I don’t want to be an angry person like my mom. Is it inevitable?

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity. I grew up with a mother who was very frequently angry and completely willing to show it in tone of voice and facial expression, with no concern for others’ emotional needs. My dad was the opposite — rarely angry, easygoing, affectionate, fun. As a child I argued with my mom a lot, but when I was about 13 I made up my mind that I did not want to be an angry person like her. I wanted to be like my dad. With the help of religion, I did a lot of introspection and learned a level of anger self-control that I didn’t previously have. However, all my life I’ve occasionally “lost it,” reverting to the early patterns I learned from my mom rather than the later patterns I copied from my dad. On such occasions, which happen about once a year when I’ve found someone’s behavior outrageous, I end up feeling really guilty afterward. I feel that I have polluted the world with my outburst, my willingness to give in to reactivity. This guilt goes on for a while, and then, after I’ve apologized for the intensity of my reaction and the person I yelled at and I have discussed the aggravating situation more rationally, I feel a little better. But not completely better. I told a good friend about all this, and he suggested that I could address the painful lingering guilt by meditating a little while. I appreciate meditation, but I wonder if it’s a bad idea to meditate away or shrug off the feeling of guilt. It seems risky to the goal of being a moral person to get in the habit of transcending guilt. And yet … guilt clearly can get all out of proportion at times. With both anger and guilt, how can we tell when these emotions are justified and useful, and when they’re excessive and unnecessary? Dear Angry at Anger, Around 2,500 years ago, the Ancient Greeks put on an amazing play that gets at the heart of your question. I’m talking about The Eumenides by the playwright Aeschylus, and I’m going to tell you its story because I think it can help you. In the play, the goddess Athena swoops into Athens to see what’s got everyone so riled up. Turns out there’s been a murder, and the Furies — walking, frothing embodiments of anger in Ancient Greek mythology — want to exact revenge. They argue that it’s necessary: If we don’t stick up for people who’ve been wronged, wrongdoers will feel emboldened to keep harming others. But Athena thinks blood vengeance is no way to run a civilization. So the goddess initiates two transformations. First, she replaces the Furies with a court of law to judge the defendant fair and square. But, recognizing that the powerful Furies can’t just be dismissed, she offers them a place to live beneath the city, where they’ll be revered by the citizens as long as they accept the constraints of the law. In other words, anger is not to be banished — only contained. But this deal doesn’t fully satisfy the Furies: They feel dishonored, like animals in a cage. So in the second transformation, Athena does something radical: She honors them. “You’re holy, honored here, and you’re my guest,” she says. And she invites them to stop identifying with anger and start identifying with kindness instead. In fact, she asks them to bless all the Athenians. They like this idea of themselves as noble benefactors, so they willingly change their identity — and even their name. They go from “the Furies” to “the Eumenides,” which means “the kindly ones.” --- Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! --- So why do I think this play can be helpful to you? For one thing, it reminds us that anger is an innocent emotion: It’s just trying to help us. It’s an indicator that something is off and needs to be dealt with. Remember, the Furies’ initial goal was to stick up for people who’ve been hurt and stave off the threat of more hurt. That’s a good goal! The problem is not the anger itself — it’s a certain behavioral response to the anger that needs reform. For the Furies, and for lots of us humans, the behavioral response is often to seek revenge or lash out. That’s why a long line of Western philosophers — from Seneca in the first century to Martha Nussbaum in the 21st — argued that anger is pretty much always irrational and destructive. But as women of color scholars like Audre Lorde and Myisha Cherry have pointed out, the behavioral response to anger doesn’t have to be destructive all the time. It can be constructive. This “Lordean rage,” as Cherry calls it, doesn’t seek liberation for an oppressed group by trying to beat down the oppressor; instead, it tries to bring everyone onto equal footing, insisting that no one is free until everyone is free. Your mom, from the sounds of it, had a behavioral response to anger that was destructive. She wasn’t bad for feeling anger, but it was deeply unfortunate that she expressed it the way she did. You’re right to want to try to avoid expressing anger in that same way. And this is where meditation can actually be helpful: not after an angry outburst, as your friend suggested, but before it. Over time, mindfulness meditation can train you to notice an emotion as it’s arising — and get curious about it. If you feel rage rising within you, but you can tell it’s the constructive Lordean rage, use it to motivate action. But (and this is much more often the case, at least for me) if you hear a certain story forming in your mind — “He’s wrong, I’m right! I’ll put him in his place!” — that’s probably the destructive kind, and it might be better to give yourself an adult time-out by saying, “I need a little time to process this. Let me get back to you later.” It sounds like you’ve already practiced this to some degree, and you usually manage to apply it in the moment, which is awesome. You’ve achieved Athena’s first transformation — the one where she respectfully offered the Furies a home, while insisting that they live within certain constraints. But. But, but, but. You’re human, my dear, so