You can’t be curious when you’re furious.
This biological reality should give changemakers pause the next time they hear a colleague or collaborator suggest “You gotta get people angry!”
Anger is an intense emotional response to perceived injustice, violations and obstructions coupled with a strong desire to ‘right wrongs’.
It plays a complex role in changemaking because competing forces are at play.
Anger is reactive, impulsive and volatile, whereas effective changemaking is proactive, strategic and considered.
Changemaking is driven by emotion but achieved through cognition.
Anger, by contrast is all emotion. There is no cognition.
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‘Anger’ has deep etymological roots. It can be traced back thousands of years to the Proto-Indo-European ‘ang’, meaning to narrow, and ‘angh’, to constrict. This evolved into the Proto-Germanic ‘angruz’, meaning tight, restricted, painful, and ‘ang’, to choke, to strangle.
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Anger triggers a cascade of neurohormonal events in readiness for confrontation. Hearts pound, breathing quickens, temperatures rise, sweat beads and muscles tense.
This physiological experience shapes how we convey and understand anger through language, especially metaphor.
Meaning is conveyed through metaphor when we draw on known, tangible knowledge and experience (the source domain) to describe abstract concepts like emotions (the target domain).
The principal metaphor for anger is ‘heat’. It draws on our lived experience (source domain) of heat in fluids and fires. We’ll start with heated fluids, which draws on an associated conceptual metaphor, that the human body is a ‘container’ for emotions.
What do we know about the heat of fluids in a container?
Hot fluids start to rise and boil:
“Things are heating up”
“Simmer down!”
“He’s reached boiling point”.
Pressure builds up:
“He’s got steam coming out of his ears”
“I just need to vent”
“You’re going to bust your boiler”.
With too much pressure, the lid comes off the container:
“She flipped her lid”
“She exploded”
“Hit the ceiling.”
Now let’s consider fire. The lived human experience of the heat and redness of fire (source domain) is often expressed through conceptual metaphor to describe anger (target domain). For example:
“It was a heated argument”
“They were inflammatory remarks”
“You’re only adding fuel to the fire”
“He was burning with indignation.”
“She saw red”
“It’s consuming me”.
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However you conceptualise anger, you clearly can’t sustain it.
It’s reactive, quick, intense and over.
Pots boil dry, fires go out, things cool down.
Anger can focus, galvanise and motivate, but even planned burns can get out of control. And, if you are consumed by anger, there is no room for anything else.
When you’re playing with anger, you're playing with fire. You risk burnout and you risk getting burnt through unintended consequences that can leave your campaign in smoking ruins.
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Keep in mind the etymological roots of anger: narrow, constricted, painful.
Anger narrows our focus, constricts our creativity and manifests as physical pain. The latter quite literally because anger is a full body emotion. You can’t just think anger, you have to feel it too. Anger was never meant to be continuous. Persistent, elevated anger increases our risk of cardiovascular disease, impairs the immune response, and causes insomnia and headaches. All impediments to creative, strategic and sustainable changemaking.
Deep thinking and cognitive flexibility are impossible during anger – these capacities go offline. If you’re seeing red, you’re not going to see the bigger picture. And if insight occurs in the relaxed alpha brain wave state, it’s not going to occur when you’re boiling mad in the hyper-aroused state of anger.
Anger might get you started, but it won’t get you through. You need to quickly pivot to more generative emotions and motivations to build a foundation for enduring collective change.
Find the deeper purpose that sits behind the anger. In community changemaking, anger often indicates there is a values violation at play. If we can identify the source of our anger, we can reframe or ‘flip it’ into a more productive orientation for change.
For example, if it’s injustice you’re against and angry about, reframe that; it’s justice that you’re for. Give people something to work towards, not just against.
Start your messages in widely shared intrinsic values such as fairness, kindness, opportunity and responsibility to frame the information that follows. These draw people to your cause by emphasising what you have in common: a shared aspiration for making people’s lives better. Remember not everyone shares your anger or has the energy or capacity to take it on. That’s why starting messages in anger can be demotivating, off-putting and ultimately, counterproductive.
How we message is how we go forward. Instead of “getting people angry” try “getting people curious, caring and connected”. Transform narrow, constricted and painful into expansive, open and energising. Anger can spark change, but it's the language of courage, compassion, and fairness that sustains it.
Go Deeper
Alia-Klein, N., Gan, G., Gilam, G., Bezek, J., Bruno, A., Denson, T. F., Hendler, T., Lowe, L., Mariotti, V., Muscatello, M. R., Palumbo, S., Pellegrini, S., Pietrini, P., Rizzo, A., & Verona, E. (2020). The feeling of anger: From brain networks to linguistic expressions. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 108, 480-497.
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Lakoff, G. (1987). Anger. In Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind (pp. 380-415). University of Chicago Press.
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Wilkowski, B. M., Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., Carter, M. S., & Feltman, R. (2009). "Hot-headed" is more than an expression: The embodied representation of anger in terms of heat. Emotion, 9(4), 464-477.
© Trudi Ryan, Words for Change
wordsforchange.com.au/anger