Boiling Blood
The public mood is stormy. Our political present is defined by anger and, arguably, we've become a society of more fiercely-defended divisions than ever before. What's going on?
By virtue of being human, anger is a part of all of us. We’re at an interesting point in our history of understanding this ubiquitous emotion. Our knowledge has advanced somewhat since 300 B.C. and Hippocrates’ theory about imbalances of ‘humours’ in the body (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood, since you ask) causing certain illnesses and emotions. In the case of anger, blood was thought to actually boil in the veins. We may still use the expression – it made my blood boil – but we know that anger has clear evolutionary functions. It helps us protect our boundaries, counter threats and motivate change. It also has undeniable social drivers.
It’s easy to see what some of those drivers are today: the cost-of-living crisis; housing inequality; job cuts; the decimation of community spaces (and the loneliness people feel as a result); the limitations of our mental healthcare system for people struggling to survive, let alone thrive, in society; childcare shortages; the extortionate mess of our railways system. The list goes on. There is anger everywhere. A rise in consumer rage, road rage, social media pile-ons, domestic violence, riots, culture wars, deadly military wars. “A particular feature of modern anger is that it’s so diffuse,” says psychoanalyst Dr Josh Cohen, author of All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World. It is scattered everywhere.
All these drivers can be conveniently smudged away by powerful people who give us conceited ‘answers’ to our anger. “There is a mass of free-floating or ‘unbanked’ rage which populist politicians stoke and capture for their own interests with facile but scarily effective stories about the causes of our malaise: migrants, the deep state, 'experts', woke culture and so on,” says Cohen. These so-called enemies are, he says, “political gifts” for the likes of Trump and Farage because they are “inexhaustible”.
He speaks of the decline of industrial regions from the West Midlands to the American Midwest since the 90s – “the loss of a relatively secure and prosperous industrial working class” – as a key driver of Brexit and MAGA. This “stoked a diffuse working class rage at the transfer or their loss of social and cultural status to a ‘woke’ cosmopolitanism, and at the imagined collusion between the rich metropolitan elite and growing migrant communities.” There is limitless scope for exploitation here. “As the ludicrous Rwandan saga illustrates, it is the Right-populist gift that keeps on giving, an endless reservoir of anger,” says Cohen.
“A particular feature of modern anger is that it’s so diffuse” – Josh Cohen
A wave of rage erupted on the streets in August, when far-right riots were incited by false claims that the killer of three children in Southport was a Muslim and an asylum seeker. We might argue that thinking about the why’s beneath racial hatred, arson and physical violence aren’t worth it; that these ‘angry mobs’ should be condemned wholesale. But if we want serious answers as to why anger is driving people, increasingly, to behave in terrible ways, we have to dig deeper. We’re not looking at ‘mindless’ mobs; these are groups of individual people with agency.
“From a crowd science point of view, ‘mob mentality’ is a baseless myth, and a very convenient one at that,” says journalist Dan Hancox, author of Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. He argues that, if we want to do something about violent rioting, it is imperative to rethink long-held assumptions about crowd behaviour and psychology. “Crowd members never think or behave in a homogenous manner. The myth of the ‘mindless’, pitchfork-wielding mob is a way for people in positions of power to avoid looking for serious answers,” he says. “It’s sidestepping a reckoning with the toxic, racist politics that underpin individual people’s hateful behaviour. It is entirely mindful, and that is the problem.”
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It’s hard to understand anyone’s anger without really listening to them. Behaviour is the tip of the iceberg.
A person’s anger operates by their own subjective set of ethics about how things should, or should not, be. As a species we are blessed (or cursed, depending on your outlook) by rich imaginations. This means that our limbic system – the part of the brain involved in our behavioural and emotional responses – is activated not just by material threat, but also when our beliefs, status and values are challenged. (This is probably what is happening in many of our day-to-day arguments.)
Anyone working in the field of emotion science will tell you that this subjectivity makes anger hard to study. “Anger is quite hard to elicit in the lab,” says Professor Sarah Garfinkel, a neuroscientist at University College London. “If I want to elicit your fear I can give you a massive electric shock, or tell you I’m about to. If I want to elicit disgust, I’ve got appalling pictures I can show you. But with anger, I’d probably rely on you recalling something specific to you.”
Anger is first felt in the body. It can be a hell of a physical trip. Anger manifests as a cluster of primitive responses: increased blood pressure, rise in body temperature, a thumping heart. These physical changes heighten alertness. “You have a reduced capacity for sustained attention, which impinges on your capacity for reasoned logic,” says Garfinkel. This is the ‘fight’ side of the fight-or-flight response. “Fear has a similar effect,” she says. “It’s like myopia; a zooming-in where the peripheral information sort of disappears.” Anger, then, can be a saturation bomb for empathy. When we’re in that raw, limbic state, our narrowed focus can culminate in words or actions that don’t align with our genuine beliefs. As Rebecca Solnit wrote: “It’s not for nothing that we call rages ‘blind’.”
