Verified by 
Anger is not an emotion I thought I was very familiar with growing up. Anger was for the men in my family. I tended more toward anxiety and sadness. You were more likely to find the teenage version of me sitting in my room, playing Counting Crows' ballads on repeat, and crying or biting my nails to the quick before final exams than to see me punching a wall or screaming.
Fast-forward a decade or two, and those quieter feelings began to give way to anger. Loud, obnoxious irritability, 10-on-a-10-point-scale anger.
I started to look for resources on coping with or managing my anger. It was an unsightly beast to be tamed. Most of what I found were books and multiple-step programs for “anger management,” written for those angry men who punch people and yell at McDonald’s cashiers. The ones I did not identify with, the ones I wanted so badly not to be like.
As an adult who spends a lot of my days doing therapy with other people, I eventually decided I should probably try it myself. (Revelation!) After a few misses, I found a therapist I really liked and who gave me a whole new lens on anger. He allowed me to look at what hid beneath the rage, and he completely changed the way I see anger, emotions in general, and myself.
I’ll never forget the first time I tearfully recounted to him the latest episode in my increasingly unmanageable home life when I had (once again) lost it with my then-3-year-old daughter. She was screaming, and I couldn’t handle it, so I screamed at her and ran out of the room like a total failure. I had been vacillating all week between googling better behavior management techniques for her and better emotion management skills for myself.
As I told him the story, I felt a searing, burgeoning shame I didn’t even know was possible. Here I was, a mental health professional, sharing with a relative stranger one of my darkest (and longest-held) secrets: I was bad. Bad mom, bad person, out of control, vicious, and uncompassionate. I had always known it, but here it was seeping out onto my child, my precious child, right in front of everyone to see.
Despite what I held to be incontrovertible evidence of my badness, he tilted his head and, with a soft gaze, asked simply, “Could you love yourself even when you’re irritable?”
This was obviously ridiculous. He was just being a therapist, I thought. Blowing sunshine. No! I can’t just accept that I’m irritable! The whole point of therapy is for me to find out how to be happier!
But in the weeks and months that followed, I started to connect other feelings, circumstances, and experiences to what he’d said about my anger. I saw that I contained all of these things, yes, and I also contained lots of other parts, like kindness, and willingness, and curiosity, and generosity, and… sadness, and nervousness, and needs and wants, and all the stuff of peoplehood. I have all of it. And yet none of it is me.
We experience a lot of emotions from day to day, and one of them is anger. Like all emotions, if we allow anger to move through us without beating the crap out of ourselves for feeling it, it will eventually pass through.
When we feel something we deem “negative,” it’s often the thought about the feeling that causes it to stick around. It’s that critical voice in our heads saying, “You should not feel this,” that ignites our rebellious, fiery need to control, squash, or act out our emotions rather than feeling them.
We also have a few voices rattling around up there from what others have told us, too: “Anger is for men. Anger is for angry people. That’s not very ladylike. Depression is more your style. Being anxious is OK. Anger is not. Anger is a problem. You go back to being sad right now, young lady!”
If a real person said things like this to you, what would you want to do? Probably punch them in the face. (That could just be me being angry).
So now you’ve taken a quite naturally occurring emotion—one that organically arises out of feeling threatened somehow, feeling not-good-enough, feeling out of control because of some outside circumstance—and you’ve piled on another, more internal layer... Anger at the anger.
This is a recipe for disaster.
Now rewind and replay that tape, but this time think about what you would do if you were angry, and some calm, nurturing presence (a grandmother? a favorite teacher? a mom or dad?) said instead, “It’s OK to feel angry. It’s totally understandable, given X, Y, and Z. Look at all that you’re dealing with right now. I’d feel angry too!”
Now that’s a recipe I’d like to try.
Last night, my daughter (who is now 4) was performing her newest rendition of “I don’t want to go to bed, so I will now try everything possible to defy and enrage you, which will lead to increased time and attention for me, regardless of the quality.” As I read each new page in the Shimmer and Shine book, she kept egging me on, and I could feel my anger building.
I snapped. Just kidding.
This time, instead of letting the rage pile on and berating myself for feeling it, I said in my brain, “Little stinker. She is trying to make me mad. No wonder I’m feeling irritable, too, because I’m hungry and tired and just want to cuddle up and have a nice bedtime for once. This is completely understandable, and I bet anyone else would feel the same.”
I redirected her attention to some detail on the page I knew she might be interested in, and I let the feeling sit ("I see you!"), and pulse, and finally pass. She tried a few more times, and each time, my brain felt a little less effortful in internally laughing it off.
After she was finally asleep, I went back to my room and thought, “Well, that actually went pretty well. Hmm.” I read my own book, fell asleep, and woke up without quite the same intensity of shame, self-blame, and promises to myself to do better next time that I'm usually blessed with upon opening my eyes. I felt my anger, instead of “managing” it away, and it moved on.
Today I got angry about something else. But I’m not an angry person. I’m happy to say that on most days—when sleep is adequate, and I remember to eat and be nice to myself—I can love myself, even when I’m irritable.
