More Americans than ever are seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But they seem to be avoiding help for another emotion, even though it comes up across life stages and can be destructive: anger.
Current events have fanned the flame of wrath even more. Like many Americans, Nycole DeLaVara has seen angry conversations about the news invade her church lifeโespecially over politics, race, and gender.
But in her work as a biblical counselor in Southern California, DeLaVara says that anger often remains unaddressed and unresolved.
โI kind of wish people were coming and saying, โI am having a hard time processing what Iโm seeing,โโ said DeLaVara. โThat would be a humble way of approaching things. I find people donโt know what theyโre feeling.โ
CT spoke with Christian counselors across the country who agreed. Not enough people, they say, have been able to recognize the uncertainty theyโre feeling as anger, and they may be missing out on the guidance that could help them during a heated and divisive climate.
โThe Facebook warrior usually doesnโt come into counseling and say, โI really struggled to manage my dialogue on Facebook,โโ said Brad Hambrick, who oversees the counseling ministries at Summit Church, in North Carolina, which has 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance.
The flood of information people experience nowโbeing able at every moment to know anything frustrating going on in the entire worldโcontributes to a โbackground sense of irritation,โ said Hambrick, which โcontributes to impulse control being harder these days.โ
Last year, the Los Angeles Police Department recorded the most road rage incidents in seven years, and nationally, the number of road rage shootings has risen 400 percent over the last decade.
Service sector workers have endured more enraged vitriol from customers since the pandemic. Flight attendants have noticed an increase in outbursts on airplanes. Anger appears to be sitting right under the surface of life in the United States.
But whatโs going on beneath the outbursts?
Anger is a โsmoke detectorโwhat is it telling me?โ said DeLaVara. Anger in personal relationships is often someone not knowing how to communicate the feelings they are having, she said, feelings like fear, uncertainty, a sense of injustice, or not being understood or respected.
Christian counselor Anna Mondal in San Diego compares good and bad anger to how a child responds after being hit by another kid.
โItโs okay for a kid to be angry, but itโs not okay for them to harm another child in their anger,โ Mondal said. โItโs okay to feel it, but how they express it matters. … That is such an important thing to know how to do: feel the anger but not express it destructively.โ
Braden Benson, a Christian counselor at The Owen Center in Auburn, Alabama, said the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump stirred peopleโs anger. For people who watch Trump every day, it was as if a friend had been shot. With current events, a lot of anger that comes out is from people having โparasocialโ relationships with politicians and online figures, he said.
โI think the deeper you go into the parasocial world, the more likely it is that youโre opening yourself up to that anger, that sense of vulnerability,โ he said. โBecause this thing, this person, this podcast, this TV show, whatever this character that you have seen as your friend, is now getting attacked.โ
Anger at social media or a news article might require some deep breaths or a long run, Mondal said.
โWestern culture emphasizes thinking and logic and intellectualismโlike, Let me think about my right response,โ said Mondal. โOften, we canโt. We have to wait for our body to calm down.โ
But she added that with longer-standing issues that cause anger, a deep breath probably wonโt do much.
People seeing seismic change around them will still feel a certain level of threat and sense of vulnerability. They donโt recognize whatโs happening in the world, and they donโt know whatโs coming next.
โYou either respond to the vulnerability as God, which means youโre in charge, you have to fix it, you have to cope, you have to control it,โ said Benson. โOr you respond to the vulnerability with Godโunderstand that you canโt fix it.โ
When Christians find themselves overwhelmed by the world, they have to work to recognize what they can and canโt influence, counselors said. Christians can use their anger to take action without letting their anger become hurtful to others.
โThe tendency is when we see people overreacting, we try to balance it out, almost by an encouragement to underreact,โ said Hambrick at Summit.
Churches could be addressing problems with anger and related issues through peer support groupsโsomething Summit has. Like 12-step recovery groups, these groups are lay-led and can naturally fit in the ecosystem of a church, Hambrick said.
โItโs one of the greatest untapped modes or ways of creating change,โ he said. โItโs just humble honesty โฆ with people you respect.โ
Others who have worked through anger found circles of others outside their family who were willing to hear their anger very helpful.
Mondal, a counselor, experienced trauma-induced anger 15 years ago after sexual assault when she was teaching overseas.
โI had no tools for how to express the anger that I felt at being dropped, left alone, not being taken care of,โ she said.
She had to learn first that she was angryโbeneath the shame she felt initiallyโthen learn how to express that anger to others and to God. Once she was able to express it in a constructive way, she said she could feel joy more deeply.
A support group for deep anger is typically a small circle of people, she said, and usually not those the person is closest to.
โItโs a different kind of people who come out of the woodwork, who are not afraid of that [pain],โ she said.
Support groups have been helpful for people struggling with more everyday forms of anger too.
Tim Schultz, a lobbyist in Washington, DC, felt comfortable confessing his struggles with anger toward his family to a small prayer group at his church.
โPeople would not see me as an angry person,โ he said. But a few years into his marriage, after having children, he was having angry outbursts at home. โI was both aghast and ashamed of that.โ
He had been in a menโs prayer group at his church for over a decade, and first shared his problem with them.
โIf youโre known by people outside your immediate family, you donโt have any problem confessing stuff like this that might feel really shameful,โ he said. โShame is paralyzing. It makes you not want people to know this about you.โ
He talked to his pastor, read books from Christian psychologists, and went to therapy.
โThe biggest technique was to find a vocabulary for each stage of anger and verbalize it,โ he said. If he asks his kids to go to bed three times and they donโt, telling them he feels disrespected lets some air out of the balloon. People โhold level 4 anger in, and then they get to 7 and blow up. You werenโt honest with yourself and the people around you.โ
He thinks part of the reason people around him in DC are struggling with unhealthy anger is that they are overscheduled. When they have no time to pause and be aware of what emotions are happening, anger has more opportunity to boil over, he said.
Schultz and his family have a big Christmas party every year with about 100 people. Every year, he shares something short about how Christmas and the gospel connects to the cultural moment.
Last year, he told the gathering: โLook around you, look online, people behaving badly on flightsโthere is so much anger in our world. โฆ We need a certain dose of anger, otherwise it will be runaway injustice. But oftentimes, anger is destroying people.โ
He talked about God seeing the things we are angry about, and how God is also angry about injustice and death. He also said God didnโt pour โbrimstoneโ on the world in response, but instead came in a manger.
Once he started talking about his efforts to address his anger, other men started asking for the number of the counseling service he went to. Heโs now referred at least seven of them to counseling for anger.
โGod is taking something bad and using it for his kingdom,โ he said. โIf I can be open about my struggles in this area, others can get help too.โ