{"id":5598,"date":"2026-07-23T08:26:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T12:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5598"},"modified":"2026-07-23T08:26:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T12:26:57","slug":"a-place-for-anger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/23\/a-place-for-anger\/","title":{"rendered":"A Place for Anger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>
\u00a0

What does it feel like to be an 11-year-old girl whose family has just moved to a new town?

That\u2019s the premise of Inside Out<\/em>, the acclaimed 2015 film conceived by Pixar animator Pete Docter.

A half dozen years earlier, Docter had been alternately startled, mystified, and intrigued by the changes he saw taking place in his own daughter as she approached adolescence. Inside Out<\/em> portrays the interactions of five primary emotions \u2013 Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust \u2013 inside the mind of Riley Andersen, a pre-teen who has to navigate the complexities of relocating from Minnesota to San Francisco.

Researchers have proposed there may be as many as 27 human emotions. But Docter wisely settled on just five, recognizing he could hardly give meaningful screen time to all the others.

Anger \u2013 who is portrayed as a smoldering red character whose hair occasionally catches fire \u2013 is memorably voiced by Lewis Black, a comedian who has made his living expressing outrage concerning just about everything.

Riley\u2019s experiences keep evolving as the five emotions take turns at the helm of \u00a0\u201cHeadquarters,\u201d the console that represents her conscious mind. It can safely be said that things usually go better when Joy is in charge, as opposed to Anger\u2019s turn at the board. In his efforts to ensure that Riley gets a fair shake in life, he shorts out the console.

It\u2019s just a movie. And a kids\u2019 flick at that. But Inside Out<\/em> makes two great points about anger.

First, anger definitely deserves a place in our consciousness. And second, it\u2019s a bad idea to let anger try to run things at HQ.

It\u2019s an understatement to say that rage is bubbling just beneath the surface of our culture, and that it routinely erupts into painful confrontations \u2013 not only between family members and friends, but increasingly, it seems, between total strangers in traffic jams and town hall meetings.

Anger overtakes public discussions of immigrants and enforcement, journalists and \u201cfake news,\u201d judges and primaries and budget shortfalls and gerrymandered Congressional districts.

It\u2019s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

In his book God\u2019s Wisdom for Navigating Life<\/em>, Tim Keller asserts that anger clearly has a role to play in our lives. \u201cAnger is energy released to defend something you love,\u201d he affirms. But then he adds, \u201cThe problem with human anger is this \u2013 we tend to love the wrong things.

\u201cIt is not wrong to value your name and reputation, but if you love them too much, there will be inordinate anger that essentially is just a defending of your ego.

\u201cParents may get inordinately angry at children mainly because the children embarrassed them before others. Because our loves are confused and out of order, our anger \u2013 basically a good thing \u2013 so often does evil.\u201d

Proverbs 15:11 reminds us, \u201cA gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.\u201d<\/em>

Proverbs may well be 3,000 years old.\u00a0But its relational advice is as fresh as a new summer morning.\u00a0As long as people have been compelled to share highways, apartments, conference rooms, and parking lots, there have been moments of rage.\u00a0The ancient Hebrews were well acquainted with insights that have only recently been confirmed by extensive research.

It matters, for instance, what happens in the opening minutes of a confrontation.

John Gottman and his associates at the Marriage Lab in Seattle have confirmed that difficult encounters usually begin and end at the same emotional temperature.\u00a0If things start hot, they usually end up hot (if not incandescent).\u00a0If things begin cool \u2013 what we might call a \u201csoft start\u201d \u2013 they usually finish that way, too.\u00a0

It matters what we say and what we don\u2019t say when it\u2019s time to enter a crucial conversation.

One of the anger-management fads at the end of the 20th<\/sup> century was called \u201cventilationism.\u201d\u00a0Anger was pictured as magma trapped inside a human volcano.\u00a0Therapists advised people to release their raging emotions by screaming, cursing, or \u201cventing\u201d at the objects of their displeasure.\u00a0Spew that lava out! \u00a0You might recall images of conflicted couples on marriage retreats whacking each other with foam bats.\u00a0

The reasoning was that people would ultimately dispel all their built-up anger, which would prevent a Vesuvius-like eruption.\u00a0

That theory, as it turned out, was seriously flawed.\u00a0Dozens of follow-up studies have confirmed that ventilationism doesn\u2019t reduce anger.\u00a0It multiples it.\u00a0As you might guess, the spouse or co-worker or neighbor who gets \u201cvented upon\u201d doesn\u2019t particularly enjoy the experience, and often finds herself thinking, \u201cJust wait \u2018til it\u2019s my turn.\u201d

This was something the author of Proverbs foresaw a long time ago:\u00a0\u201cFools give<\/u><\/em>vent<\/u><\/em> to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end\u201d (29:11).

That can help bail us out the next time we sense that smoldering red cartoon character of Anger is demanding to take over our<\/em> Headquarters. \u00a0

Stop and think.\u00a0Don\u2019t let anger, yours or someone else\u2019s, win the day.

By God\u2019s grace, we can learn to love and defend the right things the right way. \u00a0

His way.<\/em>

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0 What does it feel like to be an 11-year-old girl whose family has just moved to a new town? That\u2019s the premise of Inside Out, the acclaimed 2015 film conceived by Pixar animator Pete Docter. A half dozen years earlier, Docter had been alternately startled, mystified, and intrigued by the changes… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5599,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[277,123],"class_list":["post-5598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anger","tag-proverbs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5600,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598\/revisions\/5600"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}