Are You Feeling Angry?

While anger is normal and widespread, many of us have a challenging relationship with it. Often, we were told that expressing our outrage makes us "weak," “impulsive,” and “uncontrollable,” which means that we have an anger problem. While we strongly want to express our anger, we were taught to feel bad about our anger. This is why it may be surprising to many that feeling angry isn't a character defect. In fact, anger serves an important purpose. Like all emotions, anger is essential to the human experience and can be beneficial when used skillfully. Anger is a natural response to threat, injustice, abuse, and oppression. It wakes us up and motivates us to take action to protect ourselves and other people. Anger can point toward our deepest values and can be a positive force in our lives.

If we do not acknowledge or express our anger or other feelings, we can become detached from them. It’s as though we’ve turned off the main valve of our entire emotional system, preventing us from feeling pain and anger but also keeping us from experiencing joy or happiness. After a while, it becomes a habit not to feel, and when we do dare to turn on the faucet, the burst of pent-up emotion may be frightening.

Why Express Your Anger

Expressing anger in a healthy manner is important for various reasons:

• It provides an emotional release. Suppressing anger can lead to bottling-up feelings, stress, and potentially harmful outbursts.
• It communicates needs. Anger often arises when our needs are not met. Expressing anger can help communicate those needs.
• It resolves conflicts. When expressed constructively, anger can facilitate communication that supports conflict resolution.
• It allows for self-advocacy. Expressing anger promotes individuals to stand up for themselves, their beliefs, and their rights.
• It promotes emotional intelligence. Expressing anger healthily is a sign that exhibits self-awareness, self-regulation, and effective communication.

The Four-Step Process

It is critical to express anger in a non-violent and respectful manner. Here is a four-step process for working with anger and utilizing it in a healthy and constructive way:

1. Feel your anger

Fundamental healing and growth come from a willingness to encounter, explore, and feel your anger deeply. Accepting and feeling your own anger is the basis for taking responsibility for it and the first step toward transforming it into a positive force. As long you deny or repress your feelings, you will be limited in your self-awareness, your personal growth, and your ability to contribute and promote social justice. It is only when you allow yourself to really feel anger, distress, or despair that you can move to the healing phase and create value from your feelings.

When you feel anger without resistance and merely observe it, you realize you can endure it. You connect with your experience with openness and without judgment and accept whatever comes up.

One way to get in touch with your anger is by being an "anger detective" and identifying where it shows up in your body. Maybe your temperature rises, or your voice tone changes, or there's tension in your shoulders or jews, or you feel an impulse to scream or kick. Next time you're angry, try slowly scanning your body from head to toe. Notice any sensations that you're experiencing. Take a deep breath and aspire to slow down and befriend your anger. At the same time, be curious and compassionate, and gently stay with the sensations.

2. Understand your anger

Unexamined feelings, like the unexamined life, often lead to unwanted experiences, painful symptoms, and misery. The process of understanding and knowing your anger allows you to experience it and make good use of it fully. Healthy processing of anger allows greater emotional integration and creates the space for wise decisions.

Anger serves two interrelated purposes. The first is protective; it is largely concerned with survival and security. This aspect of anger is a function of the emotional brain. You can think of protective anger as largely unconscious or built-in. The nature of protective anger is to scan the environment for threats; this is why it is instinctually focused outwardly.

The second major purpose of anger is personal growth and transformation. While protective anger is immediate and works below the level of consciousness, the utilization of anger for the purpose of healing and personal development requires conscious and deliberate effort. Protective anger is raw; transformative anger is refined. Transformative anger can increase personal understanding and enhance resiliency and strength.

When you experience anger, ask yourself what its function is. Does anger further the expression of the self, or does it inhibit that expression? Does anger lead to a sense of inner freedom, or does it serve a defensive function?

3. Define your needs

There is an innate connection between needs and anger. In this step, your task is to identify your unmet needs. Anger always points you toward a core need that isn't being met. It indicates our location in four dimensions: survival, integrity, love, and actualization. Each of these is a fundamental need of every human being. You may become angry when you feel threatened when you’ve been taken advantage of, when you feel rejected or disrespected, or when you are blocked from doing something that matters to you.

Anger Essential Reads

Did Anger Evolve to Make Us Happy?

What Fruit Flies Can Tell Us About Our Own Aggression

When you feel angry, ask yourself what core needs are not being met.

• Is my safety or well-being at risk?
• Has something been wrong or unfair?
• Do I feel rejected, disrespected, or unloved?
• Is something preventing me from achieving my goals?

4. Take wise actions

Once you have identified what need is not being met—survival, integrity, love, or actualization—you are prepared to decide what action to take. Action is where real change takes place. No matter how thoughtfully you analyze a situation, no matter how carefully you plan ahead, that alone is not enough to change the situation. It’s action that forms your life.

To transform your anger into a force of good, you must take wise action so you can meet your needs and change your life, your relationships, and, ultimately, the world around you. As you take the action you’ve decided on, commit yourself to behave according to the virtues of strength, care, justice, and authenticity. The overarching values of these virtues are compassion and love.

It is important to note that the virtues are not about what we want to gain or achieve; they are about how we want to act. They are about how we want to live. When your behaviors are driven by these virtues, you will feel more grounded, resilient, secure, and confident, and your actions will be more effective—ultimately creating value for you and the people around you.

Conclusion

Next time something annoys you, or you find yourself in a blind rage, consider applying this four-step process. This process guides you on how to use anger effectively, moving from your defenses to realize your needs, then releasing and transforming your anger to meet your needs, and working toward becoming your best self and having your best life.

Once you process your anger and reveal your unmet needs, you are free to assess the situation deliberately, choose your response, and act in a way that is effective, compassionate, and wise. There is no need to try to make anger go away. It dissolves naturally when it has fulfilled its entire purpose: first protection and then transformation.