Anger

“Anger is a powerful catalyst but a life-sucking companion.”

~ Brene Brown

Have you ever wondered whether anger is “good” or “bad”? Have you ever tried to suppress your anger or felt fearful of how it will come out? Have you struggled to figure out adaptive ways to engage with anger? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then read on.

It turns out there are no “good” or “bad” emotions. Our mind tries to simplify life for us by sorting emotions into these two categories. However, by assigning these labels, we miss out on the function of emotions as our messengers. I like to think of emotions like the dashboard indicators of our car, letting us know something is going on with the vehicle that we need to attend to.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), an evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral treatment for PTSD, separates emotions into two categories: natural and manufactured.

Natural emotions are essentially universal and considered a natural response to a given situation. For example, if you lose a loved one, then you likely feel grief. Sadness, fear, disappointment, passion, awe, empathy, and even joy belong in this category. If you’ve ever tried to hold onto joy, then you know that natural emotions don’t last forever. IF we feel them, they arise, peak, and dissipate on their own. I tend to draw a wave on my whiteboard to depict this pattern. This is good news for the more painful emotions. However, there are many things we do to impede this process such as stuffing down or avoiding our emotions. Unfortunately doing so prevents the emotion from processing, thereby prolonging it.

Manufactured emotions follow a different pattern. They actually can stick around indefinitely, because they are perpetuated by our thoughts. Consider shame, guilt, anxiety, jealousy, regret, and resentment.

Anger is interesting because it can be natural or manufactured. As a natural emotion, anger is a response to a boundary violation or an unmet need. Anger is active, and thus functions as a catalyst to restore our boundaries, safety, or to get our needs met. In this way anger is a call to action.

Anger, like all our emotions, can be acted out in maladaptive ways like aggression and violence which can have extremely detrimental consequences. If we grew up in a home where aggression was modeled, understandably we may develop the overgeneralized belief that all anger is “bad.” We may end up fearing our own anger and suppressing it. Unfortunately, this strategy itself can lead to unwanted consequences such as high blood pressure or bottled anger spraying out when we don’t intend it, like a beachball held under water.

On the other hand, as a manufactured emotion, and because of its activating quality, anger can feel preferable to emotions like sadness, grief, guilt, or shame. It can thus be maintained as a cover over more vulnerable emotions such as hurt, or act as what we call a secondary emotion. Secondary emotions muddy the waters and without reflection, we are likely to be unaware of what we are actually responding to and why.

So, the work is to go within and figure out what it is we are feeling, what elicited the emotion, and how we desire to respond based on what is important to us. Emotional response is similar to facing physical pain. To respond effectively, we need to:

o   Be aware that we are experiencing pain

o   Identify what kind of pain

o   Discern what is causing the pain

o   Be ready to take action

If a boundary has been violated, or a need is going unmet, consider confronting the person (if safe to do so). Let them know how their actions affected you and what you expect or need in the future.

For example, if a colleague talks over you in a meeting, consider bringing their awareness to it and how it affected you. The timing on this is not that important. You can let them know in the moment (e.g., “I’d like to finish my though”), or later on (“Hey, I’m not sure if you were aware but that didn’t feel good when you talked over me in the meeting”). Let them know what you need in the future instead (“In the future, I’d like the space to complete my thought.”). Dialectical Behavior Therapy offers excellent skills for interpersonal communication and tricky conversations like these. Here is one of my favorite skills: https://dbt.tools/interpersonal_effectiveness/dear-man.php.

As another example, if you are feeling ignored in your romantic relationship, consider sharing these feelings with your partner. Let them know you’d like more attention and see if they’d be willing to schedule time for this.

If, on the other hand, you determine your anger is manufactured and not serving you (perhaps you are feeling frustrated that your team lost the championship, or your quarterback was traded away, or you’re still steaming about the person that cut you off on the freeway two hours ago), consider expressing it and letting it go. I have spent a lot of time brainstorming with patients about when, where, and how to express anger adaptively. We can act the anger out in healthy ways like yelling into a pillow, getting a few hits on the heavy bag, singing/shouting lyrics loudly in the car, or slamming a Dammit Doll into the counter a few times: https://www.dammitdolls.com/. Other clever patients have come up with smashing eggs in the bathtub or going for a rage walk. After stomping down the sidewalk a few paces, you may find yourself laughing out loud. These actions allow us to discharge the energy of anger in ways that are safe and do not threaten the wellbeing of others.

An alternative way of acknowledging our emotions is to bring mindful attention to them. Tara Brach has an excellent process called RAIN which guides us to recognize our emotion, allow it (rather than judge or attempt to change it), investigate the cause of it, and nurture it. Sometimes the simple act of validating ourselves (“it makes sense I feel this way”) is enough to allow us to move on. https://www.tarabrach.com/rain/

To summarize, I turn to the words of Brene Brown: “Anger is a catalyst. Holding on to it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice. Or sometimes anger can mask a far more difficult emotion like grief, regret, or shame, and we need to use it to dig into what we’re really feeling. Either way, anger is a powerful catalyst but a life-sucking companion.”

Consider what happens when you make room for anger, just like you make room for joy or contentment (“oh, hello friend, I see you”) and experiment with what happens when you act on your anger in healthy ways.

Be Well, Dr. Alisa Burpee