I love anger. In my atypical Jewish family, it was somehow always acceptable to express anger and rage as and when it came up which, for me, was all the time. We were a yelling family with a mother who, in summer, would admonish us not to shut up but to close the windows.
As a young adult — first in college and then beyond — I could see that this freedom would not always put me in the best light. It was one thing to let loose in my family home with people I didn’t like and whose opinions I didn’t care anything about. It was quite another to be living with people I did like and who, for their own reasons, weren’t necessarily big fans of living out loud. I later came to see that they were actually part of a very large majority when, as a therapist, most every client I had came from a place where anger was not appreciated, not felt, not expressed, and certainly not processed. So now it was clear: the knee-jerk, constant expression of anger and rage whenever it arose was not a winning strategy but neither was ignoring it as though it wasn’t actually lurking inside one’s human experience. Got it.
Then I became the Spiritual Workout guy and, more generally, the consciousness guy, and that’s when I began to see anger — starting with my own — in completely new ways. I learned that anger was not the end of the line. I learned that it was not something to be managed. I…