Neuropsychiatrist Dr Dan Siegel’s Hand Model of the Brain is a helpful model for understanding what happens in the brain when we’re overwhelmed with emotions like anger. I’ve found it very useful with young people. The model emphasises that, when the emotional ‘downstairs’ brain is activated, the rational ‘upstairs’ brain (the prefrontal cortex) temporarily goes offline (‘flipping your lid’) as the more primal, reactive parts of the brain take over.
Some of us work hard to avoid feeling angry. Particularly if, from a young age, expressing anger meant receiving judgement, or more anger in response. Anger can be conditioned out of us from early on. We’re punished when we don’t share; when we shout “no” or “go away”; when we’re not nice. This creates its own set of problems. We might develop limiting core beliefs like, “It’s not okay for me to be angry,” or, “No one will take my pain seriously.” It has been the work of my life realising how true the latter has been for me. The things that make me the most angry ultimately speak to that fear.
Emotions have social scripts and anger trumps them all with its powerful (and often prohibitive) norms. With a broad brushstroke, we may argue that, for men, anger is often seen as a legitimate reaction to an external thing. For women, expressing anger has been historically positioned as a personal failure; one she’d do well to banish with treatments, pills, anything to help her get a fucking grip. The external thing is immaterial; she should know better! Evidence suggests that women and minority groups face particular cultural pressure to squash their anger. If we grow up learning that it’s not okay to be angry, there is only one direction it travels. One of Freud’s theories of depression was that it was anger and aggression turned inwards.
We may find ways to squash or divert the deeper emotions informing our experiences: booze, drugs, sex, gambling, compulsive socialising, acting the clown, people-pleasing. It works, to a point. Until we find ourselves feeling anxious, low, lonely or lost within our relationships. Or, in a place where our bodies start doing the ‘talking’ for us: mysterious pains, skin issues, gut drama, headaches and exhaustion. These are often the junctions at which people come to therapy.
We have a wealth of evidence that tells us how buried anger can make us sick. Some studies suggest that repressing anger is linked to less activity of a group of immune cells called ‘natural killer cells’. Their job is to fight invaders like bacteria and viruses. They also fight malignancy; a dangerous invader in the body. People who repress healthy anger may suppress the activity of these natural killer cells. This makes them more prone to illness, including cancer. We can think logically about these facts and still feel blocked from anger.
All the conflicting information about anger can leave us deeply confused about what to do with it; in ourselves and in others. Anger can be a healthy signal from within that injustice has been done, or that something needs to change. It can help us move towards having important conversations with our partners, families and co-workers. It is the most powerful emotion for spurring political action. But still we are often repelled by anger because of how it can be expressed. “As a species, I think we still find it difficult to make a clean distinction between angry feeling and aggressive action,” says Cohen. It is entirely unsurprising that AI is now coming for anger. (Companies are now developing AI-powered “emotion-cancelling” tools for call centre workers to “change” the voice they’re listening to with the click of a button, so that the person sounds less angry.)
I have worked with people who: feel angry all the time; have outbursts of rage that scare them (or their loved ones); rarely seem to feel angry; are embarrassed by their expressions of anger; deeply fear anger in others. At various points I have related to them all. How do we know if what we’re feeling is anger? How do we undo repression? What do we do with ‘too much’ anger?
There are no clear-cut answers. But a striking thing I’ve observed in my work is how often anger is underpinned by a sense of helplessness. As I am writing, conversations I’ve had with friends about maternal rage come to mind: women roaring at their children, their partners or inanimate objects, before crumbling with guilt. When these women have felt overwhelmed and genuinely helpless, as in, no one is helping, they have flipped their lids. Sometimes, they have then internalised their rage as a personal failing. Not an understandable reaction to structural problems like lack of childcare, the cost of living and patriarchal norms.
Esther Perel once said in an interview that “behind every criticism is a longing, behind every anger is a hurt”. I agree. When I explore with clients what is beneath their defensiveness, outbursts of rage and relationship difficulties – often a slow process – vulnerable feelings of rejection, failure, dismissal, smallness. Sometimes, there are traumatic experiences defined by powerlessness in their histories that haven’t been processed. I hold in mind something Freud wrote:
“Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
– Freud
Consider a baby: a screaming, shitting bundle of primitive survival needs. Much psychoanalytic literature is concerned with the helplessness of infants; how rage is built into our first screams that help us stay alive by telling our caregivers that we need something. “Birth transports us from a state where all our needs were seamlessly provided into a world full of frustrations and dissatisfactions. In this sense, anger is endemic to life from the first,” says Cohen.
