Are angry emotions something we just can’t help, something that in certain instances seize and control us unless we control them? While this is a common viewpoint in our American culture, I offer some vignettes from the lives of real people to examine another possibility.

Three weeks into the semester, the bookstore called Professor Jinx to explain that 180 books for the class lay unpurchased. Evidently a maverick professor had refused to use the book after all. Jinx was furious. But he knew that of all the profs to pull such a stunt, of course it would be Professor Steara. He was always on the edge, always insistent, challenging the simplest policy. The bookstore confirmed Jinx’s suspicions. It was Steara, all right. Jinx told the bookstore he would straighten out the situation. Then he hung up the phone and smoldered—but while he did other things. Although he felt to action and call Steara, he busied himself with other demanding ( and seemingly endless) tasks that just had to be done.

Jinx put off calling Steara for almost two days. He worked hard, gritted his teeth, was aware of a nagging feeling he should take action, but remembered how intimidating Steara could be and kept himself immersed in the mundane. Then the phone rang, and Steara was on the other end of the line. He was not calling about the book problem, for as yet, he was oblivious to it. Jinx gave direct but impatient answers to Steara about a variety of matters. Finally Steara said,”Hey Jinx, is anything wrong?” Barely able to produce civility, Jinx let it out: “Well, yes as a matter of fact, there is. You agreed, along with everyone else, to use the required text in the class. Now the bookstore wants to know what to do with the 180 books you decided not to have your students buy. Maybe I should have them bill you!”

Steara explained that he had required the book and that his students were in the sixth chapter already. Jinx’s anger gave way to disappointment. He thought Steara was guilty—even wanted him to be—and being confronted by his innocence was even more irritating. It took another hour before Jinx came to his senses. His feelings of anger were not due to what Steara was or was not doing to him, but were produced by Jinx’s own hardness against another. He apologized to Steara immediately.

These four stories are of seemingly inescapable feelings generated in everyday life, although some of them are deeper in consequence than others. They all involve emotions of two incompatible qualities. On the one hand are feelings of impatience, irritability, anger, and resentment. On the other hand are emotions of compassion, forgiveness, and sorrow. The emotions are incompatible because while feeling one kind, you can not feel the other kind. (For example, I can not simultaneously resent you and respect you.) To classify these two types of feelings simply as positive or negative does not do them justice, for such labels ignore a more fundamental distinguishing feature. The emotions are of a different moral quality. What makes the negative emotions negative is that they attend relationships of contention and destructiveness. What makes the positive emotions positive is that they communicate a concern for others, a connectedness that is nourishing. When a mother abandons irritation about injustice in order to write a compassionate note to a mother who has lost a son, she has moved from one quality of feeling to another.

In explaining how these two qualities of feeling and emotion come to be, I wish to present a possibility, not offer an argument.

Here is the possibility: The quality of emotions may be nothing more nor less than an expression of whether we are walking in the light. To walk in the light is the moral course. It is to honor the truths we know. To walk in darkness—including the emotions that attend contention is to turn our backs on the light and knowledge we have received. The moral quality of our emotions changes when we live untruthfully. We then are hard-hearted. The scriptures say this more strongly: “Can ye be angry, and not sin?” (JST, Eph. 4:26) If some emotions are signals of wrongdoing, then when we give up our sin, our feelings should change in quality. At least the scriptures suggest this possibility: “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind ont to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” (Eph. 4:30-31) This view that we can abandon such feelings is not welcomed in popular culture. This is, in part, because the prevailing view of emotions does not grant that emotions can be judged as being of different moral qualities.

I have read debates about the meaning of emotions such as resentment, hostility, and despair. One camp adopts the general view of U.S. culture: You cannot help feeing what you feel, but you can decide how you are going to express it. Thus, those who get angry or frustrated with a mate or an employer are not to be faulted for the feelings themselves. Yet they are expected to channel or control their feelings. In this view, feelings are neither right nor wrong, they just are. The morality of the frustrated or angry person is in their control or lack thereof in expressing those “honest” feelings. And those who commit violence while afflicted by rage or resentment are guilty of crimes of passion, but only because their feelings got out of bounds. The idea is that we are victims of emotions, but are not necessarily unable to control them.

