When something is unfair or unjust, I get angry. It lasts as long as it takes for me to do what I can about the injustice. When I’m enraged, it’s a different story. Most often, while the rage is pointed outward, it mostly has to do with rage against me – I got caught up in an old story, or I should have seen something coming.

I’ve heard rage explained as something that a mother will feel when her child is in imminent danger. That fits, but it doesn’t fit the rage I feel when I’m caught up in my own all-consuming self-anger.

The 2 are different in quality: the first is ‘clean’, the second ‘dirty’. Clean anger and rage lasts as long as needed – until the situation is cleared, usually in a matter of minutes. Dirty anger or rage lasts and lasts, because it’s generally misdirected – to something or someone other than ourselves, so that it never really gets resolved.

Clean anger and rage are empowering, dirty anger and rage are victimizing – victimizing me and anyone I happen to be looking at.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to sustain dirty anger and rage – energy that can be so useful to us if it were released from the bondage of misdirected pain.

Why we get mad