Good Anger by Sam Parker: Why a healthy dose of RAGE keeps the spark alive

When the journalist Sam Parker told friends and colleagues that he was writing a book about anger, they were surprised. ‘You’ve never struck me as an angry person,’ was a common response. One colleague declared him to be ‘the most calming human’ she’d ever worked with.

But Parker had struggled with anger for years. As a child growing up in Newcastle, he would play mediator between his warring parents.

In later years, he cultivated a cheerful persona, but his inner life was turbulent. He once woke up in the middle of the night and punched a hole through a window. His legs jittered constantly; he ground his teeth so badly they started falling out in chunks.

With time and therapy, however, Parker has come to regard anger as a vital, and vitalising, force, one that we could all do with understanding better. Yes, some anger is bad, and there is a lot of it about. (According to Gallup, the amount of stress, sadness and anger people feel each day is higher now than at any other point since the company started keeping track of our emotions in 2006).

Yet there is such a thing as ‘good anger’, and a life with no anger is no life at all.

Anger has long been acknowledged as a key part of who we are. Ancient China had a water god called Gonggong whose tempers were thought to cause floods. In Classical Greek thought, men’s anger was deemed hot-blooded and immediate, while women’s was cold and delayed.

As the major religions developed, anger was increasingly identified as a sin. Around 1,600 years ago, the monk Evagrius Ponticus included it on his list of ‘eight evil thoughts’, which was eventually whittled down to seven deadly sins.

Ponticus thought of anger as ‘the most fierce’ of passions, and noted that it could stir up ‘alarming experiences by night’, flashing up pictures of the ‘offensive person before one’s eyes’.

Other thinkers have seen the positive sides of anger, from Aristotle to Aquinas. More recently, the philosopher Peter Strawson has suggested that anger in relationships is a good sign, because it implies you believe the person you are angry with to be capable of better behaviour.

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Parker also quotes the couples therapist Virginia Goldner, who argues that long-term relationships go through ‘never-ending cycles of breakdown and repair, separation and reunion’. Without a bit of healthy strife, a relationship can become sexless, stuck in ‘the flaccid safety of permanent cosiness’.

Anger can also stop people from being taken advantage of, whether at work or at home. Parker interviews the Left-wing commentator Ash Sarkar, who recalls being called a p**i by a stranger in Cornwall.

She felt ‘blind with anger’ at the slur, and hated the aggression coursing through her body. ‘Well, think about what your other option was,’ her mother told her afterwards. ‘It was humiliation. Anger was the clear bright line telling you not to internalise this racism.’

Still, Parker admits, not all anger shields us from bigotry, and he is thoughtful on how it can be managed.

Cultivating ‘meta-awareness’ – where you zoom out and observe the emotions and thoughts you are experiencing as they occur – can be useful.

Taking ‘time-outs’ as a row is brewing is a good idea too (though hard to pull off). Using the ‘f*** this’, or even ‘f*** you’, energy generated by anger can be put to use around the house: try reordering the cutlery drawer, say, or ticking off chores.

During a fight, it can also help to reveal one’s own unhappiness – a technique known as the ‘discomfort caveat’, where you say something like ‘I’m feeling really angry right now, which is making it hard for me to speak calmly’. It’s honest, and might knock the legs out from the argument before it’s properly got going.

Parker pulled off a version of this trick when he was at a concert in his 20s, and the man next to him trod on him (or the other way around; he can’t remember). They both swore and tried to square up to one another for a fight, but the crowd was so tightly packed, they couldn’t move their arms.

Still, they promised snarlingly to ‘see each other outside’ – until eventually Parker said: ‘I’ll be honest, mate, I’m not really hard enough to back any of that up.’

His adversary frowned and nodded. ‘No, me neither,’ he said.

At points, Parker is rather too credulous a guide to the research that he draws on.

He cites the trauma expert Gabor Mate – who once interviewed Prince Harry – saying that his work warns of ‘devastating consequences like heart disease and cancer that can arise from repressed anger’.

Well, maybe, but factors such as diet and family history are surely more relevant.

At other moments, Parker gets a little carried away: smoking, he declares for instance, is ‘a symbolic act of sucking emotions inwards’.

I also don’t recommend reading the book on public transport: the shouty cover and all-caps title attract slightly perturbed looks.

Still, it’s an enlightening read, and Parker is especially insightful, unexpectedly, on female anger.

The stereotype that women are less angry than men no longer holds true, he points out: in fact, there’s now an ‘anger gap’ of six per cent, even if men remain far more prone to violence. When women are angry, research suggests they often suppress it – either by committing quiet acts of sabotage, becoming quiet or avoidant, or redirecting their anger into other relationships.

Identifying anger for what it is can be freeing, Parker believes; above all, anger is information. We shouldn’t fear it, he says, quoting the Buddhist spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, but should hold anger to us with tenderness, ‘like a mother holding a baby’.