Anger:

We have a lot of messaging in our society about how bad anger is. How it’s undesirable, and that people with anger issues should feel guilty and ashamed. And about how anger needs to be controlled, suppressed, and never purposefully used. I think this kind of thinking is rooted in our general fear of emotion: our belief that all emotion makes us irrational and vulnerable and puts us at risk of losing the approval of important people. We judge ourselves, and others, harshly by the emotions we express. I also think that most of the time we see anger, in our parents, our partners, on social media or in movies, we see aggression and violence - both of which everyone wants to avoid. But this is only one side of a complicated story. For these reasons, I wanted to write something about the good things anger does.

There is some truth in the ways anger can be a problem, especially when it’s the aggressive or violent kind I mentioned. But it’s important to acknowledge that not all anger is aggressive or irrational or, therefore, unhealthy. And that when anger is unhealthy, it isn’t the anger itself that’s the problem.

Healthy Anger

I believe that anger comes up when we feel disrespected or ignored. Just like sadness tells us to seek out comfort and happiness tells us to savor the moment, anger is trying to tell us something, too. Usually it’s along the lines of ‘use your voice, communicate your needs and demand they get met’. Framed this way, anger doesn’t need to be about aggression or force. In my sessions I coach clients on ways to take advantage of anger by calmly letting it energize and focus them. With anger we can get control of a room of upset people; We can move attention towards what needs to be attended to; We can speak up. In short, anger gives us power that, when used respectfully, can help us achieve things we don’t always feel confident in.

Here are some tips for using anger in healthy ways:

• Be aware! Notice anger in its early stages or the first time it comes up in a situation. We get used to suppressing our anger until there’s nothing left to do but blow up. But if we express our anger when it's low we can do so in a calm and effective way. Think less 6 or 7 on the anger scale, more 2 or 3.

• Practice ways to express anger calmly. Anger doesn’t have to mean yelling or throwing things around. Anger can mean a strong posture, a firm tone of voice, and a straight expression on your face. These are signals that other people will pick up on without feeling startled by them.

• Keep your goals realistic. Remember, healthy anger is about expressing your needs, not controlling other people’s choices. If you notice a colleague doing something unintentionally dangerous, you can alert people to the problem by briefly taking control of the room. If your partner refuses to stop teasing you about the way you eat pasta, you can use a firm tone of voice to communicate that this isn’t something you're comfortable being laughed at for. People may not get the issue right away, but they will lay off, step back, and hopefully come around.

Unhealthy Anger

In my experience anger goes wrong when it’s misused and when it’s disrespected. For example, perhaps I’ve had an upsetting conversation with a family member. Perhaps I’ve had many upsetting conversations with them in a row. But because of my history with this person, or because of my own nervousness, I don’t feel confident in speaking my mind or demanding my boundaries be respected. The anger inspired by those conversations doesn’t just go away, and the more I try to ignore it, the more distracting it becomes. (This is true for most emotions.) So I hang up the phone, feeling overlooked and underappreciated and angry, and I go to lunch with a friend I trust and feel safe with. That safety makes way for genuine emotional expression that I couldn’t use on the phone. Naturally, that anger is going to come out in situations where I don’t feel so nervous, and towards people who don’t deserve it. We therapists call this Overflow. If overflow happens enough it can become seriously problematic, and maybe even dangerous.

That’s one way anger becomes unhealthy. The second is called Secondary Anger. Secondary emotions are thought to be emotions that replace other feelings because they’re more socially acceptable or easier for the person to process and express. The body is a fascinating thing. It seems that when we are faced with an emotion, like shame or guilt, that is strong enough and uncomfortable enough that our mind decides it just can’t handle it, it’ll replace that emotion with anger (or something else). 

Where both these possibilities go wrong isn’t in the anger itself - the anger usually makes sense once we consider our circumstances and notice the ways we’ve been disrespected. It goes wrong because anger is used to avoid disrespect or hurt, not by resolving it. With overflow, the person who is crossing boundaries never learns that they’re doing something hurtful. And with secondary anger, the original emotion never gets attended to. In both these cases anger doesn’t have a reason to leave, it only has reasons to stay and build and build and build. When anger comes upon us in manageable amounts it can be empowering. When it overwhelms us, it uses us.

Anger and Gender

I couldn’t write this post without acknowledging the role gender plays in our understanding of anger. It may have already occurred to you that the ‘unhealthy anger’ examples I used above are more heavily associated with men, then they are with women. This is true, although not always. Women tend to express anger by attacking each other’s reputations or being passive aggressive - these tactics can be just as hurtful, but a lot less noticeable, which makes them all the more dangerous. Differences exist in the way men and women express anger because that’s what we’re socialized to do. Women, like many things, tend to be more heavily policed in the way they express emotions. We are taught not to be angry, be sad instead. But don’t cry where others can see it, that’s awkward. Don’t yell or nag or get aggressive, it’s rude. Don’t interrupt or raise your voice, you’re being irrational. I myself have used the healthy anger tactics outlined above and been reacted to like I was screaming and throwing things. People miss-read female firmness for aggression all the time. So it’s easier to avoid anger altogether. And when anger gets suppressed things like overflow and secondary emotions become a lot more common.

For these reasons, and more, women tend to be taught at a very young age not to be angry because it invites criticism and because anger is frightening to us - we don’t want to make others feel the way we’ve felt when faced with an aggressive man or a passive aggressive woman. But women can be angry and powerful. There are so many great articles about feminist anger which explore these issues more, like these ones written by the Guardian, Psychology today, and Greater Good Magazine.