Anger: The Most Vulnerable Feeling

Adapted from a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Edited from the original recording for readability.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

Twenty years later

Dr. Chip Dodd recently recorded the audiobook of *The Voice of the Heart* — the first time he had read the book since he wrote it two decades ago. The experience proved encouraging in a lot of ways, mostly because the material still holds with what he continues to believe. He did make one change in the reading: he changed "desires" to "desire," because after writing the book he realized that all desires come from desire itself, and he wanted to read it correctly.

A good friend told him years ago that the one thing about what Dodd has learned and been able to share is that it remains consistent — always growing, but never twisting things around to stay relevant or popular. Dodd certainly hopes it's relevant, but what's great is that the message is consistent, and it's consistent because the message came way before him and will be here way after him. It's really simply a reacknowledgment of what humans have been writing about, thinking about, experiencing, running from, and diverting their lives from for centuries. It's the tools and the experience of expressing living in relationship with self, others, and God.

What surprised him in the recording came at the beginning of the healthy shame chapter, where he remembers thinking he wasn't sure it made any sense — sometimes in reading, he's just reading words and thinking about what the words are. He enjoyed the work. The engineers told him he read so well he was almost like a professional, but then added that he really does know what he's reading — where the stops and inflections go. The book is written in his voice, so reading it is like saying what he wrote. Fittingly, the book itself began as a gigantic transcript from a two-day recording.

Anger is one of the most misunderstood feelings

Continuing through the eight feelings, anger is one of the most confused. It's the feeling people misunderstand most when they begin to move into the Voice of the Heart work, and often it's the one being reframed for them for the first time. Just this week a man asked, "I hear y'all talk about being angry *for*. What are y'all talking about?"

Before defining it, it's worth naming what keeps anger so misunderstood, because so many people have been scared and harmed by something that has been called anger but isn't. Even in the psychological world they call it anger management — and that's not anger at all.

Being angry *for*, or angry *toward*, points at something different. Anger is probably the most vulnerable feeling of all eight, because anger exposes, shows, and moves toward what it is caring about. If we had to use synonyms for anger, they would be desire, longing, yearning, hoping, wishing, wanting. What it becomes is passion — a willingness to be in pain.

Anger as the vulnerable feeling

When someone says or does something in my presence and I feel angry, the most vulnerable thing about that anger is what it reveals: they've gotten to me. They've pushed my button. They've gotten into my personal space, my personhood. They've touched something that matters to me.

Dodd thinks of anger proverbially in terms of how a parent — most often, in his mind, a mother — will care for a child: a willingness to do whatever it takes to make sure the child is fed, cared for, seen, nurtured. Mama bears. That is the yearning, longing, desiring, hoping, wishing, hunger, and thirsting for another being's well-being. Anger, then, is the energy in motion — the e-motion — that expresses what matters to us. It even expresses to myself what matters to me.

That is why exposure of what matters is so risky. Take a tiny example: if I share with you the things I'm ashamed of, the things I'd see myself as probably rejectable because of, and you reject me, I'm not surprised. I'm not even torn up that much. I was looking for that. But if I share with you some of my most private joys or deepest longings or deepest wishes and you mock that, you're actually mocking who I really am. Longings are things we move toward. Desires move us toward something. If we're hungry, we reach toward food; thirsty, we reach toward what will quench. When we hope, we imagine something, and hope is the energy by which, in spite of fear, we go toward the possibility of fulfillment. That energy in motion moves us toward what we care about. So if you make fun of me after I've shown you my deepest dreams, you've made fun of who I am — what I'm angry *for*. Anger is being willing to be in pain to go after something.

"I was angry for that"

Dodd remembers wanting, growing up, to be an all-state basketball player. He set his sights on it: *I am going to do this thing.* He acknowledges it was multilayered — family issues, wounds, the hope that he could be somebody. But he wanted it so badly that he was willing to do whatever it took: six o'clock morning workouts, summertime running, running track so he'd be better at basketball. He was making all of it up as he went; he didn't have anyone coaching or helping him, and he didn't know how to ask for that at the time. All that energy applied was going somewhere. He was angry *for* getting to that place, if he possibly could.

When it didn't happen — a slow dawning realization that no magic was going to occur, that nothing was going to drop out of the sky — it was over, done, finished. And it broke his heart. He had given everything to it. He had been angry for it, longed for it, yearned for it, dreamed about it, hoped, thirsted, sacrificed to move toward it. He was passionate about it, willing to be in pain for something that mattered more than the pain. Christmas Eve workouts. The whole thing. Part of it, he admits, was sick — trying to merit love, *if I do this and do that*. But underneath it all, he was going for it.

