More Than Anger
Breaking Masculine Stereotypes — What Feelings Are OK?
There is a moment that happens in most men's lives — a moment of misplaced rage that becomes a permanent fixture in the museum of personal regret.
Matt Drexler carries his like most of us carry ours: vivid, a little embarrassing, and, in retrospect, deeply instructive.
His happened on a golf course in South Carolina. He was in his mid-twenties, running a chemical engineering research program at the university, and a colleague named Jeff had invited him out for a round. It was supposed to be a good afternoon. Nine holes in, things were fine. Then, out on the back nine — hole twelve, Matt recalls, the furthest point from the clubhouse, with no easy escape — Jeff turned to him and asked a quiet question.
“Matt, I’m just curious. Do you have a relationship with Jesus Christ?”
What happened next, Matt will tell you himself, is what he calls the most embarrassing moment of his life. His reptilian brain — his words — fired before his prefrontal cortex had a chance to intervene. He unloaded. Profanity. Indignation. How dare you bring this here. You've ruined a perfectly good round of golf.
Jeff went quiet. The friendship never fully recovered. And Matt spent the next twenty-plus years understanding, slowly, what was actually happening inside him in that moment — because it was not, as it turns out, about golf at all.
He was furious at God. He had been for years.
And because he had no language for that, no permission to feel it, no framework for what was actually lodged inside him — all of it came pouring out sideways, at a decent man who had simply asked a sincere question on a Tuesday afternoon on a South Carolina golf course.
That story is the doorway into this chapter.
Welcome to Chapter Seven.
An Introduction to James — Men Under Real Pressure
When Matt stood before the table and opened his teaching, he did not start with a formula or a self-help framework. He started with context. He started with James.
James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ, writes his letter not to men sitting comfortably in their living rooms. He writes to the scattered — Jewish Christians displaced from their homes, uprooted by persecution, living in a kind of suspended grief that would exhaust any man. The dispersion James references in his opening lines likely echoes the chaos described in Acts 8:3, when Saul was ravaging the church, dragging men and women from their homes and throwing them into prison.
These were not people with the luxury of emotional distance. These were men and women under genuine pressure — afraid, displaced, angry, and trying to figure out how to hold their faith together when the world had cracked beneath them. Into that context, James writes one of the most deceptively simple commands in all of Scripture:
"Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God."
— James 1:19–20
Matt paused on that verse for a long time. In his career as a litigation attorney, the courtroom rewarded the opposite: speak fast, advance your position, dominate the argument. And yet here is James — writing not theoretically, not to men at rest, but to men under siege — calling them to listen first, speak carefully, and go slow on anger.
The irony wasn't lost on him. And it shouldn't be lost on us.
But here is what James does not say — and this matters. He does not say, "Thou shalt not be angry." He does not command emotional suppression. He asks for something harder and more sophisticated: restraint, intentionality, and understanding. Quick to hear. Slow to speak. Slow to anger. Not absent of emotion. Wise with it.
James 1:21 follows close behind:
"Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls."
— James 1:21
Matt drew the room's attention here. James isn't just regulating behavior — he's going after the heart. The real issue isn't the outburst, the slammed door, the word said in anger that can't be unsaid. The real issue is what lives underneath. Pride. Resistance to truth. A heart that hasn't yet been made soft enough to receive what God is trying to plant in it.
And that, said Matt, is where the conversation about masculinity actually begins.
Focus on the Heart — Reshaping What We Think Strength Looks Like
Every man at that table had been formed by the same basic code. It is not written down anywhere. It is not taught in a single classroom. But it is absorbed early and deeply, through fathers and coaches and playgrounds and locker rooms and every culture signal that shapes a boy into a man.
The code goes something like this: Speak quickly, because it signals you know what you're talking about. Hold strong opinions, because it signals confidence and authority. Get angry when challenged, because it signals you can't be pushed around. Strength is volume. Power is speed. Real men react.
Matt named it plainly: that is the societal framework for masculinity in the outside world. And James, writing to men under real persecution two thousand years ago, is still flipping the script on it.
Real strength, James says, looks like listening first. It looks like speaking carefully, choosing words rather than just discharging them. It looks like bringing anger under authority rather than letting anger be the authority. This is not weakness — this is what Matt called spiritual maturity and personal growth. And it is, for most men, far more difficult than anything the old code ever required of them.
