More Americans than ever are seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But they seem to be avoiding help for another emotion, even though it comes up across life stages and can be destructive: anger.
Current events have fanned the flame of wrath even more. Like many Americans, Nycole DeLaVara has seen angry conversations about 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 remains unaddressed and unresolved.
“I kind of wish people were coming and saying, ‘I am having a hard time processing what I’m seeing,’” said DeLaVara. “That would 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 say, have been able to recognize the uncertainty they’re feeling as anger, and they may be missing out on the guidance that could help them during a heated and divisive climate.
“The Facebook warrior usually doesn’t come into counseling and say, ‘I really struggled to manage 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 information people experience now—being able at every moment to know anything frustrating going on in the entire world—contributes to a “background sense of irritation,” said Hambrick, which “contributes to impulse control being harder these days.”
Last year, the Los Angeles Police Department recorded the most road rage incidents in seven years, and nationally, the number of road rage shootings has risen 400 percent over the last decade.
Service sector workers have endured more enraged vitriol from customers since the pandemic. Flight attendants have noticed an increase in outbursts on airplanes. Anger appears to be sitting right under the surface of life in the United States.
But what’s going on beneath the outbursts?
Anger is a “smoke detector—what is it telling me?” said DeLaVara. Anger in personal relationships is often someone not knowing how to communicate the feelings they are having, she said, feelings like fear, uncertainty, a sense of injustice, or not being understood or respected.
Christian counselor Anna Mondal in San Diego compares good and bad anger to how a child responds after being hit by another kid.
“It’s okay for a kid to be angry, but it’s not okay for them to harm another child in their anger,” Mondal said. “It’s okay to feel it, but how they express it matters. ... That is such an important thing to know how 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. For people who watch Trump every day, it was as if a friend had been shot. With current events, a lot of anger that comes out is from people having “parasocial” relationships with politicians and online figures, he said.
“I think the deeper you go into the parasocial world, the more likely it is that you’re opening yourself up to that anger, that sense of vulnerability,” he said. “Because this thing, this person, this podcast, this TV show, whatever this character that you have seen as your friend, is now getting attacked.”
Anger at social media or a news article might require some deep breaths or a long run, Mondal said.
“Western culture emphasizes thinking and logic and intellectualism—like, Let me think about my right response,” said Mondal. “Often, we can’t. We have to 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 in the world, and they don’t know what’s coming next.
“You either respond to the vulnerability as God, which means you’re in charge, you have to fix it, you have to cope, you have to control it,” said Benson. “Or you respond to the vulnerability with God—understand that you can’t fix it.”
When Christians find themselves overwhelmed by the world, they have to work to recognize what they can and can’t influence, counselors said. Christians can use their anger to take action without letting their anger become hurtful to others.
“The tendency is when we see people overreacting, we try to balance it out, almost by an encouragement to underreact,” said Hambrick at Summit.
Churches could 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 can naturally fit in the ecosystem of a church, Hambrick said.
“It’s one of the greatest untapped modes or ways of creating change,” he said. “It’s just humble honesty … with people you respect.”
Others who have worked through anger found circles of others outside their family who were willing to hear 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 how to express the anger that I felt at being dropped, left alone, not being taken care of,” she said.
She had to learn first that she was angry—beneath the shame she felt initially—then learn how to express that anger to others and to God. Once she was able to express it in a constructive way, she said she could feel joy more deeply.
A support group for deep anger is typically a small circle of people, she said, and usually not those the person is closest to.
“It’s a different kind of people who come out of the woodwork, who are not afraid of that [pain],” she said.
Support groups have been helpful for people struggling with more everyday forms 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 would not see me as an angry person,” he said. But a few years into his marriage, after having children, he was having angry outbursts at home. “I was both 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 might 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 find a vocabulary for each stage of anger and verbalize it,” he said. If he asks his kids to go to bed three times and they don’t, telling them he feels disrespected lets some air out of the balloon. People “hold level 4 anger in, and then they get to 7 and blow up. You weren’t honest with yourself and the people around you.”
He thinks part of the reason people around him in DC are struggling with unhealthy anger is that they are overscheduled. When they have no time to pause and be aware of what emotions are happening, anger has more opportunity to boil over, he said.
Schultz and his family have a big Christmas party every year with about 100 people. Every year, he shares something short about how Christmas and the gospel connects to the cultural moment.
Last year, he told the gathering: “Look around you, look online, people behaving badly on flights—there is so much anger in our world. … We need a certain dose of anger, otherwise it will be runaway injustice. But oftentimes, anger is destroying people.”
He talked about God seeing the things we are angry about, and how God is also angry about injustice and death. He also said God didn’t pour “brimstone” on the world in response, but instead came in a manger.
Once he started talking about his efforts to address his anger, other men started asking for the number of the counseling service he went to. He’s now referred at least seven of them to counseling for anger.
“God is taking something bad and using it for his kingdom,” he said. “If I can be open about my struggles in this area, others can get help too.”
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