Emotional Sobriety: Anger

Anger and resentment are the main subjects of our 4th Step inventory in the Big Book. As an emotion, anger arises from a perception that one has been intentionally wronged. It responds to an act (or omission) that we see or construe as unjust or unfair, an offense or injury against us or a person or thing important to us. The Big Book lists some basic concerns as our self-esteem, pocketbooks, ambitions, and personal relations (pp. 64-65). The 12&12 sums them up as our concerns for “sex, security, and society” (S4, p. 50).

Anger motivates the aggrieved person to redress the perceived injustice and punish the offender. As such, anger is, in principle, morally necessary. Whether a specific instance of anger is morally right or justified, or morally wrong or unjustified, depends on whether the response fits the offense.

Anger goes wrong when our perception is wrong: we see an offense where there is none, or we see a greater offense than there actually is, or we see offensive intent where none exists or the offender is not morally responsible or culpable, or what we perceive to be the offender is not in fact the offender.

Anger goes wrong also when our concern is wrong. Concerns go wrong when they are excessive, morally or spiritually disordered, misguided or misdirected, or pursued at the expense of others. If we suffer from an excessive desire for respect, for instance, we will see signs of disrespect everywhere and our ire will be frequently aroused. If we are too concerned with being right, we may tend to engage in what the 12&12 describes as “quick-tempered criticism and furious, power-driven argument” (S10, p.91) when people don't agree with us.

Because of our spiritual disease, our perceptions and concerns are often likely to be selfish and self-centered and hence our anger defective. That is, our anger tends to be of what the 12&12 (p. 67) calls the "self-righteous" variety, often driven by pride of self, a hurt ego being its most common cause. In our warped, self-serving sense of justice, we are prone to take offense too quickly, too often, too intensely, and for too long. In the latter case, this issues in a smoldering resentment that disposes us to still more anger.

Our inventory of anger and resentment is designed to reveal their cause in distorted perceptions and concerns and in the character defects that proceed from them. We can infer this from the following Big Book explanation of how to do Step 4, alluded to above: After listing the people, places, and things we were angry at, "We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were 'burned up'" (pp.64-65).

Taking inventory or self-examination is a spiritual discipline whose purpose is to foster a spiritual awakening that transforms those perceptions and concerns and enables us to surrender the resulting defects of character and replace them with their countervailing traits in the virtues.

Primary among the defects of character are such traits as pride (of the self-importance, self-righteous variety), greed, envy, injustice, intolerance, impatience, unforgiveness, and intemperance.

Primary among the corrective virtues are such traits as humility, acceptance, forgiveness, justice, patience, tolerance, and temperance. Practicing these principles is how we can become progressively free from the defects of an emotion that in the past drove us to the bottle and in sobriety can still mar our recovery and sabotage our relationships.

Humility helps us to temper the sense of superiority that motivates self-righteous anger and compels us so easily and so quickly to fault and condemn others. Acceptance helps us to deal with life on life’s terms and not get overly exercised when people, places and things don’t follow our own script of how they should be. Gratitude checks the dissatisfaction that generates greed and envy, which in turn generate resentment over what we lack and others seem to have. Justice enables us to experience and direct our anger in a way that fits or does justice to its situation. Forgiveness allows us to let go of anger's consequent concern to punish those perceived to have wronged us, a concern which often issues in vengeance and retaliation. Patience enables us to endure with equanimity and without complaint people and things not adhering to our own timetable. Tolerance enables us to treat justly those with whom we may rightly disagree. A cardinal virtue governing these others, Temperance trims the excess from our concerns, desires, wants and appetites. To explore these defects and virtues, click on their links or go to Character Defects and Practice These. Also, in Reflections, see How Important Is It? for the story of one of Ray's experiences practicing acceptance.

[Image: Jim B., first self-declared atheist to join AA and the most contentious member of the group at the time; was so viciously anti-God that he was threatened with expulsion, at which point he appealed to the 3rd Tradition; claims credit for the Big Book’s use of the phrase “God as we understood Him”; ironically, the 12&12 recounts how, his militant atheism notwithstanding, it was only after reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room that he stopped relapsing and stayed sober for good; author of “The Vicious Cycle” in Big Book. For audio of his story and Q&A about it, please click on links. For talk by him, click on Jim B.: AA Pioneer. For an audio of this post, please click on link.]

"So, nowadays, if anyone talks of me so as to hurt, I first ask myself if there is any truth at all in what they say. If there is none, I try to remember that I too have had my periods of speaking bitterly of others; that hurtful gossip is but a symptom of our remaining emotional illness; and consequently that I must never be angry at the unreasonableness of sick people." – Bill W.

