Secular Accounts of Anger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Anger as a Concern-based Construal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123
Anger as a Moral Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .126
Defective Anger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129
Resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Taking Inventory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Eyes and Heart, Forest and Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Reconstruals of Anger: Fellow Sufferers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137
Reconstruals of Anger: Re-viewing and Reframing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Emotional Sobriety: Freedom from Anger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Turning Point: From Hurting to Helping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143
Our first goal in making an inventory of our resentments in Step 4 is to let go of the anger we feel toward the people, places, and things that have hurt us in the past. This work extends through Steps 5 to 9. Each of these subsequent Steps requires that we reexamine our anger as we pursue the other goals of our self-examination: to admit and surrender the defects of character driving our anger and to make amends for the harm that those defects and that anger have wrought. The principles that we practice and the understandings that we gain through these Steps form the foundation of our ongoing work in Step 10, where we continue to take inventory of our anger every time that it crops up anew. We continue to chip away at it, reducing its incidence, its intensity, its duration, and its overall negative impact, keeping it thereby from turning into still new resentments.
This is a life-long endeavor, and it stands to reason that if we are to succeed in it, we need to develop a practical, working understanding of the emotion: what it is, how it arises in us, the ways it affects us, its underlying defects of character and their remedial virtues, and how, in view of all of this, we can best examine and correct it in ourselves.
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People respond differently to the same external stimulus. On the account of the emotions we find in AA, the reason is that, while they may be faced with the same situation, they are not seeing it the same way. The difference in perception explains the difference in emotion.
Anger as a Concern-based Construal
On this account, anger is no mere physiological phenomenon. It is a complex mental state arising out of a complex value-cognitive event. Its immediate cause is the perception of offense, the sense that one has been wronged. It responds to an act (or omission) affecting our person that we see or construe as unjust or unfair, an injury (affront, aggression, assault, aspersion, attack, breach, infraction, infringement, insult, slight, transgression, trespass, violation) against something or someone that is important (valuable, meaningful, significant) to us by an agent who, in our view, is acting intentionally or negligently or is otherwise culpable or guilty, and who, consequently, we desire to punish (get back at, retaliate against).
Recall from the Big Book sample that Anonymous John was angry for a number of perceived offenses to things that he cared about: with Brown for interfering with his marital and extra-marital relations; with his wife for flirting with Brown and wanting to put the house in her name; with Mrs. Jones for snubbing him and committing her husband, who was his drinking buddy; and with his boss for threatening to fire him for drinking and pilfering. Though not noted in the sample (since the inventory is of John), it is also probably the case that his wife and his boss were angry with John for his unfair and unjust treatment of them, and that their respective responses were ways of retaliating.
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Understanding anger as a concern-based construal makes it possible for us to make such an appraisal. Anger, we have said, is a perception of offense involving something we care about, someone or something we blame, and a desire to punish. From this it follows that anger becomes morally wrong or defective when my perception of offense, the concern on which that perception is based, and/or my desire to punish the offender, are defective.
My perception is defective when it is distorted and does not accurately reflect the reality of a given circumstance: I see an offense where there is none, or I see a greater offense than there actually is, or I see offensive intent where none exists, or the offender I see as morally culpable or negligent is not truly so, or what I perceive to be the offender is not, in fact, the offender.
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Clearly, freedom from anger means freedom from its defective manifestations in us. It doesn’t mean we never feel anger, which we have argued is neither possible nor desirable. It means we are not a slave to it. Anger doesn’t control us. It no longer has a claim on our heart and is no longer anchored in our defects of character. While it remains a natural emotion, anger is no longer our natural disposition. We cease being angry alcoholics. Instead, we are now slow to anger, taking offense neither quickly nor easily nor frequently; we neither indulge it nor hold on to it, but readily turn it over; nor do we attend to every slight and snub or wish to exact a pound of flesh for every jot of blood.
Free from defective anger, we are able to experience and express just and rightly ordered anger. We are angry, as Aristotle suggests, only as, when, and for so long as we ought: “at the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way.”3 This “rightness” is the justness of anger. It matches reality, it fits the truth. It flows out of right seeing and right caring, out of a right construal of a situation based on a right concern for the goods that are at stake, of which the first is the good of justice.”
– From Part II: Emotions, Chapter 8: Anger and Resentment, pp. 121, 123–124, 129–130, 144
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