Here in Highland Park, New Jersey

This is a difficult post to write.

Last week the following post suggested that anger is a terrible trait. They are even suggesting carrying the Ramban’s letter in one’s pocket, to remind you to “remove anger from your heart”.

Anger just is. Everyone gets angry. So if you think you are removing it, most likely you are repressing it. Not healthy at all. Here is my initial post on anger, that gives definitions and suggests that the Hebrew word ‘ka’as’ not only means anger but also ‘rage’. So you could argue that rage is not the optimal way to respond to anger. But, again, not acknowledging anger itself can be detrimental to one’s well-being.

As an example, let’s travel back 100 years to the time of Virginia Woolf. Here’s someone who was not allowed to express herself. In fact, when her mother died, her whole household reflected her father’s grieving. Is it surprising that soon after this she had her first bout of mental illness?

There is a lot more treatment for mental illness now than there was back in the time of Virginia Woolf. Aside from medication for the biological manifestation of the illness, a therapist often works with a patient to allow the person healthy ways of expressing buried feelings, such as anger.

Let’s take a look at the scene of her house at the time of her mother’s death (from Virginia Woolf: A Biography, by Quentin Bell, who was her nephew):

“Her death,” said Virginia, “was the greatest disaster that could happen.”

And yet, if Virginia’s loss had simply been a shattering bereavement the situation would not have been so bad as to be unendurable. The real horror of Julia’s death came in the mourning of her. Naturally, inevitably, the chief mourner was Leslie; he, a man of sixty-three, had every expectation of being nursed out of the world by a wife almost fifteen years his junior (and she would have it so well)…For a long time he abandoned himself to grief; his life, like his writing paper, was confined within a deep black border…

At meals he sat miserable and bewildered, too unhappy and too deaf to know what was being said, until at length, in one scene after another all through that dreadful summer, he broke down utterly, and while his embarrassed children sat in awkward silence, groaned, wept, and wished that he were dead.

In the accounts that Vanessa and Virginia have left of this period in their lives the image that recurs is one of darkness; dark houses, dark walls, darkened rooms, ‘Oriental gloom.’ And by this I think that they meant, not only physical darkness, but a deliberate shutting out of spiritual light. It was, for the children, not only tragic but chaotic and unreal. They were called upon to feel, not simply their natural grief, but a false, a melodramatic, an impossibly histrionic emotion which they could not encompass.

If experiencing her mother’s death and her father’s need to have all the grief be his grief was not enough, it was at this period that she first experienced sexual abuse by her stepbrother. Can you imagine, having all that suffering and not being to express any anger? Is it surprising that during this period she had her first bout with mental illness?

Virginia Woolf’s main outlet in her life was her writing. In fact, her book To the Lighthouse is said to be a fictionalized version of her mother’s death and her father’s grief. Her books were like her babies (she had no children); after a book was published, she would often plunge into deep depression, a kind of post-partum grieving for the child she no longer carried. In the end, she killed herself.

What if she had had an outlet for the anger she must have felt when her stepbrother molested her? Beyond a mood-stabilizing drug that may have treated the biological ailment, a tendency toward depression that she seemed to have inherited from her father, might it have helped if someone had listened to her pain? to her own personal grief, not just her father’s version? If she had been allowed to acknowledge her feelings, including the anger (maybe scream them, shout them, not keep them inward bound), I think the depression might not have felt so deep. If one views depression as “anger turned inward”, then one can understand why finding a healthy way to turn it outward is so important to overall well-being.

Clarification: if one doesn’t know what to do with one’s anger, my suggestion is find a good therapist.

We should all be healthy:

Soy not healthy:
Soy Industry Promotes Health Myths to Sell More Soy Products

Author Kaayla T. Daniel is challenging what she calls the myth that soy prevents breast cancer. “The truth is that soy protein contains dangerous levels of plant estrogens. Although not identical to human estrogens, these have been proven to increase breast cell proliferation, a widely accepted marker of breast cancer risk.” said Daniel, author of “The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food.”

I’m waiting for the study on blog and Google Reader addiction:
Do you Email and Text Excessively? It’s A Mental Problem

Fight with your spouse and live longer:
Squabble with spouse for health
This fits in my express anger constructively theme.

Links to my anger series:

• Anger at a Parent
• Expressions of Anger
• Exploring Anger (basic definitions here)

Humor is always a good way to end a blog post, especially one on health; but I can’t find anything too funny to link to at the moment, so I will end this post with the suggestion that you put a funny joke in the comments if you know one. Or a funny link. But you all have good taste, right, so I won’t have to use the delete key, right?

Addendum: Finally, I found a joke. And where else, but at Jack’s place:
Evolution of a Math Joke

Parent-teacher conferences the other night. When you go to parent-teacher conferences as a parent, it is supposed to be about your child. Not about you, the parent, or about how you felt as a child. But that does have a tendency to creep in.

