More Americans than ever are searching for help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But they appear to be avoiding help for an additional emotion, regardless that it comes up across life stages and could be destructive: anger.
Current events have fanned the flame of wrath much more. Like many Americans, Nycole DeLaVara has seen indignant conversations in regards to the news invade her church life—especially over politics, race, and gender.
But in her work as a biblical counselor in Southern California, DeLaVara says that anger often stays unaddressed and unresolved.
“I sort of wish people were coming and saying, ‘I’m having a tough time processing what I’m seeing,’” said DeLaVara. “That could be a humble way of approaching things. I find people don’t know what they’re feeling.”
CT spoke with Christian counselors across the country who agreed. Not enough people, they are saying, have been in a position to recognize the uncertainty they’re feeling as anger, and so they could also be missing out on the guidance that might help them during a heated and divisive climate.
“The Facebook warrior often doesn’t come into counseling and say, ‘I actually struggled to administer my dialogue on Facebook,’” said Brad Hambrick, who oversees the counseling ministries at Summit Church, in North Carolina, which has 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance.
The flood of knowledge people experience now—having the ability at every moment to know anything frustrating occurring in the whole world—contributes to a “background sense of irritation,” said Hambrick, which “contributes to impulse control being harder as of late.”
Last 12 months, the Los Angeles Police Department recorded essentially the most road rage incidents in seven years, and nationally, the variety of road rage shootings has risen 400 percent during the last decade.
Service sector employees have endured more enraged vitriol from customers for the reason that pandemic. Flight attendants have noticed a rise in outbursts on airplanes. Anger appears to be sitting right under the surface of life within the United States.
But what’s occurring beneath the outbursts?
Anger is a “smoke detector—what’s it telling me?” said DeLaVara. Anger in personal relationships is commonly someone not knowing methods to communicate the emotions they’re having, she said, feelings like fear, uncertainty, a way of injustice, or not being understood or respected.
Christian counselor Anna Mondal in San Diego compares good and bad anger to how a baby responds after being hit by one other kid.
“It’s okay for a child to be indignant, nevertheless it’s not okay for them to harm one other child of their anger,” Mondal said. “It’s okay to feel it, but how they express it matters. … That is such a very important thing to know methods to do: feel the anger but not express it destructively.”
Braden Benson, a Christian counselor at The Owen Center in Auburn, Alabama, said the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump stirred people’s anger. When Trump was shot, Benson’s parents cried. He said they watch Trump on daily basis, so it was as if a friend had been shot. With current events, plenty of anger that comes out is from people having “parasocial” relationships with politicians and online figures, he said.
“I believe the deeper you go into the parasocial world, the more likely it’s that you simply’re opening yourself as much as that anger, that sense of vulnerability,” he said. “Because this thing, this person, this podcast, this TV show, whatever this character that you’ve gotten seen as your friend, is now getting attacked.”
Anger at social media or a news article might require some deep breaths or a protracted run, Mondal said.
“Western culture emphasizes pondering and logic and intellectualism—like, Let me take into consideration my right response,” said Mondal. “Often, we will’t. We should wait for our body to calm down.”
But she added that with longer-standing issues that cause anger, a deep breath probably won’t do much.
People seeing seismic change around them will still feel a certain level of threat and sense of vulnerability. They don’t recognize what’s happening on the planet, and so they don’t know what’s coming next.
“You either reply to the vulnerability as God, which implies you’re in charge, you’ve gotten to repair it, you’ve gotten to manage, you’ve gotten to manage it,” said Benson. “Or you reply to the vulnerability with God—understand that you would be able to’t fix it.”
When Christians find themselves overwhelmed by the world, they should work to acknowledge what they will and may’t influence, counselors said. Christians can use their anger to take motion without letting their anger turn into hurtful to others.
“The tendency is after we see people overreacting, we attempt to balance it out, almost by an encouragement to underreact,” said Hambrick at Summit.
Churches may very well be addressing problems with anger and related issues through peer support groups—something Summit has. Like 12-step recovery groups, these groups are lay-led and may naturally fit within the ecosystem of a church, Hambrick said.
“It’s one among the best untapped modes or ways of making change,” he said. “It’s just humble honesty … with people you respect.”
Others who’ve worked through anger found circles of others outside their family who were willing to listen to their anger very helpful.
Mondal, a counselor, experienced trauma-induced anger 15 years ago after sexual assault when she was teaching overseas.
“I had no tools for methods to express the anger that I felt at being dropped, left alone, not being taken care of,” she said.
She needed to learn first that she was indignant—beneath the shame she felt initially—then learn methods to express that anger to others and to God. Once she was in a position to express it in a constructive way, she said she could feel joy more deeply.
A support group for deep anger is often a small circle of individuals, she said, and typically not those the person is closest to.
“It’s a unique sort of individuals who come out of the woodwork, who usually are not afraid of that [pain],” she said.
Support groups have been helpful for people battling more on a regular basis types of anger too.
Tim Schultz, a lobbyist in Washington, DC, felt comfortable confessing his struggles with anger toward his family to a small prayer group at his church.
“People wouldn’t see me as an indignant person,” he said. But a number of years into his marriage, after having children, he was having indignant outbursts at home. “I used to be each aghast and ashamed of that.”
He had been in a men’s prayer group at his church for over a decade, and first shared his problem with them.
“If you’re known by people outside your immediate family, you don’t have any problem confessing stuff like this that may feel really shameful,” he said. “Shame is paralyzing. It makes you not want people to know this about you.”
He talked to his pastor, read books from Christian psychologists, and went to therapy.
“The biggest technique was to search out a vocabulary for every stage of anger and verbalize it,” he said. If he asks his kids to go to bed 3 times and so they don’t, telling them he feels disrespected lets some air out of the balloon. People “hold level 4 anger in, after which they get to 7 and blow up. You weren’t honest with yourself and the people around you.”
He thinks a part of the explanation people around him in DC are battling unhealthy anger is that they’re overscheduled. When they don’t have any time to pause and pay attention to what emotions are happening, anger has more opportunity to boil over, he said.
Schultz and his family have a giant Christmas party every 12 months with about 100 people. Every 12 months, he shares something short about how Christmas and the gospel connects to the cultural moment.
Last 12 months, he told the gathering: “Look around you, look online, people behaving badly on flights—there’s a lot anger in our world. … We need a certain dose of anger, otherwise it should be runaway injustice. But oftentimes, anger is destroying people.”
He talked about God seeing the things we’re indignant about, and the way God can be indignant about injustice and death. He also said God didn’t pour “brimstone” on the world in response, but as a substitute got here in a manger.
Once he began talking about his efforts to handle his anger, other men began asking for the variety of the counseling service he went to. He’s now referred no less than seven of them to counseling for anger.
“God is taking something bad and using it for his kingdom,” he said. “If I could be open about my struggles on this area, others can get help too.”
