WHY IS AMERICA SO ANGRY?

Is it just me?  Or do Americans seem to be getting angrier with each passing year?   Or month?  Week?  Day?

Sure, we’ve had road rage for years and years.   Middle fingers of fate have been waved across horn-honking intersections for as long as I’ve been around.   School or playground bullies have too often had their way probably since, well, schools and playgrounds, I would suppose.

But I can’t get over how rude people are toward each other over seemingly nothing these days.  Civility seems to have left the country.  Folks are downright nasty to each other these days, and it’s not just on social media.   I wonder why, and I doubt I’m the only one.

Years ago when pastoring a church and fielding a few requests every year to officiate weddings, I would make it a point to include in one of the pre-marriage counseling sessions a conversation about anger management.   How to handle conflict.   How to fight fair.   And I would always add a handout to the newlywed’s packet entitled, “The Sequence of Emotions.”    There I likened anger to smoke in the air.   It’s rarely fatal but getting rid of it and clearing the air cannot happen until you locate and extinguish the fire that caused it.  Anger is rarely fatal but getting rid of it and clearing the air cannot happen until you locate and extinguish the pain that caused it.  

Where is the pain?   

Pain causes anger, but what causes pain?  

When meeting with couples ahead of their intentional years of wedded bliss, I did…..and still do should I ever get asked anymore……try my best to unpeel the onion of emotional pain, fear, and anger to get at the actual trigger points below.   My little chart would display the sequence such that below pain was an unmet expectation.  Below that was an unrealistic expectation, then an unspoken expectation, and then perhaps the real culprit: an unknown expectation.   The challenge for couples in the midst of anger is to resist the great urge to fight the smoke and instead fight the fire below.   Which means finding the fire in the first place.   We know how the smoke got there.   But how did the fire itself get there?  Where’s the fire and where’s the fuel?   And where’s that fuel coming from?  

Most couples fight their anger with anger.   Which makes about as much sense as fighting smoke with smoke, or even fire with fire and fuel with fuel.   

Every marriage needs a chimney with a damper door opening to a flue that lets the smoke out.  If both partners are mad at the same time, then they will need two chimneys.   “Where’s my own damper door lever to pull so I can release my anger before my eyes start to burn and I can’t stand to breathe?”    Every bride and groom needs one of those and every couple needs to know when it’s time to open their dampers and release their anger without choking their mate.    ASAP works best.

The world we live in has many more fire fighters than marriage counselors, so couples pretty much have to learn fire safety on their own.  We perhaps have plenty of 9-1-1 calls for domestic violence, but that brings the cops and not the counselors.    Most marriages are fire traps waiting to ignite.   Thankfully, most couples do not resort to violence and 9-1-1 calls are rarely necessary.   Which speaks well of their ability to open those damper doors in time.

Taking time to find the fire and the spark and the fuel is another matter.    But in my own experience, the fuel usually amounts to the high expectations we bring to marriage in the first place.  Unrealistically high expectations that then bring painful disappointment, leading to fear of even more future hurt, leading to our anger.   That’s when the smoke alarm goes off that resembles our animal survival instinct.  And when stress hormones pump through our heart, lungs, and muscles instead of our brain’s frontal lobe where reason can best function.  

Did you get all that?   Unfortunately, we all get it…….at least after the fact.

Unpacking our unmet expectations and replacing them with more meetable, doable, helpful ones is the only marital fireproofing I’m aware of after my decades as a family therapist.   It’s the asbestos coating material that seems to work every time.   But marriages aren’t the only things at risk of catching fire and producing the kind of thick smoke that makes it hard to see or even breathe.

As a nation, the United States of America invites the same risks of unmet expectations for all who enter therein.   The American dream, like the marriage dream, is its own pathway to anger.    Expectations run high.   Unrealistically high.   Disappointment is a frequent visitor, some more painful than others.  

Please hear me when I say that high expectations are good, disappointments aren’t always bad, and anger can be tempered.    Fireplaces, for that matter, are good so long as the flue is clean and the damper door open.    Marriage is good.   America is good.   Even though there will always be broken dreams associated with them both.  

But the issue remains.  We are so angry because we are so hurt by our unmet expectations.   Our anger, like our smoke-filled rooms, can be prevented.   Fighting after the fact is far less efficient and effective.  But the hard work of communication is how we spread our asbestos.   Here are three tools needed to do that job.     

1.        Start with our own expectations.   If not, we’re slaves to others’ expectations of us and those, whether from our parents or teachers or others, can be especially unrealistic.   So start with our own dreams for ourselves and aim high, not low.

2.        Find someone we trust to understand us best and then test our expectations out in conversation.   

3.        Ask questions in that conversation instead of only making statements.    This is the kicker!   Telling others what we expect rarely helps us achieve our dreams.    Statements rarely test realities that will come into play.  Questions, however, do just that.   “Is it too much for me to expect you to clean the kitchen afterward if I prepare the meal before?” is many times more effective than saying, “I expect you to stay and clean up after I have fixed dinner.”    Questions invite honest answers.   Statements risk receiving others’ dishonest assent or dissent, thus rendering our own expectations unrealistic.   

When we learn to communicate by asking questions and listening for honest answers, we help prevent the fires that bring the smoke-filled rooms of today’s American homes.     I-statements are better than you-statements, but questions eliciting honest feedback are better yet.   We learn to ask questions in early childhood and develop it as a skill or, too often, we discard as an unwelcomed habit depending on the adults then in our lives.   And when we stop asking our own questions and instead move forward with our own assumptions, we set in motion this larger sequence of unrealistic expectations en route to our angry emotions.   

And so we go back to the original question: Why is America so angry?   And now a follow-up:  did I answer it in a way that seemed plausible?  Helpful?  Clear? And, if not, what questions would you like to ask me if we could better communicate directly?   I can be reached at 937-475-2357.    Let’s prove together that America’s anger can be managed as safely as a cozy and romantic fireplace.