Rage is a deeply impaired experience of fear, a fear that a person cannot and/or will not tolerate. Rage is a closed fist to ward off or destroy something or someone to eradicate vulnerability. Anger exposes us to vulnerability, because it shows the internal caring one has for something or someone. Anger is an open hand that reaches to create something, even though it exposes us to vulnerability and minimal control over the outside world. Anger takes a stand. Rage doesn’t allow any “stand.”
Many of us mistakenly confuse rage and anger. We have been taught that rage and anger are the same thing. We have associated anger as a harmful, destructive force, when actually the harmful, destructive force occurs as a refusal to experience the fears of our hearts.
In truth, rage and anger are miles apart. Rage rejects the fear of having desire. Anger is an acknowledgment of the depth of our desire.Rage denies our humanity and neediness with a willful fury against vulnerability. Anger acknowledges our humanity with all its hungers.Fear has in it a desire for something to stop, or a desire for something to start. With anger we use the voice of our hearts to reach out in vulnerability, saying, “I want that to stop. I want this to change.” We will know if we are genuinely angry, rather than controlled by rage, by whether or not we can be in contact with other feelings like fear, hurt, or sadness and use those feelings to stay true to being ourselves. Anger places us in a state of openness and vulnerability. It expresses the courage of being completely involved in something.Rage is a state of refusal to experience any feeling that exposes vulnerability. It doesn’t use fear as a tool; it reacts to fear as a signal to destroy, so that the vulnerability created by fear will, likewise, be destroyed. People who are raging are dangerous; distance is one’s only recourse. People who express anger are invitational; they invite others into participation with a cause or experience.