The Moral Hierarchy of Healing: Why Acceptance is Not Morally Superior to Anger

What’s your relationship with anger?

When you feel that lump in your throat and flush in your face, is your first thought a thought of shame? Perhaps you were taught at a young age that anger was inappropriate or even manipulative. Perhaps your anger was met with equal and opposite anger from the adults in the room. And so now you meet it with anger yourself, pressurizing it deep within yourself in an attempt to hide it away from the world.

Or maybe, anger makes you feel a little bit high - a little bit invincible. So, when you feel it coming on, you stoke the fire and egg it along. It becomes the explosive fuel that feeds your revenge-driven action. It gives you the propellant to do things you otherwise wouldn’t do, for better or worse.

Instead, you might fear anger, or at least the way anger feels. The feeling of fury coursing through your veins is about is comfortable to you as standing outside in a blizzard with shorts on. So, anything you can do to avoid feeling it is fair game. Running away from it, rushing it along, denying it exists in the hopes that it will disappear - all of these options are preferable to feeling the actual anger itself.

We all have different relationships with anger, but I think we can all agree on one thing.

Anger is a potent emotion.

Love it or hate it, avoid it or relish in it, when anger shows up, it makes its presence known. And as a result, most of us tend to have reactions, patterns, and judgements that we hold around anger. We place it on a pedestal, or we shove it in the basement. We make it mean all sorts of things.

But here’s the thing.

If what we are trying to reach is peace or acceptance, it is not the anger itself that is standing in the way. Rather, it is the patterns of meaning that we assign to the anger that create a standstill in the search for acceptance.

High vibes only

There is this increasingly common sentiment spread throughout our society that certain types of emotion are ‘better’ than others. And on that scale, emotions like anger tend to rank last.

Now of course, it’s normal to have preferences around certain emotions. Personally, it feels a lot better to feel joyful rather than sad.

But the societal hierarchy of emotions to which I’m referring has less to do with individual preferences and more to do with a moral placement on the person who is displaying any particular emotion at the moment.

You may have heard this distinction more commonly referred to as the difference between ‘good energy’ and ‘bad energy’ or ‘high vibe’ and ‘low vibe’.

When emotions are place into this paradigm, they are no longer categorized as a normal, personal experience. Rather, when we hear these phrases tossed about, typically a person’s emotional state is presented as something that is up for public discussion. Oftentimes this discussion centers around a value judgement of the person experiencing emotions - as if experiencing ‘bad’ emotions makes them less good than those experiencing ‘good’ emotions.

This may seem like a theoretical musing, but this behavior regularly physically manifests in a variety of different situations. You don’t need to look too far to see it.

I have worked in multiple professional settings where bosses, fresh off a leadership development seminar, have dismissed employees bringing up seriously valid concerns about the company as possessing ‘negative energy that is bringing the whole company down.’

I have watched numerous social circles project their own lack of clarity and communication onto the one member going through a tough emotional time by labeling the person as ‘low vibe’ and quickly dismissing them afterwards.

I have spoken to numerous people who are so afraid to acknowledge and process emotions such as anger and sadness because they are afraid that by experiencing these emotions, they will be welcoming in more ‘bad energy’ when they should be focusing on fostering ‘good energy’.

All of these labels and categorizations are so warped, unhelpful, and at times, harmful. And if anything, this morally hierarchical relationship to emotions is pushing us all deeper into a state of feeling beholden to our emotional state - rather than in control of it.

There has to be a better way.

Rather than asking if an emotion is good or bad, I have found it more helpful to ask the following question:

What is my current behavior in response to this emotion creating?

Rather than focusing on categorizing the emotion itself, I want to focus on categorizing my response. And rather than categorizing my response as good or bad, I want to focus on what my response is actively creating - and if that’s what I want to be creating.

For example, if I’m angry, and I respond by going for a run - maybe my response of going on a run is creating the physical and mental space for me to process my anger.

Or, if I’m angry, and I respond by trying to suppress my anger - maybe I’m in an important meeting where expressing my anger will not be productive or appropriate and my response of suppression is creating a momentary solution to this conundrum.

However, if I’m angry, and I respond by trying to suppress my anger - but I’m sitting alone at home, my response of suppression might only be creating a cycle of me not allowing myself to feel my emotions, and result in me ultimately feeling trapped by a circumstance of my own making.

The way I see it, it’s not about the ‘vibe’ of the emotion itself, or even the ‘vibe’ of the reaction - it’s about the awareness of the reaction. Not because awareness will lead to fixing - but because awareness in of itself is the solution.

When we are fully aware, we see what we can - and can’t - control. And when we see our arena of control clearly, it is easier for us to come into true acceptance.

In this paradigm, acceptance and uncomfortable emotions like anger live side by side because acceptance isn’t the good energy solution to bad energy emotions.

Acceptance is simply the awareness of the mystifying complexity of it all. Recognizing that we are all in an ongoing state of ever-changing process.

And continuing to show up in the face of it.