He used to sneak into the gym at MTSU when he was in high school. He didn't have a student ID, so security would wander the building looking for IDs, and he'd see them coming and go hide out until they left, then come back out — because if he played with the college guys, he'd get better. Whatever I've got to do, I'm willing to risk it, willing to look foolish, willing to look stupid. That's the vulnerability of anger. True anger is a creative force that moves us toward something, for something.

The purity of anger, and what it opens

Anger is the stop-go feeling, the yes-no feeling. It's binary, not gray. There's a purity to it. And it always exposes us: it leaves us open to get hurt, open to be afraid, open to be sad, open to be lonely. *Oh, you think you're going to be all-state? Look at you, you can't even do x, y, z.* There's hurt in that, and anger with it. And even being supported in the dream didn't mean he got there.

When it was finally taken from him, he was angry about having to be sad — but the anger also opened the doorway to grieving the loss. Then he realized he was by himself in it, no longer on a team, not knowing what to do with himself. He was lonely, and angry about that, and fearful: *what do I do with myself now?* Fear, sadness, hurt, and loneliness can trigger desire, longing, journey.

The check engine light

So anger can be a flag that says, *hey, you're sad, lonely, hurt* — or it can be the pure thing in and of itself. Dodd has long described anger as the check engine light on the dashboard, the oil light going off saying there's more going on underneath the hood. You need to stop and look. It's a very pragmatic feeling. If I'm anticipating being left lonely, I'll have the energy of wishing it weren't going to happen. Rejection hurts, rejection is lonely, and there's anger in it — *I wish it were different* — which can lead us into sadness. If we don't stop and honor the check engine light, we go right into anger's impairment: depression.

Anger says I need to stop and pay attention, because there's hurt going on, there's loneliness, there's fear, there's shame — something is happening that I need to attend to. Anger literally is the voice of the heart. It is the energy of desire, longing, yearning, hunger, and thirst that says, *I'm willing to speak and be truthful about what's happening inside me so I can live the life I'm made to have.* And it's one of the only feelings you can't simply have by itself; anger is always connected to these other experiences.

Depressing the beach ball

Because anger is so vulnerable, and because it gets us in so much "trouble," we try to manage it. Anger transports me beyond my powers of control. It makes me vulnerable and in need of others. That's risky, so we press the heart down — we depress ourselves. If we're scared of having our voices, or have been trained through woundedness to give them up, or were raised in ignorance, ignoring what's going on inside, most of the time people feel the need to suppress the exposure of desire. Anger that is depressed leaves us in the impaired condition of anger, which is depression: impaired expression, distancing from one's voice, distancing from one's yearning and longing. Anger is depressing who God made you to be.

The image is holding a beach ball underwater — Archimedes' principle. It's a natural law: a ball of air pushed underwater has an equal and increasing pressure to rise. The same is true of us emotionally and spiritually, in terms of how we're made for relationship. If you try to suppress how you're created for relationship, created to express your desire for life, there's an equal and opposite pressure to rise. It will make you sick. It takes willpower to stop yourself from having your identity — the same willpower that could be applied to staying in and having your identity.

Depression as Self‑Protection, Not Self‑Condemnation

The depression that comes from suppressing the heart is a matter of self-protection, not the willpower of "I'm a really awful person." It sounds more like this: I've been hurt expressing myself. I've been rejected expressing myself. I've forgotten how to express myself. I've trained myself and molded myself to conform to a certain set of rules and orders and standards so that I don't get hurt, so that I don't get seen. It isn't that a person is terrible for depressing himself. It's a survival mechanism.

Dodd tells the story of his senior year in high school, when he was slowly realizing that his hope of playing basketball at the highest level was not going to happen. The team never had a winning season the whole time he played. Still, on Saturday mornings after a game, he would get up at six in the morning and run — six miles with another guy, meeting in the dark. He made the mistake of running a lot of long distance, which is not really what you do for basketball, but somehow John Havlicek, an ancient creature in the world of basketball, was in his mind. He still desired it, and it took anger to do that. That is willpower applied to desire: I'm willing to do what it takes. That's the appropriate use of willpower.

When anger is suppressed, we will ourselves in the opposite direction. He could have said, "You want to be an All State basketball player? Look at the facts. It ain't gonna happen. You can give it up" — shaming himself into using willpower to shut up, shut down, and go away. But at that time he could not help himself. He was going to get up, because he couldn't stop hoping in spite of the facts, in spite of reality. The sad part, he says, is that he was angry in so many ways alone. No one knew what his dream was; he was doing it pretty much by himself and kept all of it to himself. Those runs seemed ridiculous or crazy, but he was actually after something.

Depression, then, is depressing the desire of the heart and keeping the voice of the heart at bay. It requires depressing. It's the same willpower, but with willpower having primacy over the heart, rather than willpower being a tool, a secondary thing, with the heart in charge.

