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Steven Stosny, PhD, is Director of CompassionPower. His interest in emotional regulation in general and in the healing power of compassion in particular grew from his childhood in a violent home.
Dr. Stosny is a consultant in family violence for the Prince George’s County Circuit and District courts, as well as for several mental health agencies.
He has treated more than 3,000 clients with various forms of anger, abuse, and violence.
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Editorial... |
The Age of Anger and Resentment - Part one
by
Steven Stosny, PhD © 2004
They called the time of my early childhood the "Age of Anxiety." It was an eponym drawn from W. H. Auden’s 1947 poem, that inspired Leonard Bernstein’s haunting symphony and ballet. Scientists churned out impersonal forms of destruction measured in "megatons." We crouched under school desks, our heads covered with bony arms and hidden between our knees. (Someone thought that would save us in the event of nuclear attack.) Our parents built bomb shelters and stocked them with canned goods. Endless industrial strikes and lockouts made them wonder whether they could keep their new pre-fab houses. We began to worry that the planet might not support the greatest population explosion in the history of humankind. We feared communism, demagogues, something called the "yellow peril," polio, genetic mutation, and teenage gangs wielding chains and switch blade knives. Anxiety rose from threats to security that were broad and great, faceless, formless, indifferent, and impersonal, hovering just outside the flickering gray lights of our new TV sets.
No society, family, or individual can long endure powerless feelings like anxiety and the guilt, inadequacy, and alienation that go with it. All powerless conditions must eventually yield to some form of self-empowerment, whether overt or subtle, predominately physical, intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, or spiritual. The Age of Anxiety, following a developmental path common in families, gave way to the rebelliousness of the sixties, the self-discovery cults of the seventies, and the narcissism of the eighties. Now, as we close out the century that has brought more radical social change than any in human history, we have realized our most insidious form of self-empowerment, in the Age of Anger and Resentment.
Now our perceived threats to security have form and shape. They are not indifferent and anonymous, but malevolent (at least while we’re angry at them) and highly personal. Unfair, inconsiderate, and incompetent, they cut us off, make us wait in traffic jams, overcharge us, and lie to us. They disrespect us, betray us, take our designer jackets and tennis shoes, laugh at us, reject us, act superior, and try in countless ways to hassle, harass, dominate, or control us. In the Age of Anger and Resentment, we have converted anxiety, guilt, insignificance, and inadequacy into blame and raised it to the level of sacrament.
Evidence of the Age of Anger and Resentment rises from every area of society, beyond the often cited fact that we are the most assaultive, litigious, punitive, and abusive of cultures. It seems a safe bet that the emotions you witness most frequently, both in professional and personal lives, are some of the many forms of anger, resentment, irritability, impatience, chilliness, ill-humor, crankiness, "attitude," etc. More words describe or express the many forms of anger than for any other emotional experience. Anger and resentment dominate our emotional discourse, prompting a client to asses his marriage with disturbing accuracy: "We don’t really want to communicate, we just want to complain."
Researchers say that anger is the predominant emotion experienced by parents. We inflict more physical punishment on children than any other nation. We see frequent divorce and custody battles in which parents play out extended revenge motives, tearing their children to shreds in the process. Research now suggests that bitter custody disputes cause more harmful stress to children than death of a parent.
The popular culture abounds with the sights and sounds of anger and resentment. "Gangsta rap" has built a movement on the confusion of anger with power. Even love songs seem to have some measure of dominance or retribution. A whole marketing generation, called, "X," identifies with its resentment. Children see thousands of murders and other violent acts on TV before reaching school age. Movies contain just enough sex to titillate the central nervous system for maximal effect of the immediately ensuing violent scenes—the sex focuses attention to "set us up" for the violence. The dramatic media have transformed the Age of Anxiety's "strong, silent" and "brooding" protagonists into virulent models of emotional dysregulation. In a recent episode of NYPD Blue, Jimmy Smits, its most sympathetic character, pinned an assistant district attorney to the wall with the threat of serious violence for making a tactless remark. The writers probably intended to dramatize the depth of the police officer's conviction. Instead it modeled anger and violence at the experience of vulnerable emotion.
Such manifestations of the Age of Anger and Resentment, that come to one with little effort, form just the tip of the iceberg. The mode of self-empowerment that most often occurs with anger is alcohol and drug use. Like anger, substance abuse provides an immediate feeling of power, confidence, and wholeness to mitigate feelings of doubt, powerlessness, shame, and inadequacy. Alcohol and drugs relieve the "reactaholism" that anger creates. The angry and resentful tend to numb their pain and doubt with alcohol and drugs.
