How to Reduce the Impacts of Anger in Relationships
And why Christian nationalism provides unique challenges in the study of anger.
The investment in studying the psychology of the Evangelical movement is incredibly worthwhile, especially as we understand the 21st century’s greatest moral incongruence to-date: The alignment of Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal Christians with the authoritarian Republican Party, complete with all of the horrendous behaviors and communication strategies that come with authoritarian rulers.
For instance, Laura Upenieks, professor at sociology at Baylor and Terrence Hill, professor of sociology at the University of Texas-San Antonio, recently published an article called “Christian Nationalism, Religious Struggles, and the Structural Amplification of Emotional Distress”, published in January 2024’s Social Science Quarterly. They explored data from 2021’s Crime, Health, and Politics Survey, in which Hill and colleagues asked over 1700 people to describe the mental health and social stressors that the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to. To quote the UTSA press release:
“Topics include loneliness and social isolation, police interactions, religion, political attitudes, pandemic behaviors, sexual behaviors, intimate partner violence, food insecurity, and more.”
Specifically, Upenieks and Hill isolated questions that addressed three categories:
Engagement with Christian nationalism. Participants assessed their agreement/disagreement on three items: “The country should be governed by Christian law.”; “The government should declare the country a Christian nation”; “The government should advocate Christian values.”
Religious and spiritual struggles. Participants reflected on three items: “How often do you have doubts about your religious or spiritual beliefs?” “How often do you feel as though God has abandoned you?” “How often do you feel as though God is punishing you?”
Self-reported anger. Participants were asked how often, over the course of 30 days did you feel angry, lose your temper, and yell at people.
They discovered that folks who had higher levels of Christian nationalism were more likely to have a higher number of angry outbursts. They also discovered that people who had higher levels of religious and spiritual struggles were more likely to have greater levels of anger.
The outcomes of the research itself is not surprising. It aligns with the amount of atrocious behaviors that we’ve seen in the last decade (and more) out of Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal leadership, members of the conservative media, and leadership within the Republican Party, most recently seen through the amount of vitriol directed at 17 year old teenager Gus Walz.
Okay. Christian nationalists are more likely to have angry outbursts.
Now what? What do we do with this information?
There’s two questions that I want to pose in this article:
How do we work with anger in relational health?
SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) provides their 12-week anger management group workbook for free.
I love the way that they define anger as a habit: “a performance of behaviors automatically, over and over again, without thinking…that results in negative consequences”.
They describe anger as a three-phase “aggression cycle”:
“The buildup phase is characterized by cues that indicate anger is building. Cues are warning signs, or responses, to anger-related events.
If the buildup phase is allowed to continue, the explosion phase can follow. The explosion phase is marked by a discharge of anger that is displayed as verbal or physical aggression.
The aftermath phase is characterized by the negative consequences that result from the verbal or physical aggression displayed during the explosion phase.”
SAMSHA provides strategies for each person to navigate the buildup phase by determining cues and triggers to anger, such as physical shifts, contextual factors, and the perceptions of the behaviors of others. They also offer feedback for folks to slow their bodies down to reduce the explosion phase, such as timeouts and breathing techniques.
However, in my experience, the motivation for reducing anger most often comes by exploring the negative consequences that result from the explosion phase.
And it’s here that I want to note that anger, more often than not, happens in the context of relationships. One of my critiques of anger management programs is that they focus on the behaviors of the individual, removing that person from the relational contexts in which anger most commonly gets enacted and creates social problems.
What if we viewed anger less as a series of behaviors and feelings and more as a communication strategy?
When working with anger, we want to understand how anger convinces people to communicate. How does anger impact the following elements of communication, such as:
Blaming or critical language
Volume
Rate of speech
Pitch register
Diction
I was recently working with an opposite-sex couple, and the female partner described that her husband had an angry outburst that, understandably, scared her.
I asked them to revisit the conversation by pretending that their dynamic was a play, complete with the words spoken and the nonverbal expressions, including those listed above. (As a note, I’ve been working with this couple for about three years, and their level of honesty and self-reflection doesn’t happen with every couple.)
The male partner explained that he started by talking about stressors at work, and then quickly, the topic shifted to a family member. We figured out that anger makes this person an ineffective communicator by attempting to address eight topics at once, and which the introduction of each topic, the volume and pace of the conversation increases to a pace that neither of them can keep up. I made the metaphor of Magneto, where the energy of anger absorbs all of these unresolved issues and dispels them all at once in one intense, violent motion.
The male partner acknowledged his bad habit of not disclosing stressors to his partner, aligning with his larger experience of having to keep it together for everyone (i.e. his family members, his co-workers). This prevents him from initiating emotional concerns and his partner from receiving and supporting his emotional health.
The process of anger keeps both partners stuck in a rigid relationship dynamic. Discussing one topic at a time allows the male partner to be a more effective communicator. He can direct his attention to that one singular topic, and also increase his likelihood of initiating conversations. The female partner can track the information her partner from a place of calmness and safety, thus enabling her to provide support that best works for the relationship.
The male partner agreed to write down notes about stress- or excitement-related incidents throughout the day and text his partner that he wants a few minutes to explore the single item that he wrote down. We also worked on some strategies to push pause on the conversation if an additional topic impulsively got included.
In this case, the male partner recognized three things:
Anger didn’t facilitate the outcomes he wanted; in fact, it directly contributed to communication strategies that prevented him from getting what he wanted.
The relationship, both its communication structures between two people and the humanity of both people in the dyad, mattered more than being right
There are different processes that he and his partner could utilize to communicate more effectively.
And this leads us to one of the challenges with Christian National and other far-right movements.
Far-right movements reward people for communicating through anger. They reward those who yell, criticize, shame, name-call, and emotionally manipulate in order to get to the top. Christian nationalism, and other forms of religious nationalism, are uniquely dangerous because a deity gives believers permission to discriminate, blame, and nonconsensually evangelize—sometimes through proselytizing, sometimes through violence—in the name of a higher calling.
In the absence of systems that provide consequences for these displays of anger, there’s no motivation to change.
I really appreciate what Upeneiks and Hill are doing in their research. But when we explore how a group of people intentionally obstructs processes that allow for the thriving of all folks, be that for religious, cultural, or other ideological reasons, are we actually talking about anger?
Or are we dealing with something else entirely?
Social justice work is ultimately about pushing back against systems that interfere with the values of equity and democracy through discrimination, propaganda, and anger straight-up jackassdom.
This fall, Julia and I are hosting a fall podcast series called “How to Do Social Justice Work This Election Season Without Being a Jackass”. We’ll talk about options that we have for effectively addressing and disempowering Christian nationalist systems, policies, and people.
Our podcast series will start Monday September 9 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah
Great article. Such important topics the part about discussing one topic at a time definitely hit home.
Thanks so much Aaron!