Right now, I’m in session seven of The Foundations of Well Being, a year-long online course with Rick Hanson. I’ve been gliding along just fine until last night when I listened to Hanson’s talk on Anger as part of the “pillar” detailing how to cultivate calmness. It got me to realizing how I’m just not yet able to (or even willing to) apply the suggestions advanced on dealing with anger when it comes to the results of the 2016 election.
(It’s a fabulous course, btw, with talks, guided meditations, live monthly Q&As with Hanson and conversations with folks like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Dan Siegal, and Sharon Salzberg. Online support forums provide a sense of community and I’m thinking about putting this issue about my inability to relinquish anger’s hold on me in this particular instance.)
In a May 2016 Atlantic article The Anger of the American People, University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum turns to Aristotle to lay out the basic principles of anger, viewing it from two perspectives: motivation and source of moral conflict
(1) You think you’ve been wronged,
(2) The damage was wrongfully inflicted, and
(3) It was serious damage to something you care about.
Aristotle also thinks the damage is always a kind of insult—what he calls a down-ranking, or a kind of slighting that puts you lower in the scheme of things. I ended up saying that’s not always the case. However, I think that’s an important ingredient in a lot of anger that people have.
The last thing—and this is the crucial one, I think: Aristotle, and every other philosopher known to me who writes about anger, says that part of anger itself is a desire for payback. Without that desire, it’s not really anger—it’s something else.
This got me to thinking about how “anger” is one of the most commonly used adjectives when it comes to anything associated with Trump. In just the past news cycle we have Trump’s anger against his aides, his anger at Sessions, the public anger over the trans ban, parents’ anger over the scout’s jamboree.
So here I am taking this course, hoping for an outcome like this ...
The brain is like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones - which wears down health, fuels conflicts with others, and piles up feelings of frustration, hurt, and disappointment.To beat this "negativity bias," you'll learn to use positive neuroplasticity, in daily life, with effective, quick, and authentic ways to build lasting real happiness into your own nervous system
… except when it comes to Trump. I’m just not willing to put aside my anger over what happened last November. I don’t know if I ever will be.
How do you handle anger? Take the quiz.
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