Fear and Anger - so what's wrong with that?

So what’s wrong with Fear or Anger? It’s alright!

So what’s wrong with fear or anger. Why do we believe we need to overcome fear when it arises? Why do we believe that anger is man’s worst enemy?

Truth is, anger is an emotion when rightly deployed allows it to be placed where it belongs. It provides the right release of energy against an issue. Anger is ‘frustrated love’ and when not expressed and repressed can actually turn out to harboring deep seated hatred.

Truth is, that it is easier to trust someone who gets angry. You understand his/her emotions on a subject. Yet for someone, who holds back his anger he willy nilly turns out to do more harm and even to himself.

Yet, when anger takes over, the sense is lost, insight is lost, cognition is reduced.

Research is now point out, and it is but a new interpretation, that one who holds back his anger is doing more damage to his psyche. Hence, now one is encouraged to direct one’s energy to an alternate source – a pillow, a object, and thereby to release anger.

For anger not deployed where it belongs, it would be displaced and create havoc, where it did not belong.

As regards Fear, why is that a problem? Fear is about managing options of imagined consequences or stories we tell ourselves. Fear is ultimately about our loss of ‘self’ of self annihilation. Fear is about death. It focuses our attention on what matters: what happens next? Fears accelerate as we write up one set of the events, for one series of events leads to another chain of fears. These are unpleasant stories we portend of events we expect to happen and with consequences we imagine.

Truth is, fear is a story we tell ourselves (Karen Thomson Walker, Ted Talks). The imagined unpleasantness of one story is so fearful, that we wish to avoid it, so we avoid any action towards those consequences. What stories do we listen to? We need fear to generate multiple stories to pick from: to make choices. So what’s wrong with fear.

Fear plays itself out in many ways in our lives. Why do we hoard money? A fear that we would run out of ‘assets’ to survive. A fear that we would not have enough to be ‘attractive to others’. 

Fear and anger are as important as any other emotion. I argue that both are hard wired to our brains. It is there for a purpose. Discover it. Not abhor it.