So, the logic goes, while you may not be able to help how you feel, you had better control your feelings responsibly. The counsel often fostered by this view is, “Get a grip” So, according to this view, feelings can be controlled or expressed responsibly, and our agency consists in being able to do just that. This view purports that the ability to express frustration without doing damage to others is a matter of learning, maturity, and personality. Perhaps it is a matter of practice and rehearsal.

Over all, proponents of this view suggest that we can be in control of how we express our feelings. We are counseled, for example, that “nobody can make us angry, we make ourselves angry.” Emotions such as anger are decisions within the realm of our agency. Thus, when Bill is confronted by the person in heavy traffic who cuts in front of him, Bill’s resulting frustration or resentment is because of his decision, not because of the other’s behavior. Bill can decide whether to be angry, frustrated, compassionate, patient, and so on. But if Bill is unaware of his feelings, he cannot control them. Thus, additional counsel fostered by this view is, “Be honest about your emotions (own them), but express them responsibly.”

The scriptures offer a possibility that transcends these ideas. That possibility is that the moral question is not how we either control or express our feelings. Rather, it has to do with the quality of the feelings themselves. This thought is expressly repeated, but as good a starting point as any is 3 Nephi 11:29:30. “He that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another. Behold, this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts oe men with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.”

This does not mean that we must just control or express feelings responsibly, but that we must do away with them. How is such a thing possible? It is not possible if you believe that you can’t help how you feel. How can you do away with something you are not responsible for in the first place? The condemning of anger is not, in public circles, an idea whose time has come. Some even suggest it is a backward step to the days of guilt and repression of feelings. For example, to say that anger or contention is of the devil makes matters worse, because it heaps great guilt upon those who experience an emotion considered to be normal by popular philosophies.

But we have evidence of our own experience, as well as from scripture, that such a view may eclipse the truth. Greater peace and freedom await those who grant that their bitterness can be abandoned than those whose best hope is to cope with feelings beyond their control Of course, as a practical matter, it is still better to “school thy feelings” than not, but the gospel solution to troubled feelings is to walk in the light. Otherwise, we control and express the symptoms of the problem without dissolving the source of our emotional difficulties. The four examples presented at the beginning of this article are genuine cases and are consistent with scriptural counsel and promises. Cheryl’s anger dissolved in an instant when her anonymous antagonist became the face of a favorite aunt. Cheryl’s anger in the parking lot didn’t disappear because she controlled it but because she gave up accusing the other driver of emotionally victimizing her. Greg actively held a grudge for years. It poisoned his life until he forgave his father. We could as easily say he repented of his sin against his father. The hostility toward the military by the mother of the Marine was an expression of her refusal to be true to her conscience, and not reality, no matter how much she wanted to rationalize it, because of the military red tape. Moreover, just because she gave up her resentment didn’t mean she felt nothing about not seeing her son. But her sorrow at being away from him was of a different moral quality than her previous bitterness Her sorrow reconnected her to her son—and included compassion for a woman who had lost one.

As for Professor Jinx, his feelings of frustration against Steara were real and completely unnecessary. They were an expression of his hard-heartedness, not of human helplessness in the face of some else’s irresponsibility. Jinx came to his senses and went to Steara with an apology. He also solved the bookstore problem without rancor. In the instant Jins began to act on the moral feelings he had had in the first place—to do something about the problem—his irritability turned to cheerful determination.

The view of the morality of emotions is not naïve to the reality that we all experience emotions of resentment, anger, hostility, and so on. To invite us all to give p such feelings is not an act of condemnation of each other but of love. It is an invitation to give up the idea that we are trapped in miseries we could trade in for compassion and sorrow. When Ephesians 4 is lined with Mosiah 3:19 (“Natural man is an enemy to God…and will be…unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit”) it may be seen that some emotions are of a moral quality that constitute sin and that we experience as natural men and women, but that can be given up. We are commanded to put off the natural man. In so doing, we also put off the immoral, accusatory feelings that attend being an enemy of God, for what is left when we accept the Atonement is that we are submissive, meek, humble, patient and full of love (Mosiah 3:19). The issue is not to express or control negative feelings, but to give them up. To give them up is to run to obedience to the Atonement. It is a doctrine of hope that makes a reality of the Savior’s promises, For “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another” (l John 1:7), and, as King Benjamin suggests, we “will not have a mind to injure one another, but to live peaceable” (Mosiah 4:13). Eventually we will “have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually” (Mosiah 5:2)

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