The men around the table knew this in their bones. When the host of the gathering set up the conversation, he reached for a metaphor that landed hard: most of us, he said, run our emotional lives on a dashboard as limited as the one in his grandfather's old truck. Mad. Sad. Glad. And for many men, if they are being fully honest, the only emotion that feels socially legitimate to display — the only one that reads as strength — is anger. Everything else gets compressed down, rerouted, and expressed as fury.
"We as men potentially allow ourselves mad, sad, and glad — and that's about the extent of it. And for most men, the only legitimate emotion we're allowed to demonstrate is anger."
— Opening reflection from Russell
James is not asking men to abandon strength. He is asking them to relocate it — to move it from the jaw and the fist and the reflexive retort, and to find it instead in the attentive ear, the measured word, and the disciplined heart.
That is the work of this chapter.
Anger Danger — What Happens When It Takes the Wheel
Anger is not the enemy. Matt was careful about this, and we should be too. But uncontrolled anger — anger that has never been examined, never been named, never been submitted to anything larger than itself — that is where the danger lives.
Here is what the science confirms and what every honest man already knows from experience: when anger fires, the amygdala takes over and the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for logic, reasoning, and proportionate response — effectively shuts down. Two things happen simultaneously. You literally think worse. And you react faster than you can reflect.
Matt identified two primary dangers that flow from this, and he called them bluntly:
The first: anger distorts perception. When we are in the grip of it, we jump to conclusions. We see threat where there is none. We assign motives that may not exist. We catastrophize, amplify, and misread. The Ted Lasso dart scene — Season One, Episode Eight, for those who haven't seen it — captures this beautifully. The entire scene pivots on a single phrase borrowed from Walt Whitman: "Be curious, not judgmental." Curiosity requires slowing down. Anger forecloses everything.
"Whoever is patient has great understanding, but one who is quick-tempered displays folly."
— Proverbs 14:29
"Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools."
— Ecclesiastes 7:8–9
The second danger: anger damages relationships. Not just in the moment — but for years, sometimes for lifetimes. Matt told his golf course story not as a comedy but as a cost analysis. One reflexive, unexamined outburst at a man who was extending genuine care. A friendship strained from that day forward. A lifetime of regret. A relationship with a follower of Jesus lost in the space of thirty seconds on the back nine.
"Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear."
— Ephesians 4:29
The damage anger does to relationships is not merely interpersonal — it is generational. One man at the table spoke quietly about a physical altercation with his oldest son, a gentle and soft-spoken boy, and the profound fear his own wife had in that moment — not for him, but for the child. "We both do," he said. "We talk about it quite a bit." The shadow that an unexamined anger casts does not stop at the edges of the man who carries it. It reaches.
And still, the damage is repairable. More on that in a moment.
Emotional Fluency — Naming What's Actually There
Here is one of the most clarifying things Matt said all morning, and it deserves to be said slowly:
Anger is almost always a secondary emotion.
Underneath the raised voice, the clenched jaw, the thrown item in the garage — there is something else. Hurt. Fear. Embarrassment. A sense of rejection or inadequacy. Shame. Feeling forgotten or disrespected. Grief. These are the primary emotions, and for most men, they never make it to the surface in their original form. They get compressed, rerouted, and expressed as anger — because anger is the only emotion in the masculine vocabulary that feels permitted.
Matt told his own story here: struggling for hours to diagnose a leaking air suspension system on his truck, unable to make traction, his frustration building until he was throwing things against the wall of his RV garage. His wife walked in at precisely that moment. What she saw was rage. What was actually happening, as he later understood it, was something far more vulnerable: "I'm feeling totally inadequate. I don't understand how this works. My mind isn't mechanical, and I feel embarrassed that I can't figure this out."
He didn't have those words then. He just had the throwing.
This gap — between the emotion that is actually present and the emotion that comes out — is exactly what emotional fluency is designed to close. Emotional fluency is the ability to accurately recognize, name, and express what you are actually feeling. Not what you think you should feel. Not the version that sounds strong or stoic or acceptable. What is actually in there.
