How Pride Influences Anger

Pride is the emotion of self-absorption, arrogance and conceit. Whether it’s open aggression or passive aggression your mind is focused on you, your rights, and your preferences only. It is at the core of virtually any unhealthy, nonproductive emotion or behavior. In the context of anger, it plays a very influential role.

Pride is our spiritual disease: To understand the influence pride can have on personality, it is important to recognize how it is intricately linked to our inborn sinfulness. Pride is a spiritual disease that is the manifestation of our innate sinful nature. Therefore, anger can be managed as you come to proper terms with God.

Choosing humility: The trait that keeps us in submission to God is humility. The opposite of pride, it is a lack of self-preoccupation and a willingness to acknowledge personal limits. While denying self may appear to be a weakness, it actually clears the way for unusual strength. Because God’s plan always leads to healthy interaction, we are assured that this submission will bring us more success than failures.

Humility is other-focused: As the emotion of self-preoccupation, pride’s bottom line is, “get my needs met.” Meeting needs can become an all-consuming drive that a person becomes obsessed about how others can and should respond to him or her. The Bible’s instruction for successful relationships is to consider others more important than yourself. We are so naturally selfish we must consciously tune in to others. This requires us to be sensitive to others’ feelings and to recognize that their different perceptions can have validity. This is not natural for us to do, and involves a daily, conscious decision on our part.

Humility accepts limits: Prideful people struggle to maintain balance in their relationships. They are presumptuousness and critical, often expressing their convictions and needs with the assumption that no one could possibly disagree with them. They create turmoil by imposing their will by attempting to push their preferences and ideas on to others. To establish patterns of successful assertiveness, boundaries must be recognized. First, you must establish personal boundaries, including communicating simple needs to standing openly for deep convictions. Second, you must accept others’ differentness. We can stop expecting the world should fit our personal preferences.

Does humility require repressing emotions? If you practice humility as an act of duty only, you would have some success at managing your anger. But then, it wouldn’t really be humility. You’d be living in a subtle form of pride called legalism. Humility is not an obligation or a duty. It is a choice. By accepting our limits and setting aside self-preoccupations, we are not repressing the other emotions. We are putting a higher priority on appropriateness.  Learning to let go of undesirable emotions rather than repressing them is unnatural to many. If you have had a history of abuse or if you are accustomed to being invalidated, you have probably learned the trait of repression. To develop humility without repression will require ongoing self-examination: Do I really mean it when I act kindly?