Family integrity, community welfare, and social causes become marginal in the Age of Anger and Resentment. We strive to relieve feelings of powerlessness, not right social wrongs. The impulse for revenge and punishment inherent in anger degenerates the nobility of social goals into personal power trip and, eventually, into the petty and vindictive. Doing what’s right soon recedes into self-righteousness, in-fighting, and power struggles.
The Road to National and Personal Ruin Begins with Blame
The formula for most of the prolonged negative experience in societies, families, and individuals: feelings of powerlessness (e.g., anxiety, distress, pain, guilt, shame) + Blame = Anger/Resentment.
Powerless feelings raise grave doubts about the adequacy, worthiness, and potency of the self, the family, or the national identity. Blame (the primary defense of the toddler), serves as an externalizer of powerless feelings—they are the result of someone else’s doing--thus temporarily relieving the self, family, or nation of shame and doubt. Blaming someone for painful experience unleashes the survival-based fight or flight response of anger, the most contagious of all emotions. Experiments show that merely being around a mildly resentful person stimulates a similar response in others (even when not a target of the resentment or consciously aware of it). The motorist who cut you off this morning was probably cut off a few minutes earlier by someone else. Anger and aggressive driving pass car by car down the road, just as a rude remark can spread thinly veiled hostility throughout the workplace like bacteria in a laboratory culture. Without refined skill in self-regulation, we are all at the mercy of anger-junkies, i.e., those who use the amphetamine and analgesic effects of anger for energy and pain-relief.
The well-documented reciprocity of anger and resentment can do no less than shape the demands we place on family and national leaders. The "Republican revolution" of 1994 had to founder on the very tide of resentment it had ridden to power. was just as predictable as the family power struggles that can only increase in virulence or passive-aggressive manipulation, when anger is used consistently to relieve feelings of powerlessness. One reason is that anger makes us ascribe the worst intentions (insensitivity, self-obsession, recklessness, dishonesty, or gross incompetence) to perceived offenders, no matter how much we might otherwise esteem, care about, or love them. Anger gives us permission to dismiss, disregard, loathe, control, manipulate, intimidate, or aggress without regard to the overall nurturing of the relationship or good of the country.
Of course, the quick-fix of blame comes at the cost of genuine power. When we blame our bad feelings on our spouses, children, neighbors, or government, we become powerless over them. Our own emotions become the enemy. For they do not seem our own at all, but the products of inconsiderate, unfair, or incompetent others. A family or nation that blames its insecurities on certain members or segments of the society flails ever more powerlessly in the storm of those insecurities.
Blame directed at entirely external threats, such as neighbors, school officials or foreign powers, creates a seductive kind of familial and national unity, so long as the threat remains palpable. To keep it palpable, we must extend anger beyond the momentary impulse for revenge. We demonize the "enemy," with terms such as Japs, Krauts, Gooks, Savages, Devils, Animals, Infidels, Communists, Sinners, Gangsters, Extremists, Baby Killers, Batterers, Abusers, Delinquents, Liars, Cheats, Slobs, Incompetents, Hypocrites, etc.
We occasionally try to use the "common enemy" effect to mobilize "attacks" on relational, social, and economic problems. Witness the various "wars" on drugs, poverty, crime, and inflation and in titles of otherwise benign programs like "Fighting for Your Relationship." The unavoidable failure of such efforts' springs from the inability to extract blame from anger. Sustained anger at a common enemy requires demonization of persons, not abstract communication or social problems. "Common enemy" motivation leads us to punish those who take drugs, commit crimes, cause poverty and inflation and who seemingly fail to cooperate in the family’s mobilization against "the problem." We build more prisons for the easiest scapegoats, cast derision on the more individualistic family members, and loose interest when we can’t figure out who’s to blame for the more complicated circumstances. Anger-related forms of self-empowerment can only lead to the simplest and least appropriate solutions to complex problems. We see this plainly in the "common enemy" tactics of some well-meaning advocacy and special interest groups, who seem oblivious to the well-being of the country-at-large. Advocacy groups motivated by anger and resentment tend to multiply like rabbits, as disagreements within the organizations splinter them into smaller bodies competing for media and legislative attention. The public response to resentful advocates is the typical reaction to any chorus of blame: a mixture of irritated resistance and disgusted dismissal. (Unfortunately, noble goals are often dismissed along with the tactics of resentful advocates.) In contrast, passion, conviction, compassion, and cooperation (all of which dissipate in the fog of blame), build enduring coalitions for the common good in families and in society-at-large. They do so by inspiring members to find viable solutions to problems, not merely to empower themselves with anger and resentment.
Copyright 2004 Steven Stosny, PhD., all rights reserved
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