What is the Anger Phase?

In her seminal work on grieving and loss, a Swiss psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed the Five Stages of Grief model for how people cope with loss. While the model was originally developed to describe how people deal with death, the scale has been found to be widely useful for loss in general.

The five stages in the Kübler-Ross model are Denial, Negotiation, Anger, Depression, and Acceptance. A person who is grieving may experience these stages in any order, more than once, or some of them not at all. The simplicity and high empathy the model evokes make the Kübler-Ross model a useful way to discuss grieving and loss.

When we talk about the Anger Phase in the context of The Red Pill, we are indeed talking about Kübler-Ross’ Anger stage. In this stage the newly unplugged man is angry – at the world, at women, at himself. He may lash out at friends and loved ones, reject much-needed help and support, and may even engage in self-destructive behaviors. This is the situation in which we find many men on RP subreddits, particularly on MRP. While single guys have their own reasons to be angry once they unplug (some of which overlap those of married men), married guys have some unique aspects to their anger phase. This post therefore focuses on married guys who are unplugging for the first time and find themselves in what I will refer to as the MRP Anger Phase.

Sources of the MRP Anger Phase

When men first discover TRP and start to open their eyes to the reality of their marriage, anger is a common reaction. But why? In my experience the reasons for intense anger fall into one or more categories:

  1. Feelings of betrayal and shame. One common source of anger in the newly-TRP-aware husband is the inescapable feeling of betrayal. The idea is that everyone knew better but deliberately led him astray. Society (through media and cultural norms), his family, his friends, and especially his wife, all lied to him. They did this repeatedly, his whole life, and the only way he can see it is as betrayal. This can often be accompanied by a sense of shame: he feels like a total fool for having believed it.

  2. Fear of being used. Another common source of anger stems from the fear of being a BetaBux. Once men get the AF/BB story, they worry that their wives have exploited their Blue Pill beliefs and attendant Beta ways only to use them as unwitting provider drones while their women obtain (or long to obtain) their AlphaFux elsewhere. The thought that one could be duped so easily leads to anger and a desire to find out the wife’s true intentions.

  3. Feeling defrauded. Whenever we make an important financial decision it is important to have the true facts at hand. Only when we have accurate information can we even hope to make a rational risk/reward calculation; the same is true for relationships. However, when everything men think they knew about women turns out to be wrong, they realize they were not making well-informed choices. In fact, they were making misinformed choices. A natural result is to think, “If I knew then what I know now, maybe I would not have gotten married to the same woman. Maybe I would not have gotten married at all!” Another avenue of feeling cheated is when men realize the terms of trade in a marriage: men’s commitment for women’s sexual availability. When married men come to realize that they have offered all the commitment and gotten very little of the sex, they feel as though their wives have “breached the contract.”

  4. Opportunity cost. This is perhaps the largest and most important category here. Once men awaken to TRP, they naturally start to analyze the high points and low points of their lives. They start to think, “All the women I missed out on! All the times I went Beta and lost the chance to bang that girl I really liked! I wasted my best years being an AFC! Argh!” An additional opportunity cost is experienced within the context of marriage. When men start to realize how little sex they’ve really had in their marriages over the years, or how low the quality has been, they realize that a good amount of opportunity has been missed. “All those years I begged for sex! All those times she gave me the Starfish! All those times she said no! If only I’d known how to make her say yes!”

How to move past the MRP Anger Phase

Getting past the MRP Anger Stage is not easy to do. The angry married man became so because he finally believed the truths that RP showed him about women and relationships. But to move past the anger requires that he next accept those truths, and perhaps more importantly, the implications of those truths. In other words, the RP transformation is really about moving beyond Denial, Negotiation, and Anger to true, whole, and honest Acceptance. So the focus is to not only know the individual facts and theorems of RP, but to really understand their implications and be at peace with them.

While some men will find this easier to do than others will, and while each case is undoubtedly a little different, I believe there are some general things that a man must do to move past Anger and on to Acceptance. I present these here in roughly chronological order.

  1. Know that you are in your rights to feel angry. Emotions are pre-programmed responses that reflect our estimation of our life situation. If we are sad or angry, it is because we perceive that we are either lacking something or have lost something. In this situation you have lost potentially several things: time, opportunity, innocence, trust. This is why the Kübler-Ross model works here – you’re grieving. Take the time that you need to process your anger and especially to understand where it’s coming from. This means you should introspect, i.e. sit and think about how you feel. During this time, whether it be hours or days or weeks, do not make major life decisions. The anger will corrupt your reason and you may later regret decisions made while angry. Talk with a Morpheus figure if you can and discuss those feelings with him. Caution: Never discuss these feelings with your wife or LTR. A therapist may be an option, but if you go that route choose your therapist carefully. When it comes to relationships therapists often (wittingly or unwittingly) have a gynecocentric philosophy.

  2. Learn about the Sunk Cost Fallacy. This is another staple of MRP borrowed from Economics. The definition of a sunk cost given on Wikipedia is “a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.” The fallacy part comes in when we try to make decisions or take action by considering those costs. The point is that what’s in the past is in the past, and nothing you can do now will recover the time or opportunity you lost to acting Beta. Your outlook must become forward-looking only.

  3. Understand that women are not malicious for acting like women. Whether you believe that women are biologically programmed to pursue their life and sexual strategies or they are simply rational agents doing what seems logical given female identity, you have to know that most women are not consciously manipulative predators. To be mad at women for pursuing their sexual strategy is to be mad at women for being women. Their strategy is a part of their identity. In other words, behaving as they do is the very definition of feminine. Just as we do not get angry at dogs for walking on four legs and peeing on fire hydrants, we cannot be mad at women for doing what they do. It’s who they are.

  4. Clearly define your goals and formulate a plan. Though being angry is understandable, one must know what his goals are in order to move on. How are you going to learn a new way of behaving, to “kill the Beta” inside you? What do you want from life? How will you get it? If you are not already working towards these goals, see the Guide for Beginners to MRP.

  5. Channel your anger into self-improvement. Feeling angry? Burn off that energy lifting weights at the gym, go for a run, work on your car, mow the lawn. Remember what General Patton once said, “An ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood.” In this case substitute “misery” for blood and you get the idea. Anger can raise adrenaline and cortisol, so physical exercise is a great way to burn those off and mitigate the angry feelings. Work yourself until you’re too tired to be angry anymore.

  6. Memento Mori and Carpe Diem. You now know the truth. You have learned what was causing you all that pain. Like a splinter from your paw the thing that once was causing you misery has been removed. Revel in the possibilities that the future holds. Your life is limited, and spending one moment longer than you need mired in anger is just a plain waste of your most precious resource, your time. Pick up new hobbies, meet new friends, get a new job, travel. Do all the things on your bucket list, then do all the things on other peoples’ bucket lists too. Become the man you always envied. You have the knowledge, you have the power. As Hemingway said in For Whom the Bell Tolls, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” Don’t leave any unfinished business.

  7. Become Morpheus and help other men through their MRP Anger Phase (Bonus). This is not for everyone, but if you can, consider helping other men get through what you just conquered. Nothing solidifies learning like teaching. Plus, the world is a better place when more men unplug.


I never claim to be an authority on these things, and I’ve almost certainly missed some sources of anger and probably some brilliant coping strategies as well. If anyone has these, please put them in the comments. As always I hope that this post and its attendant comments will serve as a resource for our brothers in need.

Edited for formatting