"Resentment is the “number one” offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick." – Big Book

"What we must recognize is that we exult in some of our defects. Self-righteous anger can be very enjoyable. In a perverse way we can actually take satisfaction from the fact that many people annoy us; it brings a comfortable feeling of superiority." – 12&12

"A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger." – Proverbs 15:1
"Love . . . is not easily angered." – 1 Corinthians 13:4

"Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.” – Socrates

"There are two things a person should never be angry at: what they can help, and what they cannot." – Plato

"Anybody can become angry—that is easy—but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody's power and is not easy." – Aristotle

"Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad." – Euripides

"Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it." – Seneca

"Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him." – Epictetus

"The best answer to anger is silence." – Marcus Aurelius

"You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger." – Buddha

"Anger regards two objects, viz., the retribution that it seeks, and the person on whom it seeks retribution." – Thomas Aquinas

"Those speak foolishly who ascribe their anger or their impatience to such as offend them or to tribulation. Tribulation does not make people impatient, but proves that they are impatient. So everyone may learn from tribulation how his heart is constituted." – Martin Luther

"Thou hast not half the power to do me harm, as I have to be hurt." – William Shakespeare

"When angry, count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.” – Thomas Jefferson

"Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one." – Benjamin Franklin

"There was never an angry man that thought his anger unjust." – St. Francis de Sales

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." – Mark Twain

"Nothing on earth consumes a man more completely than the passion of resentment." – Friedrich Nietzsche

"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow." – Rainer Maria Rilke

"So many of us make a great fuss of matters of small consequence. We are so easily offended. Happy is the man who can brush aside the offending remarks of another and go on his way." – Gordon B. Hinckley

"In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves." – Abraham J. Heschel

"Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head." – Arthur Schopenhauer

"Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance." – Robert Quillen

"He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin." – John Ruskin

"Don’t do something permanently stupid because you’re temporarily upset." – Anonymous

"You cannot stay angry at somebody unless you feel superior to them." – Tim Keller

"I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to." – Anonymous

"Revenge is a confession of pain." – Latin Proverb

"Never say mean words out of anger. Your anger will pass. But your mean words can scar a person for life. So use kind words or be silent." – Anonymous

"[Wrath] is the love of justice perverted into the desire for revenge and for the injury of someone else; justice is the proclaimed motive for every manifestation of Wrath.” – Henry Fairlie

"Anger is one letter short of danger." – Anonymous

"When you are angry, be silent." – Anonymous

"A bitter heart eats its owner." – Bantu Proverb

"Anger is a feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind." – Anonymous

"When wrath becomes a habit, we learn to see the world through angry eyes: laden with an excessive sense of our own entitlements, we let anger direct reason’s vision and judgment, rather than the other way around.” – Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices

"Suddenly I saw that I could do something about my anger. I could fix me, instead of trying to fix them." – A.A.'s Daily Reflections

"Live and let live warns against resentment; tells us to avoid construing other people’s actions as intentional injuries to us." – One Day at a Time in Al-Anon

"Just for today I will let go of my resentments. Today, if I am wronged, I will practice forgiveness, knowing that I need forgiveness myself." – Just for Today: Daily Meditations for Recovering Addicts

"As we take inventory and examine our resentments, issuing from hurts real or imagined, we begin to see the exact nature of these resentments in the character defects that lie behind and trigger them." – PTP123

"Our first goal on 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.” – PTP4

Emotional Sobriety: Anger - Thomas a Kempis

For PTP123 passages on anger and resentment, see pp. 29, 77, 168, 211. For PTP4 passages, see Chapter 8: Anger and Resentment, pp. 121–145. For more Big Book and 12&12 passages, click on 164andmore.com and search for anger and for resentment. On this site, see Appendix 3: Common Manifestations of Self: Defective Emotions – Anger. See also Watch Your Mouth: Cursing in Meetings, and Reflections: How Important Is It?.

Additional Resources

Meditations for 03/09, 04/15, 08/27, 08/28, and 09/11 in One Day at a Time in Al-Anon
Meditation for 12/06 in Al-Anon's Courage to Change
Meditation for 03/11, 04/27, and 09/9 in NA's Just for Today: Daily Meditations for Recovering Addicts
"Anger: Holy Emotion or Hellish Passion?," chapter in Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
The Mission, 1986 movie with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. Two cases of anger, both ostensibly aroused by injustice, but each driven by entirely different concerns and desires. A 3- rather than 5-star film, yet instructive and entertaining. See DeYoung’s insightful analysis in book chapter noted above

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