One man at the table told the story of sitting with his wife in therapy and being handed an emotion wheel — a circular chart mapping dozens of emotions outward from a central core. His wife began circling feelings with recognition. He looked at his and circled "anger." Then he wrote the word "responsible."
"I had circled anger. And then I wrote the word 'responsible.' And then we had a big discussion about whether 'responsible' was a feeling. Growing up, I felt like I had anger and not-anger. Those were the two emotions."
— Thomas
The emotion wheel maps the landscape most men have never been invited to inhabit. Violated. Ridiculed. Powerless. Disrespected. Inadequate. Humiliated. Dismissed. These are precise words for precise wounds. And precision matters here — psychologically, the more accurately you can name what you're feeling, the more proportionate your response can be to it. The further out you move on the wheel, the more self-insight you gain, and the more choices open up to you.
Scripture, Matt was quick to note, does not model emotional suppression. It models emotional honesty. The man it holds up as the model — Jesus — is not a man of muted feeling. He overturns tables in the temple. He weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. In the garden of Gethsemane, his sweat becomes like great drops of blood falling to the ground.
"And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground."
— Luke 22:44
David, in the Psalms, does not whisper his anguish in careful, acceptable language. He shouts it:
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?"
— Psalm 22:1
And this is where Matt landed something that stopped the room: that same verse — David's cry of abandonment — is the verse Jesus quotes from the cross in Matthew 27:46. The emotional honesty of a shepherd-king thousands of years earlier becomes the language of the Son of God in his darkest hour. God himself models bringing the full weight of human feeling directly to the Father.
The cost of not doing this is steep. When men cannot identify what they are actually feeling, anger becomes a blunt instrument that carries everything — all the unprocessed fear, shame, grief, and hurt piled on top of each other. The result is disproportionate reactions to small things. "Seemingly small things end up having these big reactions," Matt said, "because the anger is carrying everything else."
It also stunts spiritual growth. If you cannot identify what you are actually feeling, you cannot bring it honestly to God. You cannot pray truthfully about something you have not yet named.
"When you get to the outer ring and you name it — when you say 'I'm actually feeling violated' — it is so powerful. This is so helpful."
— Thomas
The Surprising Benefits of Anger — When It Moves You Toward Something Good
This is the chapter's important turn.
Anger is not the enemy. Unexamined anger is the enemy. But anger examined, named, and submitted to something larger than the self — anger in service of love — is one of the most powerful forces available to a man.
"Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger."
— Ephesians 4:26
The Bible does not prohibit anger. Jesus in the temple was not composing a strongly worded letter. He was overturning tables. Righteous anger — anger in response to something that genuinely offends the heart of God — is not a character flaw to be managed. It is a signal that something in you is aligned with something in him.
One man in the group told the story that became the chapter's emotional centerpiece. Years ago, he had traveled to Russia to adopt a boy named Grady. There were two visits required by the Russian court — and then the judge had told them, three weeks, and you can come collect him. Three weeks became four. Four became five. The court systems had gone on vacation. One hundred and sixty children, three years old and under, were sitting in a baby house while paperwork moved at the pace of bureaucracy.
"Something activated in my prayers that I've never experienced, and I don't know if I've really experienced since. It was just this righteous anger of injustice — my son is sitting in that crib on the other side of the world. I was on a holy campaign and had nowhere to go with it other than prayer."
— Russell
He and the boy had locked eyes on that first visit. A bond was forged that no court schedule could dissolve. And the anger that rose in him — that fierce, consuming, unrelenting indignation — drove him to pray in a way he had never prayed before. Moving heaven and earth. Not a polite request. A demand born of love.
That, said another man at the table, is what anger in God's design looks like: motivated by love, in defense of something loved, pointed at a genuine wrong. "If what we love is good," he said, "then the anger that protects it is good."
"Anger is not outside his design. If we're angry and it's righteous anger, it's because something that we love is being threatened. Anger will help us protect whatever it is we love."
— Matthew
Another man described watching poverty up close — four or five people living in a space smaller than the room they were sitting in, and on their faces, inexplicably, joy. "This ain't right," he said, and the dissonance of that — beauty in the midst of injustice — had never left him. That anger, he said, was not noise. It was signal. It was the beginning of a response.
