//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.
Part 1: What is Anger?
All our emotions share an evolutionary utility. They try to spotlight our attention on a given stimuli amidst the floodlight of perception. Understanding how various emotions contributed to our species’ survival helps us understand why we experience the emotions we do and how best to process them.
Anger is fascinating; it’s a fiery, explosive emotion that holds great constructive and destructive power. Anger can fuel and motivate us, but it can also drive us to harm ourselves and others.
Why do we feel anger? What is anger trying to signal to us about our reality?
We experience anger when we feel a boundary has been threatened. This includes both physical and emotional boundaries. This is helpful to recognize because framing anger in this way will help elucidate our boundaries for us, all of which are not obvious, or even known, to us.
Part 2: Understanding Our Own Boundaries
Consider this: you hear a burglar breaking into your home at night. You’re terrified at first, afraid for your and your family’s safety. The burglar trips over a child’s toy, spraining their ankle and knocking their head against the wall. This completely neutralizes the threat and fear fades, allowing another emotion to bubble to the surface.
Anger.
Who does this person think he is, breaking into _your_ home, where _your_ family sleeps, attempting to steal _your_ belongings, for which you have worked so hard? It’s your responsibility and your duty to keep your partner and children safe, and you feel infuriated that this thief forced themselves into your private safe space.
You’re blinded by your desire to harm them to ensure they never think about entering your space ever again.
Next, consider this: you come home after a long day at work. You tear your shoes off and throw your work bag beside them, collapsing on the couch. Your spouse enters the room and senses you feel defeated. They probe you to talk about it, but given you just got home, you request some time to vegetate and decompress before talking through the laundry list of mishaps and professional torments that characterized your day.
They feel like you’d feel better if you just talked it out with them so they push, inching closer on the couch and nodding. You’re exhausted, frustrated, and feeling incompetent. The last thing you want is to leap into an animated montage of all the hurtful things everybody said and did to you today, so you push back. They offer their ear again, this time more aggressively. They sprinkle in a bit of guilt-tripping, reminding you they’ve been waiting for you to get home for hours.
You snap.
You raise your voice, telling them to back off for the last time. You jump off the couch and storm to the bedroom, slamming the door behind you in a rage.
In both these examples, boundaries were violated. Vastly different boundaries, but boundaries all the same. One we can see, the other we can’t. One we can easily explain (and legally defend), and the other is fickle, transient, and conditional. We’ve all had our emotional boundaries violated at some point, driving us to behave aggressively in an effort to protect ourselves from harm and make us feel safe again.
We’ve also violated others’ emotional boundaries, driving them to do the same. We sometimes are taken aback by their strong responses, bewildered by their aggression. We just stumbled onto someone’s emotional boundary. It’s entirely possible they themselves were entirely unaware of it too.
Infringing a physical boundary is straightforward. There are walls, property lines, and tangible bodies to help us understand physical boundaries. People can lay claim to things in a way we all understand, resulting in a finite number of ways a physical boundary can be threatened.
Our emotional universes are infinitely more complex. Where we have laid claim to territory in our familial, social, and professional lives is much more abstract and challenging to parse. We are almost guaranteed to infringe on others’ emotional boundaries unknowingly, just as they are guaranteed to infringe upon ours.
Part 3: Setting New Boundaries
As children, many of us live our lives as per the whims of the adults around us. As we enter adulthood, we try to develop our own value system, our own operating system of sorts. This requires as much unlearning as it does learning. We all have unhelpful beliefs and perceptions of reality that impede our progress, regardless of the goals we set out for ourselves. Inherent in achieve these goals is doing things differently than when we were kids.
The most terrifying thing about growing up is having the courage to establish our own individuality amidst other adults who expect us to continue thinking, feeling, and behaving in accordance with how we were as children. This brings disappointment, confusion, and in many cases, relentless admonishments about what will happen if we don’t live the life these adults envision for us.
After all, most adults in our lives love us and want to protect us. It’s always well-intentioned.
Many of us fall victim to this pressure, interrupting our lives and denying our natural inclinations along the path of least resistance. We are unhappy and resentful, living our lives for our parents, their teachers, and their bosses.
Adults like this never learned how to set their own boundaries, the consequences of which are monumental and everlasting.
Establishing boundaries is fundamentally conflict-prone. A boundary needs to be established because some desired territory is not ours, it’s someone else’s and we want it back. Setting a boundary requires us to consciously expand our boundary to the point of contact with someone else’s, and then continue to push, advancing ours forward and forcing theirs back.
As we have already established, when a boundary is infringed upon, the result is anger. And the distance the boundary has been pushed is directly proportionate to the anger. It’s like a metabolite the process. Pushing a boundary backwards releases anger, like an exothermic reaction.
We see visceral reactions to our efforts to establish boundaries in our lives and we get frightened and back off. We think the conflict isn’t worth it or maybe we need to try another strategy, instead of recognizing that although there are possibly more or less inflammatory ways of establishing boundaries, anger will always be a byproduct.
We should mentally prepare to be met with anger during these difficult conversations and resist the temptation to mirror back that energy. Anger at anger leads to an eruption, not a cooling. We should keep in mind the cost of not establishing the boundary, which is living a life lacking individuality and devoid of personality. It’s impossible to feel at home in a body that solely works for other people, and never feeling at home is floundering in the abyss and deeply incompatible with happiness.
So identify where your boundaries are through what makes you angry, push back on other people’s boundaries through asserting yours, and prepare for the fight.
Angry,
Vandan
Vandan Jhaveri 