We are meeting with our 10th teacher of the night (we have three children in one school, and the two in the upper grades have a lot of teachers). This teacher is a rabbi, who teaches both my sons at the current time. I made some remark about my eldest son getting “mad” (my mistake, I really meant angry, but colloquially one often says mad) because I took out his broken, falling apart folder and replaced it with a new, sturdier one. Now, all my son did was make one of those faces when I told him I had done this. No drama, no yelling. Just a facial expression. But I didn’t say any of this to this rabbi, his teacher.

The teacher said in response: “And you told him he’s not allowed to get mad at his parent, right?” I mumbled ‘no’. And that was basically the end of this part of the discussion. For the life of me, I can’t remember what he said next. But for the rest of the evening and part of the morning, I was thinking about what I might have said, what I would have wanted to say. And I want to write about why this whole thing bothered me. Why can’t I just let it go?

Perhaps I would have wanted sources (Jewish halachic sources) that say one is not allowed to get angry at a parent. But I’m sure they exist. That’s not going to help me.

So I now I go back to an earlier post, the first I wrote about anger. Anger as an emotion just is. So naturally one is sometimes going to get angry at people who live in your house, be they your children, parents or spouse. It’s what you do with the anger that can be problematic. And all my son did was make a face. A perfectly good way to deal with his anger, in my book. But the differentiation of anger vs. how one reacts to anger is not at all in this teacher’s head. Now, he happens to be a good teacher and has a good sense of how to handle kids. But I’m not going to be the one to educate him on emotions. Maybe part of me wishes I could do that, in a way he could hear. But maybe what I am really looking for is to undo my own childhood hurts, and once and for all be allowed to be angry at some of the adults around me! Even the caring, loving ones.

A big danger in not expressing anger is one can get sick from internalized anger. Coming soon: a look at Virginia Woolf and her father…did internalized anger contribute to her illness? She eventually killed herself. If one sees her illness as all biological, then the anti-depressants of today might have saved her. But if one sees her illness as internalized anger, perhaps some externalizing of her anger may have helped her.

Yesterday, I started posting about anger.

My intention had been to write about every day anger and how various people handle it. However, a horrific tragedy gave me pause to focusing at present on the every day. I feel fortunate to have wonderful neighbors here in Highland Park of many different backgrounds. But the close neighbors of Sderot, Israel, where people have been under daily rocket threats, celebrated yesterday’s massacre. CELEBRATED! How could one not get angry?

Some responses of bloggers:

• A classic approach by Yid with Lid: Seething at appeasers of terror
• What I would call a “rabbinic” approach by Therapydoc. Listen up, kids, she seems to say. Consider this as another school killing. Let me tell you a story about angels singing at the death of the Egyptians…
• A great way to deal with anger… tell a joke. Maybe then someone out there will get it?!!

Finally, getting back to Highland Park, as I originally meant this to be a blog about Highland Park, I just want to mention with sadness and some anger that Michelle Reasso will be leaving the Highland Park Public Library. At whom do I direct the anger? It can’t be at Mayor Meryl Frank; she gave the library a large donation recently. And not at the other librarians. And not at the taxpayers of Highland Park, we pay too much already. So I’ll direct it at the ridiculous politicians of Trenton who messed up the State budget. Michelle deserves her own post, so I’ll write one soon.

It’s OK to be angry. Really.

I’d like to introduce a topic of interest to me, in hopes that it is of interest to you: repressing anger, expressing anger. What constitutes a healthy way of dealing with anger? What are unhealthy ways of dealing with anger? What do Jewish scholars have to say about anger? Psychologists? Bloggers?

First, some definitions:
Repression: The unconscious exclusion of painful impulses, desires, or fears from the conscious mind.
Depression: Freud defined this as anger turned inward.
Anger: I couldn’t find a simple definition. The Wikipedia page on Anger is quite long.

I found a nice explanation of three different forms of anger by Rabbi Abraham Twerski:

…the Hebrew word for anger, kaas, is used for three different phases of anger, and this may lead to some confusion.

Kaas may refer to the feeling one has when one is offended or provoked. There is no need to describe this feeling. Everyone is familiar with it.

After we feel anger, we may react by expressing our anger in a wide variety of ways, from word to deed. In fact, clamming up and pouting is also a reaction, albeit a passive one. The reaction to the initial feeling of anger is also termed kaas.

The third phase of anger, which is likewise called kaas, is retention of the feeling. Sometimes the anger feeling dissipates, and at other times it may linger for hours, weeks and even years. We may hold a grudge for years against the person who offended us.

I like the way he divides anger into three. People often mush together the feeling of anger with the reaction. One of the reasons this is important to me is as a child, I was taught that anger was bad. As an adult, I’m learning to understand that anger just is. And recognizing it and finding a healthy way to deal with it is important to one’s health.

Here’s a famous letter that the Ramban, a rabbi from the 11th century, wrote about anger:

Hear, my son, the instruction of your father and don’t forsake the teaching of your mother (Mishlei 1:8). Get into the habit of always speaking calmly to everyone. This will prevent you from anger, a serious character flaw which causes people to sin.
More of the Ramban’s letter to his son

Now, having read what Rabbi Twerski’s wrote about anger, perhaps this letter should be re-translated as “rage” and not anger, a feeling that we all feel. Or perhaps we just need to accept that the Ramban did not know all.

To be continued…