Matt himself found a version of this in his work as a litigation attorney: the pro bono cases, roughly one a month, the ones that come through that make you boil. Child abuse. Injustice that has no other advocate. "We're on the side of the angels on this one," he told his team when they took those cases. The anger didn't disappear. It was disciplined, channeled through procedure and law, and aimed at the thing that needed fixing.
The key question Matt posed to the group: "When has anger pushed you toward something good? When has it motivated you to do something that mattered?"
That is not a rhetorical question. Every man reading this chapter should sit with it.
The Battle: Reaction vs. Response — Choosing the Higher Path
The most dangerous version of anger is the one we have rehearsed.
More than one man at that table confessed to maintaining what might be called a fantasy life of unresolved arguments. Arguments from twenty years ago, replayed in mental widescreen. The perfect rejoinder finally delivered. The confrontation that never happened, scripted and rescripted in the mind. One man described elaborate fantasies about a father who had abandoned his children — a man he had poured into and loved over the course of eighteen years — imagining the day he might finally show up at a wrestling tournament and hear every unsaid thing said aloud.
"I have these fantasies of, like, I would find out they had child porn on their computer and they'd be arrested..." he admitted, then stopped himself. "That's just crazy stuff."
It is also universal. The rehearsal of anger is one of the most common and least discussed features of the male interior life. And Matt connected it clearly to the feeling of powerlessness: we rehearse the argument we never got to have because somewhere inside us we believe that having it would finally resolve something. It never does. The anger just gets another rotation.
"Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools."
— Ecclesiastes 7:9
"You're drinking poison hoping the other person gets injured," Matt said. And the room recognized it.
The alternative is not suppression. It is not swallowing everything and performing calm while bitterness calcifies underneath. Suppressed anger, as one man noted, has a way of destroying a man from the inside out. It lodges. It festers. It shows up in the body — Proverbs says it rots the bones. It shows up in relationships as a kind of low-grade coldness that everyone can feel but no one can name. And it shows up in the spirit as a locked door between the man and God, because you cannot honestly engage with a God you have never honestly addressed.
What James calls for — and what the table kept returning to — is not suppression or explosion, but response. The ability to feel the full weight of what is happening, to name it accurately, to pause long enough for the prefrontal cortex to come back online, and then to choose what to do with it.
Matt offered a practical framework he called the Anger Toolbox — five steps for moving from reaction to response:
1. Notice it. Be slow to anger. Recognize when the heat is rising.
2. Name the real emotion. Go to the wheel. What is actually underneath the anger?
3. Pause. Slow to speak. Do not react. Create space between stimulus and response.
4. Get curious, not judgmental. Before concluding, ask a question.
5. Choose your response. Proactive, not reactive. What serves the relationship? What serves God's purposes here?
Alongside the toolbox, he offered something simpler — a three-step biblical framework that maps directly onto the rhythm James describes: Pause. Pray. Proceed. Not as a formula, but as a posture. The anger is real; you don't perform your way past it. You stop long enough to bring it to God before you bring it to the person. You name it honestly in prayer. And then you move forward — not suppressed, not discharged, but transformed.
One man described learning a version of this from a mentor fifteen years ago: the twenty-four hour check-in. After a conflict — especially a heated one — give it a day, and then return to the relationship. Not to relitigate. Not to press for victory. Simply to ask: "That was hard. Are we okay?"
He had used it that very week — after a difficult feedback session with a supervisor, a moment where his internal temperature had been somewhere near boiling and the things he wanted to say were available and ready. Twenty-four hours later, he came back. "That was a tough conversation," he said. "How are we feeling?" What followed was a better conversation than the one they had originally had — one that restored the relationship rather than calcifying the wound.
"New mercies are written in the morning. The 24-hour check-in creates the opportunity to de-escalate, come back in, and just ask: are we okay? It allowed us to square up — because I value the relationship."
— Russell
This is the discipline of the mature man: not to feel less, but to respond more wisely than he reacts. To carry the emotion without being carried away by it. To be, in the language of James, slow to anger — not because the anger isn't real, but because he has learned that the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.
Stop the Suppression — The Call to Respond Over React
Here is where Matt left us.
The goal is not to become less emotional. Let that land. The goal is not the stoic, affectless man who has successfully locked everything down behind a wall of performance and self-control. That man is not strong. He is defended. There is a difference.
