The Difference Between Anger and Abuse

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The two “Inside Out” movies have helped people learn how to understand and accept their emotions. Psychotherapists like to reduce the complexity of human emotional experience to four categories: mad, sad, glad, or scared. Of the four, we often label mad, sad, and scared as “negative” emotions and glad as the only positive emotion. No research suggests that anger is unhealthy or harmful for relationships. On the contrary, most psychotherapists believe that emotionally healthy people have the capacity to fully experience all of their emotions in the proper context—i.e., to be able to feel sad when experiencing something like a loss and to feel scared when there is a real threat.

But what about anger? Is there a place for anger in a healthy life and relationship, or is anger just a “negative emotion?” Although anger has gotten a bad name in our culture, anger itself is not a problem. Anger only becomes a problem in relationships when it is not expressed or acted out rather than talked through.

Anger is essentially the emotion we experience when we don’t like the way things are going in a relationship and we want to do something to make things better. For example, if I’m supposed to meet a friend for lunch and they forget, I might feel angry that they forgot me. I might also feel disappointed or perhaps even worried that this friend doesn’t like me very much. My anger is an indication that this person matters to me, that I don’t like the way things are going between us, and that I am invested in making things better. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be angry.

Things can get a little more complicated with men and anger. Anger is the emotion that men tend to be most familiar and comfortable with because there are many social prohibitions against men expressing emotions other than anger, particularly vulnerability, and a lot of social reinforcement for being angry. Anger appeals to men because they can be angry and still remain well-defended and not vulnerable.

In many instances, men go to the familiar experience of anger to hide from themselves and others what they are really feeling, and what men are often feeling underneath their anger is fear. For example:

• A man’s anger at his wife for “putting the kids first” may mask the fear of being unable to get as close to his children as his wife is.
• A man’s anger at his wife for often being critical of him may mask his fears that he may never be able to please her and “get it right with her,” feeding into his fears of inadequacy and perhaps even abandonment.

The most helpful response when someone is angry with you is to listen. If you think you are listening but still don’t understand where that person is coming from, try listening harder. Remember that anger is their way of letting you know that they care about the relationship and that they are invested in making things better.

Is anger always healthy, or are there limits? This is where it is important to be able to distinguish between anger and abuse. Abuse is one of the words in our culture that has become so overused as to become almost meaningless. We have become quick to call out anything that makes us uncomfortable or hurts our feelings as "abusive." While it is often uncomfortable when someone is angry at you, that does not make it abusive. Anger is a feeling, and abuse is an acting out of that feeling. Anger is someone’s efforts to let us know they are not happy with how things are going in our relationship and are committed to making things better.

In contrast, abuse is someone’s efforts to let us know that they are not happy with how things are going in your relationship, but rather than being committed to making things better, they are trying to hurt us in turn, to “get even” in the hope that it will make them feel better. While the best response to anger is to listen because anger is the other person’s efforts to make things better, the best response to abuse is to do what you need to protect yourself because when someone is being abusive, they are trying to hurt you.

Excerpted, in part, from Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men's Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships. (Lasting Impact Press)