[Trasmatta]

I see it exactly opposite. A Buddhist monk would learn to experience, feel, observe, and detach from their anger, not suppress it or shame it. This is more in line what what I think we need to do.

The more you resist the anger the more it will persist.

[slowmovintarget]

There are neurological studies that show that anger cycles can escalate and become amplified with practice. That's not what we want.

Acknowledge your anger, yes. Then acknowledge your control, not only over how you express it, but even over whether you feel angry or not. It is possible to develop the skill to stop being angry. This is far more important than going with the flow.

It's often a bitter pill to swallow, because it means the people that act out of anger, or are always angry, are ultimately responsible for how they feel. It is not someone else's fault you feel angry.

[2devnull]

“the skill to stop being angry”

Often that amounts to changing the people or circumstances in one’s life. That’s the point of therapy. A good therapist wouldn’t help a sexually abused child stay in a bad situation and just learn to suppress emotion. Well maybe a cbt therapist would. But a good therapist would try to help catalyze a change in the situation causing the trauma.

[chaos_emergent]

The neurological studies to which you refer point to the neurological phenomenon, but you’re mapping that to a single possibility for the psychological process that is coupled with the physical phenomenon, namely, that anger monotonically amplifies over time when reinforced, perhaps to some asymptotic steady state that’s greater than a normative baseline

An equally valid narrative is that, especially in our society where most people have repressed anger, once anger is tapped into, there’s an overwhelm of backlogged emotion that is also released. Anger as an emotion is energetically expensive for a biological system, and it doesn’t make any sense that it would continue to be reinforced indefinitely.

[Trasmatta]

It's a lot more nuanced than that. You can't just "control your anger". You can layer a controlling part of your mind on top of the anger to try to swat it down every time it surfaces, but this is a temporary solution. Especially when the anger is rooted deeply in things like trauma or shame.

The path forward is to understand the anger with compassion, and the trauma or painful emotions below it, or the boundaries that are being crossed. Rather than just trying to force yourself not to feel it.

It's not that different from telling a depressed person that they should just think positively to cure themselves.