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Key points
- Anger is often misunderstood because of how it is portrayed in our culture and how we are taught to relate to it growing up.
- Anger is not the problem. It's the dysregulation that comes about when we are not skillful with our anger that's an issue.
- Three ideas can help us learn to manage anger more effectively.
Poor anger. It gets a bad rep. Of all the emotions humans experience, anger (and maybe jealousy) are probably the most discouraged and misunderstood. Here's the thing: Our emotions show up whether or not society deems them appropriate—and if we don't witness and learn healthy management of these more intense feelings, we're signing up for a lot of unnecessary frustration.
Where does our collective discomfort with anger stem from? Pause and think about it for a moment. The don’t-touch-it-with-a-10-foot-pole association with anger is all around us culturally. Recall a scene from a movie, show, or book in which there was a display of Big Anger. Chances are the scene that comes to mind was volatile, loud, maybe even violent. Now think back to a time when you or someone you were with experienced Big Anger in real life. It likely left you feeling pretty bad.
Not only are we not being modeled healthy responsiveness to an adaptive feeling, but we are also being modeled maladaptive coping such as reactivity, dysregulation, and rage in relation to this common, informative, and oftentimes helpful feeling.
The issue here is that anger is often portrayed and understood as an unmitigated and unbridled reaction that leaves a destructive trail in its wake. What we aren’t being shown are individuals meeting themselves or another in their experience of Big Anger with grace, compassion, regulation, openness, and intention. In other words, we aren't seeing people effectively responding to and coping with their anger. What we often see portrayed in movies is a lot more than anger: It’s a dysregulated, maybe even dissociated, reaction to the feeling of anger.
Can you think of a scene from a show in which you saw someone deal with their Big Anger in a skillful and productive way? Me neither. And guess what? We are not alone. I recently polled my Instagram audience to see who has learned to manage anger in a productive way and a whopping 67% said they, in fact, had not. Not only that, but 85% said they were told anger was "bad" growing up.
Our misunderstanding of anger goes beyond TV shows and books—it’s how many people were raised to feel about this emotion. Many of us were told implicitly or explicitly that displaying anger was not OK. We were either rewarded for not showing it or punished for showing it, thus learning to bury it. Add to that the confusion in witnessing reactive anger from caregivers when you were told this feeling was bad, and you have a recipe for either your own anger repression or volatility around this feeling.
How are we supposed to learn to embrace this feeling, work with it, honor and respect it, if it’s taboo and what we are shown furthers its bad reputation? See, when we see dysregulated anger, it’s not the anger that’s the problem; it’s the reactivity, the behaviors, and the unskillful choices that are.
How are we supposed to know how to work with our anger if we haven’t been modeled it? How many of you grew up in homes where you witnessed the adults around you having hard and angry conversations in skillful ways? My hunch says not many. (As a side note: If you want to give your kids a great gift, model for them healthy conflict resolution and being with anger.)
Anger is a basic human emotion. It is shared across not just humans, but all animals. It stems from our amygdala, the emotion center of our brain, and it serves a primitive and adaptive function not just in our day-to-day, but also in our survival as a species.
Our anger can be informative. It lets us know that something isn’t right around us. That we need to deal with something (or someone). That a boundary has been crossed. Something meaningful has happened. You’ve experienced a loss. Wherever it's coming from, our anger deserves attention.
When we suppress it, this experience of anger can lead to feelings of depression. When we don’t have the tools to regulate it and process it, it can lead to rage, violence, and aggression.
So, how do we pay attention to our anger, honor it, and manage it effectively?
1. Build self-awareness. Ask yourself how strong your emotion is on a scale of 1-10. Teach yourself that if your anger (or any big emotion, for that matter) surpasses a certain number, you put a plan of action into place. You could take a break, or move your body. Take deep breaths as you put your hands over your chest. Feel the anger as it moves through your body. Bring your awareness to the physical sensation of your anger (after all, it’s a very physical sensation). In short, train yourself to take certain actions to re-regulate your nervous system if you surpass that number. Learn to catch that number earlier and earlier. Write out this action plan "cheat sheet" and put it somewhere you will see it.
2. Learn to communicate your anger in an effective way. Contrary to what you may have been raised with, there is nothing wrong with saying “I am feeling angry” to your partner, and yet, many of us are highly triggered by these words. We haven’t learned how to say them (or receive them) in a calm and open way. Here’s the thing many of us don’t realize: You can be both grounded and angry at the same time. It’s not one or the other. You don’t have to withdraw just because you are angry. If communicating this way is new for your relationship, have a conversation in advance about anger and how it has been dealt with in the past, and the changes you would like to see. Bring curiosity to the table as you understand and talk about how anger was treated in your upbringing, as well as your partner's upbringing. Ask permission and set the norm in your relationship to be able to talk about anger directly, using “I statements" and speaking from your experience. Request in advance that whomever you are talking to receive these potentially hard feelings in an open and non-defensive way.
3. Remind yourself that your “OK-ness” doesn’t stem from any outside source. You can be angry—and still be OK (i.e., know that this feeling will pass, that it doesn’t define you, that you are not alone with it, and that it is a part of life). If we only know that we are OK if everything inside of us and around us is in order, we are setting ourselves up for a load of suffering. Because there is so much we can’t control. Situations will arise that make you angry. People will disappoint you. Learning and reminding yourself that you can be OK and angry can be quite liberating. Try saying, "My OK-ness is independent of anything else. I am OK even in this experience of anger."
So, to sum up, remind yourself that it’s OK to be angry. Move away from judging yourself for the anger. If you catch yourself going to a place of judgment when you find yourself angry, you may want to ask who used to judge you (or themselves) for getting angry when you were a child. This answer will likely provide insight into where your trouble with this intense emotion stems from.
Next time you feel angry, notice it, see what your body feels like in this state, and welcome it in as the old (and oftentimes helpful) friend that it is.
