What To Do With the Anger

Most of what gets said to angry people in a church after something like this is some version of be careful with that. Do not let it take root. Do not become bitter. Do not let the sun go down on it.

The advice is usually well meant and it lands as an instruction to stop feeling something, which nobody can do, so people either pretend or leave.

This guide starts from a different place. Your anger is a reasonable response to what happened. It also has a specific set of behaviors, some of which help you and some of which quietly make things worse, and knowing the difference gives you something to actually do.

The anger has more targets than anyone acknowledges

Part of what makes this exhausting is that the anger is not aimed at one thing. Most people find some version of all of these:

At the leader. At the board or elders, for what they did or did not do. At people who defended him. At people who knew and said nothing. At the people who left, for leaving. At the people who stayed, for staying. At whoever read the statement from the stage. At the denomination. At God. At yourself.

Only the first of those is socially acceptable to say. The rest you carry silently while sitting near the people you are carrying it about.

That is not bitterness. That is a normal response to a situation with a lot of parties in it.

The finding that contradicts the usual advice

Here is where research is genuinely useful, because it points somewhere unexpected.

The common belief is that anger builds up like pressure and needs releasing, and that letting it out reduces it. Psychologists call this catharsis theory, and it has been around since Aristotle.

Brad Bushman, a psychologist who has studied aggression for decades, tested it directly in a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2002. He deliberately angered participants, then split them into groups. One group hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who had angered them. A second group hit a punching bag while thinking about getting physically fit. A third group did nothing at all.

Then he measured how angry they felt and gave them an opportunity to behave aggressively toward the person who had provoked them.

The group that vented while focusing on the person who angered them ended up the angriest and the most aggressive. The distraction group was in the middle. The group that did nothing came out best.

Bushman's summary is that venting to reduce anger works about as well as using gasoline to put out a fire. The results replicate earlier work and directly contradict catharsis theory.

What that actually means for you

It does not mean suppress your anger, and it does not mean the people telling you to calm down were right.

What the study isolates is one specific activity: rumination. Going back over the provocation, rehearsing it, keeping it active and vivid. That is what made people angrier. The punching bag was not the problem. Thinking about him while hitting it was.

This is worth taking seriously because rumination is exactly what a congregation in crisis produces industrially.

The group text where the same six people rehash the same details every night. The seventh retelling of the timeline to someone who already agrees with you. The hours reading comments about your church from people who have never been in it. The conversation you keep having with him in your head, where you finally say the right thing.

All of that feels like processing. It has the emotional texture of working through something. What it actually does is keep the anger fresh.

Processing and rumination look similar from the inside

Three questions tell them apart.

Is it going anywhere? Processing changes shape over time. You notice something new, your understanding shifts, you arrive somewhere slightly different. Rumination is a loop. The same account, the same order, the same ending. If you could transcribe the last four times you told it and they would be nearly identical, that is a loop.

How do you feel afterward? Processing is tiring and tends to leave you a little lighter. Rumination leaves you more activated than when you started. Check thirty minutes after, not during, because during feels good either way.

Are you talking to a person or to an audience? A friend engages with what you say and sometimes complicates it. An audience agrees. Audiences are much more comfortable and much less useful.

What does help

Write it down instead of retelling it. Writing forces sequence and structure onto an experience in a way that talking does not, and it does not require anyone to react. Write the ugly version. It is not going anywhere and nobody is reading it.

Set an actual boundary on the intake. Decide when you read about it and when you do not. Anger with an unlimited supply of fuel does not settle. This is not avoidance if you have chosen the terms.

Move without rehearsing. Bushman's distraction group did better than the rumination group while performing the same physical activity. The variable was where their attention went. Exercise helps. Exercise spent narrating your case does not.

Let it point at something. Anger is directional and carries information about what you think is wrong. Sometimes the useful move is to let it aim at the structural question: what allowed this, and is it still there. That is not the same as revenge, and it is one of the few places this energy converts into something.

Give it a container rather than a lid. Some people find a set time genuinely helps. Twenty minutes, written, then closed. It is not a trick. It works because it stops the anger from having to fight for your attention all day.

Anger at God

This one carries the most shame attached and the least permission, so it is worth saying plainly.

Anger at God after a leader's failure is one of the most common responses there is, and it appears throughout scripture in the mouths of people who were not being rebuked for it. The specific difficulty is that the person who broke your trust was the person whose job was to represent God to you, so the two are tangled and untangling them takes time.

It does not resolve by deciding to stop. It usually needs someone to say it to.

When the anger is actually shame

Worth checking, because it is common and it changes what helps.

Shame and anger travel together. Research on self-conscious emotions consistently finds that when someone feels globally exposed and has no way to repair it, anger frequently becomes the exit, because fury is more bearable than humiliation.

If you notice contempt rising toward whoever is convenient, or anger that is much larger than the specific thing that triggered it, it is worth asking whether underneath it is something about your own part. Defending him. Bringing someone. Not seeing it.

Anger that is really shame does not respond to anger strategies. It responds to being said out loud to one person.

When this is more than a guide can hold

• The anger is affecting your work, your driving, or how you speak to people you love
• You are frightening yourself or someone else
• It is not moving at all over months
• You are using alcohol or anything else to manage it
• Any thought of harming yourself or anyone else

Talking to a licensed counselor is not an admission that your anger was wrong. It means the load is bigger than a document.

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Sources

• Bushman, B.J. (2002), "Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(6): 724-731.
• Bushman, B.J., Baumeister, R.F. and Stack, A.D. (1999), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76.
• Tangney, J.P. et al. (1992), "Shamed into Anger?", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62.

This guide is educational and is not a substitute for counseling or medical care. If you are in crisis, contact a licensed professional or call or text 988 in the United States.