Anger Versus Rage

People are often afraid of their anger, in part because it exposes them and they've been hurt, but also because they have been harmed by other people by what has been called anger and is really impaired fear — rage. Rage is an animalistic demand to try to get someone to behave in a way so that I don't have to feel my fear. So I rage at you, threaten you, snarl at you, cuss at you, shame you, ignore you, go silent toward you. There may be some anger mixed into that, but it's all twisted up; the predominant experience is terror, and the energy that comes out of it may have anger in it, but it's terrified.

True anger is a reaching toward, which is open. Rage is a reaching at, with hands closed to grasp. Anger and rage are as far apart as the East is from the West — forget circles that come back around to the same place; pretend it's infinity. Rage is rooted in terror, in making sure I'll do whatever it takes to never let this thing happen to me again. So anytime a person is threatened with exposure, it becomes anxiety-driven, controlling, and ultimately murderous or revenge-focused in its take.

"Never Again"

Dodd returns to basketball to describe how anger turns into terror. He remembers the night he walked out after the final game he would ever play. His heart was shattered, because even though he knew it was coming, he somehow held a magical belief that some freakish thing might occur and they'd make it to the state championship — like a movie, like *Hoosiers*. After his shower, the last one left in the locker room, he stuck his head in his locker and cried his guts out. He didn't want anybody to see him. Not knowing where to go, he walked up the ramp while the next game was going on, and somebody said, "Look at him. He's been crying." He gave the person a mean sort of look, then turned around, walked back down the ramp, and went out the exit door into the dark with absolute fixed intention: never again.

That became terror. I will never let myself be in a position of being so foolish. I'll never go for it again like that. And for the next bunch of years it was potentially rageful: no, you're not going to get to me, I'm not going to let you. I'm not going to let myself care. What was once anger had become terror-oriented, a refusal to be fooled again. If someone got close to his heart, they could be in danger, because what they would experience was not anger but rage.

That is what most people in most of their lives have experienced in their families. It has been called anger, and it isn't anger at all, because there's no vulnerability in it whatsoever. Rage has zero vulnerability: I'll do whatever it takes to protect myself from having to expose feelings, to expose vulnerability.

Addiction and Denial

The reason anger is so unidentified and rage is so mistakenly identified as anger, Dodd says, is addiction. This whole nation is involved in a pandemic that isn't last year's or ten years ago's — it's been going on a long, long time. We are slaves to doing whatever we have to do to escape vulnerability, to escape neediness, to escape being in the position of not knowing what to do. It isn't just opioids; that's only the new face. There are no new addicts being created. There will be class action suits against Silicon Valley, because what's coming out of the boardrooms now is the recognition that they knew the technology would addict us and wanted to make sure it did. Games on phones are designed to be addictive.

Denial of feelings is the only thing that can keep that exercise going. Denial means I don't see, so I won't feel — the only thing that keeps us asleep to addiction. And addiction is doing whatever I've got to do not to feel. Rage is guaranteed to be the expression when anybody gets close to someone who would then have to feel, because addiction has to keep going so that we never expose ourselves to being needy or vulnerable or genuinely angry.

Wanting People Who Are Angry For You

What Dodd wants instead is people who love him to be angry for him — people willing to reach out with their hands to offer him something, to care enough to yearn or long for him. He wanted someone to want to know what he was doing shooting basketball all the time. He wanted someone to ask him what he was doing running. And he wants to be with people who are angry for themselves, because then they can be clear about who they are and clear with him, so he doesn't have to live guessing where he stands with them, or bracing for the planned resentments that might come later.

To this day, he says, it is very difficult for him, deep inside, when someone is angry with him, angry toward him, angry for him — angry about something they have feelings about. It's scary. Are you raging, and is our relationship over? Or are you saying you're hurt or sad, actually reaching toward me to heal, rather than reaching at me to end your pain and get rid of me? Because we're so used to growing up around denial and in a culture of addiction that's terrified of feelings, we have to be able and willing to ask: are you angry with me in a way that says we're done, or angry with me in a way that says otherwise?

Anger can say, "You and I just need to keep talking," and it can also say, from far enough away, "I'm done. I need not do this." Both are boundary setting. The question to ask oneself in the middle of it is simple: are you angry, or are you raging?

The clarity feeling

Anger, Dodd says, is the clarity feeling. It is the boundary feeling. It is the go-for-it feeling. It is the mother protecting the young feeling. It is the willingness to express vulnerability, and the willingness to show what matters to me. It is also the energy of reaching toward creating — I'm going to grow, I'm going to grow this, I'm going to go do this. It is the energy of desire: what I want, what I need.

Without anger, we don't have a willingness to be in pain for something that matters more than my own comfort. Without anger, you've already given up — given up on your heart, given up on possibility, given up on hope. And that, Dodd says, is impossible; to get there, you have to do something against yourself.

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the anger module. Or explore all eight feelings.