The goal is to become emotionally fluent. To expand the vocabulary until the emotion wheel is not intimidating but illuminating. To get further and further from the blunt instrument of anger-as-default and closer to the precise language that can actually name what is happening inside you — so that you can bring it honestly to God, to your wife, to your son, to the men around the table who are doing the same hard work.
The suppression has to stop. Not because your feelings deserve a louder platform, but because what is suppressed does not disappear. It lodges. It surfaces in the places you least want it — in the car ride home, at the dinner table, in the garage, in the inheritance you leave your children. The anger you do not name becomes the anger they inherit.
But here is the other side of the call: the reaction has to become a response. The speed of the amygdala — that fast, certain, righteous feeling that you are about to say or do something that will finally fix this — that speed is the enemy of wisdom. Not the feeling. The speed.
Pause. Pray. Proceed.
Notice. Name. Pause. Get curious. Choose.
And underneath all of it — the question Matt asked that quieted the room and deserves to quiet yours:
"What's underneath your anger most of the time? If you dig down — what's really there?"
— Matt Drexler
For some of us, it is old wounds that never got named. For some, it is anger at a father who didn't show up, expressed as anger at the man across the table. For some, it is anger at God — the kind that feels too dangerous or too sacrilegious to speak aloud, so it gets redirected at everyone else. And for some — like Matt on the golf course at twenty-two — the most honest answer is that the fury had almost nothing to do with the question being asked and everything to do with a life of pain that had never been brought into the open.
At fifty, Matt understands what was happening with that twenty-two-year-old. He was not angry at Jeff. He was angry at God. And he had no words for it, no permission for it, no framework for it — so it came out sideways, at full volume, on hole twelve, on a Tuesday afternoon.
That is the work of emotional fluency. Not to make the anger smaller. To make the man bigger — bigger than his reactions, wiser than his defaults, more honest than the code he inherited.
The world does not need more men who perform calm while quietly drowning. It needs men who have done the harder work: who have named the thing under the anger, brought it to the God who wept at a graveside and sweat blood in a garden, and chosen to respond rather than react.
That is not weakness. That is the most masculine thing you can do.
Reflections
Reflection: Think of a moment when your anger damaged a relationship. What was the secondary emotion underneath it? What were you actually feeling?
Reflection: Where on the emotion wheel do you tend to live? What emotions do you have the most fluency with — and which ones are still foreign to you?
Reflection: Is there anger you are rehearsing — an argument you keep rerunning, a person you keep putting on trial in your mind? What would it take to release it?
Reflection: Have you ever been angry at God? Have you told him? What would it look like to bring that honestly to the Father rather than to everyone else in your path?
Reflection: When has your anger moved you toward something good — toward justice, protection, or love? What was the love underneath it?
Reflection: What is one step you can take this week to move from reaction to response? Who in your life would feel that change first?
A Prayer
Father,
You are the giver of every emotion — including this one. You designed us to feel. You wept at a grave. You prayed in agony in a garden. You overturned tables in righteous indignation. You are not frightened by what is inside us. You made it.
We confess that we have often used anger as a shortcut — to avoid the harder emotions underneath, to perform strength rather than feel it, to discharge what we should have examined. We have thrown things in garages. We have said words on golf courses that we cannot take back. We have passed on to our children the inheritance of a narrowed emotional world that we ourselves received and never questioned.
Teach us to be quick to hear. Slow to speak. Slow to anger.
Give us the courage to go further down into the wheel — to name what is actually there. The hurt. The fear. The shame. The grief. The anger at you that we have been too afraid, or too proud, or too theologically uncomfortable to admit. Meet us there, as you have always met your people there — in the Psalms, in the garden, on the cross.
Where we have been carrying the poison of unforgiveness, hoping someone else suffers for it — release us from it. Where we have been suppressing what needed to be said — give us the words. Where we have been reacting when we should have been responding — give us the pause.
Let our anger be in service of love. Let it move us toward justice, protection, and restoration — and let it always be submitted, finally, to you.
For the men at this table, and for every man doing this work — you see them. You are with them. Commission them out to another week, knowing that the work they are doing in the interior places is real, and it matters, and it is yours.
Pause. Pray. Proceed.
Amen.