I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t manage to achieve this every time. There will be the occasional outburst. So the real question is, how can you handle that without stewing in endless guilt? You wrote, “It seems risky to the goal of being a moral person to get in the habit of transcending guilt.” But it’s also morally risky to stay in guilt mode: That doesn’t actually help anyone, and it can just keep your attention resignedly centered on yourself. Instead, guilt — like anger — is meant to be a useful indicator. It’s there to tell you when you’ve acted out of line with your values. But like other indicators in our lives (think: the smoke alarm), it’s counterproductive or even harmful to just sit with it too long. The point is to change your behavior: Make amends! Run out of the burning house! I suspect guilt about angry outbursts is sticky for you, though, because of the family mythology you developed growing up. At age 13 — an age when we can’t easily differentiate between the emotion of anger itself (innocent) and a particular expression of it (problematic) — you came to the conclusion that you didn’t want to be like your mom. That’s super understandable. It’s common for us to develop family mythologies where we talk about ourselves or our siblings as being “like mom” or “like dad.” But those mythologies can inadvertently do us a major disservice. I’d encourage you to revisit yours now, as an adult. You specify that to you, being “like mom” means being “an angry person.” But is there such a thing? The truth is, all humans get angry. In fact, all mammals experience reactive aggression; it’s part of the mammalian response to a perceived threat or stressor — the “fight” part of the “fight or flight” response. From the point of view of the nervous system, there’s no “justified” versus “unjustified” anger; a threat is perceived, so anger arises. While some people may have less impulse control or be less skilled at managing their behavioral response to anger, these things are on a spectrum and they’re alterable. Anger is not a person’s fixed essence. A cornerstone of Buddhism — the idea of anatta — is instructive here. Anatta means that a person has no permanent fixed essence. There is no static “me.” My self is always changing because it’s subject to different causes and conditions in the environment: whether my family says encouraging or hurtful things to me, whether I experience a traumatizing war or live in peacetime, whether I have enough nutrition or not, and so on. Same for your mom, and same for you. If we look at anger through this lens, we see it not as some irrational madness that suddenly takes possession of an individual (à la Seneca and other Western philosophers), but as a response to the conditions in the person’s life. Maybe they’ve endured trauma and, as an adaptive response, they developed a hair-trigger reaction to any perceived threat, making them quick to anger. Maybe they were exposed to aggression at a young age and that diminished their brain’s capacity for impulse control. Maybe they haven’t had an opportunity to learn more skillful ways of expressing their feelings. Viewing anger this way, we naturally feel an upswelling of compassion. That’s not to say we excuse the behavior, but we understand a bit more where it’s coming from, so we’re less likely to demonize the other person or be angry at them in turn. The beauty of this is that we’re also less likely to demonize ourselves when we have an angry outburst. We know that we, like all other humans, get angry because we’re humans and we have certain conditions acting upon us. That doesn’t mean we get to be complacent and give free rein to anger when it arises. But it means that we don’t stew in guilt, or in fear of being “an angry person.” If anything, we stew in compassion. And this, to me, is Athena’s second transformation. It’s the realization that we can actually use anger as a doorway to a really radical compassion, turning “furies” into “kindly ones.” By all means, keep practicing the first transformation — the mindful constraining of how you behaviorally express anger. But in those inevitable moments when you slip up and get reactive, can you recognize that as evidence that you’re a human animal who is affected by her inner and outer environment? Smile compassionately at your anger and say: Yep, still human! Bonus: What I’m reading * If only every philosopher wrote as clearly as Agnes Callard! This week’s question prompted me to read her short piece “Angry Forever,” in which she argues that being angry, and even staying angry, is actually very rational. * Speaking of Callard, she’s got a new book out called Open Socrates. Writing about it for the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman notes that the internet gives us the illusion of free speech and real thought, but it’s just that — an illusion. Everyone can publish their contrarian opinions, but, as Callard writes, “free speech is achieved neither by debate nor by persuasion” — it’s achieved when you can discuss your deep questions with someone you consider your equal, someone who is listening to you sincerely and willing to have their own opinion changed in the process. * I recently read the philosopher Susan Wolf’s essay “The Moral of Moral Luck.” She describes what she calls “the nameless virtue” — a virtue that involves recognizing that none of us is a separate and independent self: “we are beings who are thoroughly in-the-world, in interaction with others whose movements and thoughts we cannot fully control, and whom we affect and are affected by accidentally as well as intentionally, involuntarily, unwittingly, inescapably, as well as voluntarily and deliberately.” Though it might be nameless in Western philosophy, I think this virtue does actually have a name: It’s the Buddhists’ anatta! This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

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I don’t want to be an angry person like my mom. Is it inevitable?