Vachon Imagined

Working and being around angry and aggressive people is inevitable. It is part of life, part of us, so why wouldn’t we expect to work around them, be around them, even become them?

Anger is a form of life. It is not necessarily something to be managed or even understood; it is something appearing.

We now know that highly angry people are often, underneath that anger, deeply sad people. When people use anger as a way to keep others away, it can be effective. Anger is highly contagious, not to mention insular. A person who does not know how to live with themselves, who does not know how to inhabit their own inner world, may protect themselves by any means necessary. In essence, these are people who experience the world as dangerous. But often, the danger is not happening in the world as much as it is happening within them.

And these people affect others.

Imagine taking a shot and watching the medicine move into your veins. This is what life does, in all its forms. Spend enough time with very sad people and you may become very sad yourself. Spend enough time with very happy people and you may begin to feel happy. Life moves through us. It enters us, affects our bodies, and changes us.

But none of these things are permanent states. They are preferred states, and that is a very important distinction.

Anything I can prefer, I can also judge. I can hold it apart from myself and explain it. I can dissect it, analyze it, understand it. But life does not always need to be explained as much as it needs to be accepted.

Sadness: accepted.

Anger: accepted.

Many people speak of anger as though it is something they need to get out of themselves. But let’s assume, for one moment, that it were happening outside of you. Would it make much sense to take something that is outside of you and try to get it outside of you again?

No. That does not make good sense.

So how do we work with anger?

We become bold and courageous in its presence.

Anger is moving. It is not a person. It is not a statue. It is a form of life, a spirit, passing through us. And the more present we can be with it, rather than trying to fix it, cheer it up, suppress it, or abolish it, the more clearly we can see it as a form of life—not life itself.

No one is an angry person.

They are a fearful person.

And anger is one way that fear shows itself: in their weeping, their defensiveness, their destruction, their withdrawal.

To meet anger is not necessarily to defeat it.

It is simply to remain courageous enough to witness what is moving through another person—and through ourselves—without mistaking the movement for the whole of who we are.