Emotion in Context: Primary and Interpreted Anger
This article is a shout-out and a response to the work of Dr. Brené Brown, who, through her work, has been a powerful guide for me. In Atlas of the Heart she talks about anger and her desire to label anger as a secondary emotion, but also about how — as a grounded theory researcher — she is called to honor the way that terms are used by real people in real life. So she acknowledges anger as a primary emotion, while retaining some lingering suspicions. It is those suspicions that I want to follow-up on in this article.
First, I want to hearken back to something I first wrote about publicly last week in my article The 7x Distortion: Negativity Bias reconsidered. What if the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) bias in human research — created by an overreliance on western college students as research participants — isn’t limited to those elucidated variables? What if, we’re making even more mistakes than we realize? What if we’re measuring immature human beings and mistaking them for mature ones? I mean, we wouldn’t measure a sample of seven year old's and use those results as ‘determinative’ about ‘how people are.’ Why do we do that with college students? Especially when we know that brain development continues through the late 20’s. We drank the “18 = grown up” cultural tea and allowed it to cloud our ability to use the developmental continuum as a part of how we evaluate human characteristics — characteristics like emotion.
I’m going to take this one step further — development along the continuum is not an age based given. We all understand that ‘getting stuck’ is a developmental possibility — what I propose is that it is actually the norm in our modern culture. Our culture has eschewed rites of passage as an obligation of culture to the people trying to grow up, wake up, show up, and clean up within it. In doing so we have created generations of human beings who ‘get stuck’ before they can become the wise elders that we both need and deserve. Well, you might say, I know a few wise elders. Great, I say, because we need them. But, if we can’t count every political, social, business, and religious leader in our culture as a member of that group of wise elders — then our failure is manifest. That is the point of creating wise elders in a culture — for them to lead, for them to apply that wisdom to the challenges before us. And I know for a fact, that the number of wise elders among our current global leaders is vanishingly small, pathetically small. But I digress. Most of us, from what I’ve seen growing up in the U.S., get some major parts of our development stuck in adolescence — stuck in a stage dominated by ego and gratification and wanting and competence addiction (you can thank Stephen Jenkinson for that last concept — it’s a doozy). So, measuring how these stuck people process emotion is valid — it will tell you how they do it — it won’t tell you how it could be for a fully ripened and mature human being, it won’t tell you how it is for the wise elders among us. One glimpse into the life of wise elders seems to be available through the study of advanced meditators — their proclivity to live in the present, instead of preoccupied with past and future.
So, let’s get back to anger and this question of the primary and interpreted experience of emotions. To give credit where it is due, the seed for my answer to this question was planted a long time ago by Eckhart Tolle in a field that had been thoroughly plowed, irrigated, and fertilized by the work of Ken Wilber. Now Eckhart Tolle says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that although we do sometimes experience emotions as a direct reaction to our life situation, most of the emotion we experience is a reaction to our own thoughts. In Tolle’s writing he reflects that the body — and emotional systems — don’t really know the difference between a direct experience and a thought, so they respond to every thought of danger AS IF it were a danger… w/ cortisol, adrenaline, etc. Here is one part of Dr. Brown’s mystery — I think her perception that anger is most often experienced as a secondary emotion is partially grounded in the fact that most anger is experienced in response to internal thoughts, not external direct experience. For the purposes of this article, I’ll call the direct experience primary and the other kind interpreted. The reason for the label ‘interpreted’ is that once an experience has been filtered by the mind, it is usually labeled good or bad, safe or threatening, etc. The mind adds content to the experience and this added content creates an ‘interpretation’ of the event that can, and often does, diverge from the original stimulus.
Okay, second part — this part ties in the work of Dr. Marc Brackett too — which is the recent research about the relationship between language and emotion and our ability to experience (and sustain) emotional states. The research shows that the average American can list about three (3) emotion words — and unsurprisingly one of them is anger (the other two are happy and sad). One of the findings of the research is that teaching people a more nuanced and descriptive emotion language (i.e. a grid of 100 emotion words with a horizontal axis of pleasantness and a vertical axis of energy) enables people to experience a wider gamut of more nuanced emotions. An implication of this language-emotion research in my reading is that, when we lack such vocabulary — the default condition — , we tend to take a primary and directly experienced emotion in the present and using our reflective system force that emotion into a category we have words for… combine that with some cultural nudges about the acceptability of being angry and the discomfort when people are sad and — voila! — a perfect recipe for creating anger, lots of anger, whenever we experience ‘negative’ emotions. Now, here again, this only seems to be true at certain developmental stages — advanced meditator studies tend to show that both anticipatory-anxiety (generating emotion about what might or will happen in the future) and emotional-storytelling (generating emotion about what has happened by retelling the story internally or externally) are either absent or differently managed in advanced meditators. There are a couple of possibilities for this floating out there: one is that the meditative habit of letting-thoughts-flow-by-without-becoming-attached is actually developing a skill of non-reaction (emotionally) to thoughts — thereby ‘growing out of’ the confusion between direct experience and thought experience that Tolle warns us of. The second option is that advanced meditators form habits of mental quietness that simply reduce the occurrence of anticipatory and memory thoughts by an order of magnitude. Considering the extent that ‘repetitive thinking’ tends to whip us into an emotional frenzy, my suspicion is that both of these mechanisms are in play. So, to summarize, this second mechanism by with ‘secondary’ anger comes about is intersectional, caught between an underdeveloped system of emotional language and awareness, an underdisciplined mind preoccupied with past and future, and unhealthy cultural norms that repress emotions related to sadness. (Note: under — in this context is a developmental comparison to a fully-mature wise-elder state of development — one that has done its work to grow up, clean up, wake up, and show up… I think it’s time for Ken Wilber).
The final context portion of this puzzle lies in the work of Ken Wilber, whose lifework lays out a comprehensive framework of psycho-social and spiritual development and the interrelationships between them. Just to get your brain pointed in a Wilber-way:
- Grow up: Progressing through the psycho-social, intellectual and emotional stages of development.
- Wake up: Engaging in spiritual practice (e.g. meditation, yoga, reflective prayer) to attain higher states of consciousness.
- Clean up: Doing the shadow work (think Jung) to get any stuck parts of our growing up or waking up unstuck. None of us get through life unscathed, this is the healing work.
- Show up: Bringing your energy and your being to the service of life and your fellow beings.
Now, I think we’re ready to talk about anger.
When we experience direct anger — it is the fight response. Someone just disrespected us or endangered us or attacked us or a loved one… it is not “I don’t like what they did.” It is the immediate and appropriate emotional reaction to certain kinds of threat, damage, danger, or injustice.
Most of our anger is something else — it is being pissed off because of what we think about a situation or a person or <insert object here>. I propose that for all of us who are not yet wise elders, this kind of anger happens inside us dramatically, overwhelmingly more often than the direct kind. And I think this is why Dr. Brené Brown wants to call anger secondary — because most of it is. Not because primary anger isn’t common — but because interpreted anger is so prevalent and pervasive. One silly example, Dr. Brown likes to talk about ‘throwing books across the room’ when she reads something hard — presumably in anger. Now, that book did not bite her, or give her a paper cut, or threaten her in any way except in her interpretation of it… and that is what the vast majority of our anger is like, it is just us, pissing ourselves off, over and over again, with stories of outrage and injustice and danger and harm…
Look, those things are real, and when we experience them directly, out there in contact with the world, they deserve our anger. But we don’t deserve to feel angry all the time, and it is possible to learn to stop doing that to ourselves.
