Those of us who work with therapies focused on emotions, such as , know that emotional “discharge” is not always beneficial for people’s lives. What’s more, in many cases, it can be harmful in the long term and become an obstacle to achieving vital goals.
The colloquial term “emotional discharge” is often used to refer to emotional expression in terms of the impulse for action that includes the emotion. That is, the discharge would imply the decrease of emotional tension through the realization of the impulse that the emotion dictates, what the emotion tells us to do. But the truth is that the emotional response is not necessarily part of the emotional phenomenon, that is, we can respond in many different ways by feeling that same emotion. I can get angry at my boss which doesn’t necessarily involve “yelling at him and slamming the door.”
Our response to emotional experience can be varied, and we can increase these response options through practice and generalization of emotional regulation skills (Linehan, 1993).
One of the simplest skills, but not necessarily easy to practice, is simply the contemplation of the emotional wave, from the moment it arises after a specific trigger until a return to the baseline occurs; return that will inevitably happen if we allow ourselves to be with the emotion without reacting to it.
Despite this, it is still maintained that emotions, misnamed “negative”, such as anger, must be able to be “discharged” because otherwise something terrible will happen. Both popular knowledge and some psychological currents have encouraged these ideas that are deeply rooted in culture despite strong evidence against them. “If I don’t let it out, I’m going to explode,” “if I don’t express my anger, it stays inside me and I’m going to get sick,” “anger accumulates until one explodes” are some of the versions of the same story that ends up justifying impulsive responses of anger that can cause harm to ourselves or other people.
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Fortunately, there are people willing to investigate and debunk myths that do not contribute to a healthy life. Such is the case of Scott Lilienfeld and his team, who wrote a very interesting book on Myths of Popular Psychology (Lilienfeld, 2011). Below I share some fragments that I translated from the book, about the scope of the myth of catharsis and the evidence against it (“Myth No. 30: It is better to express anger towards others than to keep it to yourself”):
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Patrick Henry Sherrill has the sad distinction of being the person who inspired the term “going postal” for having committed one of the worst massacres in American history.
On August 20, 1986, Sherrill, furious at the prospect that he would be fired from his job as a postal worker, fired two guns that he hid in his mail bag, killing 14 workers and wounding 6 before taking his own life in Oklahoma Post Office. Many people now use the term “going postal” to describe an angry person who becomes uncontrollably violent.
“Road rage,” a slang term for angry outbursts on the roads, can be equally deadly.
On April 16, 2007, after flashing his headlights and cornering Kevin Norman, Jason Reynolds drove his car in front of Norman and slammed on the brakes. When Norman swerved to avoid a crash, the vehicle rolled into the middle of the road, landed on top of another vehicle, and killed Norman and the other driver (The Washington Times, 2007).
Could Sherrill and Reynolds have avoided these lethal outbursts if they had “released” their repressed emotions at home, say, by hitting a pillow with a plastic bat or hitting a punching bag to assuage their anger?
If you think like most people, then you probably believe that releasing anger is healthier than keeping it “bottled.” In a survey, 66% of psychology students agreed that expressing repressed anger is an effective means of reducing the risk of aggression (Brown, 1983).
This belief dates back more than 2,000 years, when the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his Classical Poetics, proposed that watching tragic plays offered the opportunity for catharsis (derived from the Greek word “Katharsis”) – a purging of anger and other negative emotions that offered a satisfactory experience of “psychological cleansing.”
Sigmund Freud (1930/1961), an influential theorist of catharsis, maintained that repressed rage could build up and fester, like steam from a pressure cooker, to the point of causing psychological distress.
“The Incredible Hulk,” a Marvel comic character, is a metaphor for the consequences of failure to control anger, which is always lurking on the margins of consciousness. When Bruce Banner allows too much anger to build up, he transforms into his rampaging alter-ego, the Hulk.
Popular psychology teaches us that anger is a monster that must be tamed. A lot of movies and books feed the idea that we can do it by “letting off steam,” “getting out what we have inside,” “getting it out of our system.”
