What to do with all this anger?
On Lama Rod Owens' Love and Rage
Of course, I’m angry. My jaw clenches every time I see a MAGA hat or pro-Trump bumper sticker (which is often where I live). I’m angry every time I see the long-ass drive-through line at Chick-fil-A. I get mad every time I read the news, and don’t even get me started about browsing Facebook.
My anger is righteous and necessary. If I ever stop being angry, then I’ll have no right to call myself a friend to anyone facing any oppression. Neither would I be able to call myself a spiritual person connected to a loving source.
Anger can come from a place of love. It’s a natural reaction to bearing witness to injustice. If you’re not angry about what you’re seeing, then you’re not seeing the truth.
But my anger does no good to me or anyone else unless I process it and channel it into something useful. In fact, unchanneled, unprocessed anger is destructive.
When a friend reached out and asked for advice about how to handle their anger toward white women following the election, I recommended the book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger by Buddhist minister and activist Lama Rod Owens.
Owens wrote the book after Trump’s first election in 2016. He, too, was approached by people who asked what to do with their anger and fear. The book was his response, and it’s just as relevant as we head into 2025.
Throughout the book, Owens educates the reader on contemplative practices that can help with processing anger and other emotions. There are sections on anger and Blackness, sex, depression, trauma, and more. If you’re struggling with anger, I recommend checking it out. I’ve personally found this book helpful in many areas of my life, such as dealing with breakups, family problems, and work-related issues.
Below, you’ll find my summary of some of the main themes from the book about processing anger and using anger in activist work.
Anger protects heartbreak
The big “ahah moment” for me when reading Love and Rage was realizing that my anger was hiding a deeper emotion: heartbreak. Anger guards a broken heart. It’s like our emotional bodyguard protecting its more fragile sister emotion.
Now, when I am feeling angry, I can check in with myself and ask if anger is at the heart of the matter. It rarely is.
More often than not, when I check in, my anger softens to reveal underlying grief or sorrow. These emotions feel more “true” to me. It’s not that my anger is dishonest or invalid, but the deeper emotions generally do a better job of telling me what I need.
As Owens explains, “If we don’t wrestle with anger, we never get to the heartbreak. And if we don’t get to the heartbreak, we don’t get to the healing.”
Owens warns his reader that this work isn’t easy, and it doesn’t always feel good. It’s challenging to open yourself up to your heartbreak. “There’s no liberation without actually leaning forward and looking at the things that we habitually run away from, in order to see things as they really are, not as we have imagined them,” he writes. “This is the path of liberation through anger.”
Unprocessed anger destroys, while channeled anger nurtures
Unprocessed anger is deceptive. It feels productive and powerful, but it blinds us. When we let our anger lead, we remain reactive, short-sighted, and shallow-minded. It can also lead to violence that betrays our values.
Here’s Owens:
If we’re responding to anger, we think that we will always hit the target. We think we can be angry and have agency over how we respond to it. We tell ourselves we are not going to get violent. If there’s no space there, if we are not taking care of our hurt, we will actually lapse into violence, because the anger will have agency over us. If you want to be angry, that’s wonderful; but if you’re actually concerned with nonviolence, you also have an ethical responsibility to have a relationship with your hurt.
Owens is not saying that we should give up our anger, but rather work with it:
When I give the mourning lots of space, the anger has lots of space. The anger is like, “Thank you, finally, for taking care of the hurt.” The energy of anger is still there. If I am grieving, then I can actually channel the energy of anger, not into trying to protect myself, not into trying to hurt other people, but rechannel it into benefiting others.
So how do we re-channel it? We pair it with love.
Anger can co-exist with love
Owens writes that “it is love that directs and motivates” both his own healing work and his work for the collective good:
When I am rooted in love, anger reveals itself as trying to point us to our hurt; and when I am taking care of my hurt and loving at the same time, the energy of anger becomes an energy that helps me to cut through distractions and focus on the work that needs to be done.
What does love look like here? To start with, it looks like communal grieving: helping each other move through our collective heartbreak so that we’re healed enough to do the work together.
This could look like sharing our brokenheartedness in communal spaces so that others know it’s okay. This could like empathetic listening or singing laments together or simply reaching out after the latest round of violence.
Processing our anger allows for this collective grieving which, in turn, allows for collective healing. But healing work should never end in grief; it should end in joy.
“What would it look like if we formed our activist communities around joy, not the suffering or the anger, as a basis for our change work?” Owens asks.
I love this question and think we should all be asking it because centering love, joy, pleasure, and each other’s well-being will get us through this time. It’s what’s going to help us individually and collectively heal.
For me, centering joy means leaning into public displays of queerness. It means supporting queer-affirming family events. It means supporting community gardens and other local organizing. What does it mean for you?