Expression

The basic expression of rage that Darwin noted in both primates and humans consists of a rush of blood to the face and scalp; a 'contraction and lowering of the brow;' a piercing, focused expression of the eyes including constriction of the pupils; eyes fiery and protruding from their sockets; dilation of the nostrils; and the drawing of the lips away from the teeth to reveal them in a snarl, as the breath is pumped in and out between clenched teeth. Darwin was fascinated by the primitiveness of this expression, although he noted that in humans it was usually only visible in young children and in the inmates of mental institutions, who were incapable of controlling it. In most adults it only survived as a frown, concentration of the eyes, dilation of the nostrils, and a clenching of the jaw. The jaw would also be thrust forward, along with the arms and the whole upper part of the body. As Darwin remarks: 'Few men in a great passion, and telling someone to begone, can resist acting as if they intended to strike or push the man violently away.' Darwin noted that children, like young apes, 'when in a violent rage roll on the ground on their back or bellies, screaming, kicking, scratching, or biting everything within reach.' In adults 'the desire, indeed, to strike becomes so intolerably strong, that inanimate objects are struck or dashed to the ground.' But he also noted that when the muscles are not moving in an angry action, the whole muscular system will tremble. The eyes, too, instead of being focused beneath an intense frown, may be opened very wide in a stare, and instead of the face being flushed and red from the rush of blood to the head, it may become pale as the blood withdraws from the skin surface. Darwin did write of 'the mingled emotions of rage and terror,' but did not have enough of the physiological knowledge that we now have of the autonomic nervous system to realize that the paleness and contraction of the circulatory system are part of 'emergency' functioning. They suggest fear, not anger. The opening wide of the eyes, along with the raising of the forehead is, as Darwin himself notes, an expression of acute fear.

In energy terms, the two 'hard' emotions of fear and anger can be seen as two phases of an emergency situation, with fear as a 'charge stroke' and anger as a 'discharge stroke.' The expression of fear serves to take in the emergency situation, and is strictly speaking not so much an expression as an impression. The expression of anger is a discharge outward of energy in the form of threat or aggressive action to remove the obstacle that the emergency has presented. This may become clear in the following short table:

The importance of being able to distinguish these expressions is in the fact that when they are mixed they are a better clue to what the person is really experiencing than anything the person may say. If a person utters furiously angry words while his eyes and mouth are wide open, his forehead raised, and his skin pale, he is at the least more frightened than angry. The eyes play a major role in this: in panic, the eyes widen and stare and apparently take in too much of the emergency situation so that the brain becomes overloaded and, in a sense, the person stops really seeing the situation. By contrast, anger is extremely focused in the eyes: an angry person can usually throw an object exactly where he or she wants it to go, or smash a stick against exactly the aimed-for place.

It is when an element of fear is present that the anger begins to become blind and the person lashes out wildly. Children do this in their tantrums because normally the situation is too overwhelming for them, far out of their control. Similarly, an adult's anger becomes blind when indignation is too overwhelming, the enormity of the situation is out of control, or the person is humiliated, back to the wall, with no way out. There is nothing more dangerous than blind rage. EFA must concentrate as a first step in not provoking a person to the point at which rage becomes blind (see section on Provocation), or as a second step, where the rage is already blind, trying to reduce the emergency of the situation to proportions on which one can focus. The first step consists of recognition and prevention, the second of channeling and reduction.

Experiencing

If you can find a place where you can be in private and make noise, you might try to explore the following:

—Stage a temper tantrum. Lie down on a soft surface and kick and pound and yell. Get a feel of how unfocused and diffuse this kind of rage is. Just be like a child.

—Standing up, take a rolled newspaper in one hand and hit a hard object viciously, such as the back of a chair. With each blow, let out a loud sound. Keep your mouth open. Roar, make angry faces. Stick out your jaw. In particular, experiment with your eyes: Open them wide and raise the eyebrows in an expression of fear. Keep hitting. Notice how powerless your blows begin to feel, how you lose focus.

—Frown, bunching up the muscles in the center of your forehead, and narrow your eyes to concentrate in a hard glaring look on the point at which you are aiming. Notice how this tends to bring out a real sense of rage.

—With a friend you trust, set up an angry dialogue. A guideline for safety is to agree to stand always in one spot and under no circumstances move your feet. In this way, your partner is sure of being able to keep a safe distance. Facing each other, shove at each other with one hand, pushing the palm against the partner's shoulder and saying something like, "Get out of my way!" Again, experiment with the expression of your eyes, to get a feel for how anger may become mixed with fear and lose its focus. Resist the temptation to smile or laugh. (Many people, even when genuinely angry, smile, which establishes a horizontal block against the surge of anger upwards.)

—Grasp a towel tightly in both hands and rotate your fists in opposite directions in a twisting motion. Push your jaw forward and breathe forcefully. You may notice that the harder you twist, the more easy it is to breathe. Or you may feel your throat begin to tighten and your hands lose their strength. Where the capacity for anger is blocked, it is as if we choke ourselves rather than the towel. Try turning the anger outwards, into your hands.

—Seize a towel between your teeth and bite it angrily, making growling sounds. Explore this primitive, childish side to anger. You may feel quickly nauseated. See if you can overcome this by biting hard, growling, and sticking your jaw forward. Again, blocked anger is often displaced into nausea. (See Switching.)

Although some therapies and encounter groups use these experiencing techniques for emotional release, they are not an end in themselves. I am not suggesting that you do 'anger exercises,' which defuse anger from its real object, provoke it unnecessarily, or become a substitute for real-life situations. Simply, you may try these movements a few times in order to test the expression of anger and get a feel for how different expressions evoke or channel different feelings.

Distress

Violence is not treatable by EFA. There is no pat remedy for stopping it once it occurs, and it would be irresponsible to suggest any. It has to be stopped before it occurs if possible. The section on Provocation discusses this.

EFA can deal with distress associated with blocking of acute anger—the rage that rises to the surface and becomes held, or that lashes out indiscriminately instead of being focused. There is another kind of distress associated with chronic anger, where a perpetual state of simmering or smouldering resentment is either held in a chronically muscle-bound rigidity of the whole body, or where it is discharged partially by constant complaining or irritability. EFA with anger can work in the following areas:

—to channel and focus destructive anger where it belongs, helping it to remove the real obstacles to a person's functioning.

—to reveal chronic resentment and identify its cause.

—to break the vicious circle in some relationships of provocation by one partner, rage from the other.

—to reduce the occurrence of anger by allowing it, when it does occur, to be more complete.

—to unblock the fear of other people's anger (even when it is not violent), since this fear is often in the last analysis a fear of one's own possible anger.

It is easy to forget that anger has a biological function, of aggressive attack to remove obstacles. In many societies, people are taught to persuade and negotiate or placate rather than to attack obstacles coming from another person. There is a place for this. But paradoxically, it is most easy to exercise the control of anger that negotiation requires, if we are also at times capable of anger. The psychosomatic costs of repressed anger are high, including not only a build up of a muscle armor to prevent explosions, but according to some specialists, a variety of diseases. Many of us repress anger at work and go home to take it out on our families, as a safety valve. But this is destructive. Part of EFA with anger must be to help a person whom society denies the right to be angry at work, to discharge the anger in a focused way.