The relationship between helplessness and anger was of great interest to Donald Winnicott, one of the most respected and influential psychoanalysts in history. His clinical research illuminated the significance of the parental role in early object relations. (The term ‘object’ is used synonymously with ‘person’.) Object relations theory suggests that our relationships with primary caregivers shape our emotional development and how we come to relate to others later on. But a baby does not ‘know’ they are having a relationship with a caregiver. When their scream achieves its aim, the ‘object’ is good and safe. When the scream is routinely left unanswered, the already-helpless baby is left in a state of uncertainty.
So it goes, then, that if our emotional needs aren't more or less met in our early years, our relationship with anger as adults might be muddled. Maybe we struggle to notice that we’re feeling it. Maybe we’re scared of anger. Maybe we express anger in ways that cause suffering; for others and ourselves.
What makes me angry? Not feeling heard. Increasing male violence towards women and men who respond with whataboutery. Transphobia. Landlords. People watching TikTok videos without headphones on public transport. Beneath all these things are shades of helplessness. (Yes, even the TikTok videos. Sometimes you can’t get away from the noise, or feel too timid to ask if someone has headphones. Does this say more about me than anything else? Undoubtedly.)
What I learn every day in the therapy room is that experiencing humiliation or hurt – even fleetingly – can bring us into contact with what Cohen calls “a primary layer of helplessness”. We usually feel something else before anger: embarrassment, invalidation, criticism, shame. Something (more likely someone) will trigger these feelings and, in the blink-of-an-eye, we move to anger. It ‘manages’ what was there originally, like a powerful painkiller.
The word ‘responsibility’ often, rightly, comes up when we talk about anger. Some people struggle to express their anger healthily, behaving in ways that leave their family and friends hurting and afraid. This is when it’s important to ask for help. Therapy is one option. I have also met people who have found anger management courses very helpful. The industry has boomed since the 1980s, when anger management was recommended to combat unionisation in various industries; to keep workers calm. As you might imagine, the courses often have a standardised frameworks that focus on people’s triggers for anger, with an emphasis on taming techniques. The problem is, ultimately, rooted in the individual.
We do need to take individual responsibility for how we behave. I’m going to lean on a metaphor now, though, because psychotherapists love a metaphor: when the structural inequalities that might be driving someone’s anger are skated over, it’s a bit like trying to control rising damp with toilet paper. Programmes that focus on individual behavioural change are a central concern in Bessel van der Kolk’s now-infamous book The Body Keeps the Score. He repeatedly opposes therapeutic techniques and medications that aim to control someone’s behaviour, rather than addressing the “undeniable social causation of much psychological suffering”.
I am deeply suspicious about the number of ‘emotional coaching’ apps now available. I gasped when one called ‘Ahead App’ was marketed to me on my Instagram feed as “Duolingo, but for anger.” These tools will undoubtedly be helpful to some people. But at the macro level, who is benefitting the most? If we’re incentivised to fix the symptoms, we’re at surface level. Those with the real power to improve the quality of people’s lives so they’re less fizzing with rage get a free pass. Meanwhile, more and more people find a channel for their ‘unbanked’ anger in something like violence. Then we have to pay attention.
Instinctive acts of vengeance might temporarily right a wrong someone feels. We all know what it’s like to stub a toe and feel desperate with rage. I once tripped over an empty box on Shaftesbury Avenue in central London and landed on all-fours, arse skywards. My body flooded with rage. I turned and kicked the box into the road, regretting it instantly. More so when I locked eyes with a cab driver as the box hit his cab wheel. Anger can create an illusion of control when we feel none. When you look at footage from the riots this summer, at the faces in the crowds, the implications of this idea are devastating.
It can be overwhelming to tune into how much anger is around us. We see drivers slamming their horns and throwing their hands up by their face like a soprano mid-aria; people aggressively spitting on the floor at bus stops; starting fights with GP receptionists; starting fights online; muttering for fuck’s sake through gritted teeth because the person in front of them isn’t walking fast enough. Underneath all of it are flavours of vulnerability. People are often brimming with emotion they can’t fully access or express – pain, perhaps, that hasn’t been heard – and trying to feel in control. You don’t need to have sympathy with an arsonist or a racist to think about these things.
Sometimes, being repelled by others’ anger is essential because there is a real threat of harm. But to see the angry person as an aberration simply for being angry is to deflect from an uncomfortable truth: that we all know what it’s like to feel helpless. Perhaps that’s another reason why we can find anger so hard to be with. What seems increasingly clear is that, unless those in power truly confront the reality of why so many people are so angry, that ‘endless reservoir’ Cohen speaks of will keep bursting its banks.