In the movie “Analyze Me” (1999), the psychiatrist recommends the New York Gangster hit a pillow every time he feels angry.
In “The Unforgiving World” (1976), an angry newscaster (played by Peter Finch) implores viewers furious and outraged by the rising price of oil and the plummeting economy, to release their frustrations by opening windows and shouting, “I’m crazy as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” In response to his urging, millions of Americans did just that.
In “Locos de Ira” (2003), the main character is wrongly accused of having had an attack of anger on a plane and the judge orders him to attend an anger management group in which his therapist, Dr. Buddy Rydell recommends that he purge his anger by throwing blunt objects. Dr. Rydell’s advice is similar to that of many authors of numerous self-help anger management books.
John Lee (1993) suggests that instead of “holding poisonous anger,” it is better to “hit a cushion and, while doing so, scream and curse. Strike with all the frenzy you have. If you are angry with a particular person, imagine his face on the pillow and vent all your anger physically and verbally” (p. 96).
Dr. George Bach and Herb Goldberg (1974) recommend an exercise called “Vesuvius” – referring to the volcano located in front of the Bay of Naples whose eruption caused the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were buried. In this exercise “individuals can vent their repressed frustrations, resentments, hurts, hostilities and anger by shouting at the top of their lungs, like an explosion” (page 180).
These techniques for dealing with anger even found their place in some psychotherapies. Some popular therapies encourage patients to yell, hit pillows, and throw objects against walls when they feel angry (Lewis & Bucher, 1992). Proponents of Primal Therapy maintain that psychologically disturbed adults must release the emotional pain produced in their traumatic childhood by discharging this pain, usually through piercing screams (Janov, 1970).
In some cities in the United States, such as Atlanta and Georgia, Primal Therapy centers can still be found.
Research suggests that the Catharsis Hypothesis is FALSE.
For more than 40 years, studies have revealed that encouraging the expression of anger directly toward another person or indirectly, such as toward an object, actually increases the intensity of anger (Bushman, Baumeister, & Stack, 1999; Lewis & Bucher, 1992; Littrell, 1998; Tavris, 1988). In one of the early studies, people who were instructed to drive nails after someone insulted them were more, not less, critical of that person (Hornberger, 1959). Furthermore, playing aggressive sports such as rugby, which could presumably promote catharsis, results in increased aggression (Patterson, 1974) and playing violent video games is also associated with increased aggression in laboratory studies and in real-life contexts. daily (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007).
So expressing anger does not mean “discharging” it: it simply fuels the flame of anger. Research reveals that expressing anger is helpful only when accompanied by constructive problem-solving strategies designed to resolve the source of the distress (Littrell, 1998).
So if we are angry with our partner because he is always late for appointments, yelling at him will hardly make us feel better and will not improve the situation either. But if we can calmly and assertively express what we feel (“I realize you’re probably not doing it on purpose, but when you’re late you hurt my feelings”) we will have taken a big step toward resolving the conflict.
The media may increase the likelihood that some people will engage in aggressive acts because they believe it will make them feel better (Bushman, Baumeister, & Phillips, 2001). Brad Bushman and his colleagues (Bushman et al., 1999) conducted research in which they asked participants to write an essay about abortion, then gave a group fake newspaper notes stating that to act aggressively It was a good way to reduce anger and another group also received false notes that spoke against acting aggressively. Finally, the researchers gave very critical feedback to the participants regarding what they had written about abortion (“This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!”). The results indicated that people who read the “pro-catharsis” notes became more aggressive toward the person who criticized them than those who read the “anti-catharsis” notes.
Why does the Catharsis Myth remain so popular despite the overwhelming evidence against it? Because sometimes people feel better in the short term – immediately after the outburst – and that could reinforce the act of expressing anger and the idea that catharsis works (Bushman, 2002; Bushman et al., 1999).
At the same time, many times people mistakenly attribute the fact of feeling better to catharsis, when in reality what happens is that the anger usually disappears on its own after a while. As Jefrey Lohr and his colleagues (Lohr, Olatunji, Baumeister, & Bushman, 2007) observed, this is an example of the “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy…