Understanding might not be the solution to your anger.
The appeal in Baruch Spinoza is very precise, if you understand the causes of your affects, you stop misreading them as personal failures or moral defects. Anger becomes intelligible, this is what happens when my power to act is reduced by external causes. That shift can genuinely lower the secondary load so you end up with less self-accusation, less confusion, less “why am I like this?”
But the psychologists or spiritual helpers forget to say that it is only one layer of the system. Spinoza distinguishes between adequate ideas (clear grasp of causes) and passive affects (states produced when external forces determine you). The uncomfortable point is that you can have a fairly adequate idea while still being dominated by passive affects. Knowing the mechanism does not automatically give you the power to alter it.
Why?
Because the causes that generate the state are not primarily in the level where the understanding sits. They are in the body, the learned predictions, the environment’s constraints. So you get a split. You understand that “this anger is a decrease in my power caused by obstruction” and your nervous system still runs spike, shutdown, pressure, repetition, No contradiction. Just two layers operating on different time scales and with different leverage.
Spinoza himself is explicit that understanding increases freedom in proportion to power. If your ability to act is significantly limited by a difficult work environment or a nervous system that shuts down under stress, then the benefits of understanding are restricted. While it can provide clarity, it won't completely change how you react.
