Q & A. Why Anger Is Considered As Strong And Crying As A Weak Emotion In Our Society?

Historically it was more useful to be angry than crying and this is basically our historical “hangover”.

Photo by Philipp Pilz

Imagine this: in old days an enemy breaks into a territory of a tribe. What kind of people will survive? The ones who can take action and defend themselves. What kind of person does that? The one who gets angry rather than gets scared and starts crying. So that’s why a long long time ago society has decided that anger is associated with strength and survival, and crying is associated with weakness because it didn’t help survival.

Now, we are no longer living in the times where we would need to physically protect our tribe from the enemies (in most of the cases of western society), however, those qualities that were associated with survival are still associated with strength.

Anger is also what takes you from the state of victimhood into the state of self-protection, self-defence and therefore “protects” person form other vibrationally lower emotions such as hopelessness, helplessness, sadness, depression, futility. I wanted to highlight here that even though these emotions (lower than anger) is something that anger often protects us from feeling, it can be very useful to go to these emotions consciously and work out the root cause of them as it is often the place where the anger and sense of disempowerment come from and once we clear them, we will not be experiencing “angry outbursts” for example.

I also wanted to mention that crying also has a very important place and role in our emotional well-being. Crying can be a wonderful tool for the relief of stress and suppressed emotions and a person who has the ability to cry when responding to a situation that triggers intense emotions has a healthy mechanism to allow themselves to clear and “to clean” their emotional system.

Personally, I think both anger and crying are necessary and can be used as emotionally healthy ways to respond to situations. It is just that crying had a bad reputation from history and has been classified as a weakness. I think both of the emotional expressions can be strengths when used in a healthy way.

If you need to be angry or crying - know that both emotions are important and valid. You have a right to feel whichever way you are feeling. There are no "wrong" emotions.

I do get angry sometimes.

I also cry, often. :)

Ruta