you feel better because, in a sense, you have not so much vented your anger as rehearsed it, and now the story you have in your own mind is even more strong, more clear, you are more sure of your own rightness, your justification.

What I’m offering you here is a fairly complicated argument in very very abbreviated form. I realize there are exceptions and situations where anger can be turned into productive action. I’m talking here briefly and broadly about our tendency to think that we are helped and justified by verbalizing general every day anger at the usual frustrations in life verbally.

My ideas are from a seminal study on Anger by Carol Travers - a book I was asked to read for a class in conflict management. The book is extraordinary and it is out of print, largely because her ideas are so wildly counter-cultural. Travers argues that it isn’t always the best or the healthiest thing to express our anger in the American cultural way; she describes many cultures who handle anger in many different ways. She claims that expressing our anger verbally usually doesn’t make it go away, but makes actually makes it stronger. She claims we can do an awful lot of harm in verbalizing all of our anger in relationships and that verbalizing the anger rarely has anything to do with actually solving the underlying conflict.

I would add to Travers that verbalizing your anger - letting it out “at” someone is a very different thing from metabolizing your anger. Next time you are angry, instead of talking about it, try exercising while intentionally thinking about something else. You can give your body relief from its adrenaline induced stress without giving that stress to another person.

Peter was a fine one for expressing his anger to others verbally or through fighting. He had the nerve to tell Jesus to lay off when he was talking about going to the cross. He whipped out a sword in the garden of Gethsemane and cut off a slave’s ear with it. Peter got plenty angry, and every time Jesus looked at him, in love, and pretty much told him to chill. “Forgive, Peter.” Not once, not ever, did Jesus say “Peter, let your feelings out.”

Now just to be perfectly clear about it, Jesus did get angry. When he cleansed the temple with a whip, that seems pretty angry – and he was expressing it. BUT – he was expressing his angry in a righteous, productive way. He wasn’t being polite, but he was doing something to change the situation that needed to be changed. He didn’t just stand there yelling at people about how stupid they were. He wasn’t just venting, but taking direct action to solve a problem.