Anger

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
~ Matthew 7:15

Anger is taboo in our culture.

Unlike other negative emotions... sadness, fear, boredom... raw anger is socially proscribed and must be refined-- suppressed or “managed”-- before it is heard. We send angry children to their rooms and withdraw from angry friends or lovers until they “cool down”. We refuse to listen to an agitated roar until it subsides to a levelheaded whimper.

Because of our anxiety around anger, we fail to attend to the nuances of different situations that involve the expression of anger, and are not very nuanced in our reactions to it. When anger is expressed to us, we tend to hear it as expressed at us. When anger is expressed at us, we tend to experience it as an assault...

So anger generally elicits a defensive reaction that does not win the angry person our support or sympathy. Worse, it often elicits a counter-attack. This, I believe, is because it is mistaken for aggression, a precursor to violence and declaration of war. We defend by attacking back, and all hell breaks loose. Welcome to the animal realm. But, as Norman Cottrell of the Beck Institute in an online article on Anger versus Aggression says,

... anger doesn't break bones, aggression does. Anger need not sabotage one's goals, aggression or passive-aggression does. And anger doesn't always imply violence. People can be angry without being violent -- they can use it as energy for constructive action. And they can be violent without being angry -- as in the instrumental actions of a sociopath ("Nothing personal. It's just business.").

The irony of course is that we are so defended against anger that we don't notice when aggression, the real enemy, creeps in like a wolf in sheep's clothing, masked by equanimity, rational argumentation or eloquent silence.

Over-preoccupied with the messenger, we are in danger of not hearing the message.