When I was young, my family did not like to deal with uncomfortable emotions. When a challenging emotion surfaced, I was taught to ignore it and it will eventually go away. Anger was rarely expressed. Grief wasn’t shared. Only “safe” emotions were allowed to bubble up and make their way to the surface of our conversations. All those troubling and more complicated emotions were ignored. This taught me one important lesson: anger is bad, and I should be ashamed when I feel it.
My school reinforced this notion of anger as a negative thing. Only the “angry” kids were sent to the office, and quickly, too. I remember poor “Paul” (name changed), a kid who, from the very first day of first grade was labeled as the problem child. Paul was sent to the office several times a week for his angry outbursts, and, in my day, that meant being paddled by the principal. No one ever stopped to ask why Paul was so angry or take the time to show him how to deal with his anger. My best guess now is that Paul was dealing with some heavy stuff at home, and no one had shown him what to do with his difficult emotions.
Is anger really bad? If we don’t know what to do with it or use it to harm others, it can surely have some negative outcomes. But the emotion itself is quite normal, and historically serves a very important role in our survival.
In her podcast How to Be Angry Better, Dr. Laurie Santos invites Dr. Faith Harper to discuss anger in very relatable and helpful terms. Dr. Harper explains that the definition of anger derives from the Latin root “to out move”. In a sense, anger is a trigger that helps you stay safe. It directs your body to move and create change; anger is a cue for your body to protect itself.
The problem is that we aren’t taught how to manage anger in healthy ways, to use this signal for protection to our benefit and the benefit of others. Because anger is dealt with punitively from a young age, we don’t develop healthy ways of addressing it. Anger is meant to be a brief feeling, a signal to make a change. If we hold on to it and don’t resolve it, it can have some unhealthy physical and mental consequences and can cause problems in our relationships with others.
When I was a school counselor, I had a poster on my office door titled Managing Your Anger: What’s Behind It? In the center of the poster was the word anger. Around that word were other feeling words: anxiety, shame, embarrassment, fear, sadness, hurt, frustration, etc. So when a student who was expressing anger came to my office, I would point to the poster and go through the different feelings behind the anger. What was the trigger? What were you really feeling? Anger rarely stands alone. There’s always a trigger that creates an angry response. The key is to uncover that emotion and deal with what’s behind the angry outburst. Getting to the root of the problem helps calm the anger and manage your reactions to it.
One tip to regulate our anger that Dr. Harper gives in the podcast How to Be Angry Better is the 90-second rule. The goal is to be curious about our anger for 90 seconds, to think before you react: “Oh! Something’s going on here. I’m having a big reaction to this. What’s behind it?” Anger is our body’s signal to pay attention, so if we’re curious about this emotion and question it, that’s all the body wants, and our anger dissipates. Because we’re attending to what’s going on when we stop and question what we’re feeling, the anger doesn’t last as long.
I highly recommend listening to the entire podcast How to Be Angry Better, which can be found on the broader podcast titled The Happiness Lab. It’s available on Spotify and Pushkin.
And the “Managing Your Anger” poster I mentioned can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Emotions-Motivational-18-24/dp/B00448RE8A/ref=sr_1_5?crid=XGGOYPXVN89G&keywords=Managing%2BYour%2BAnger%2BFaces%2BEmotions%2BMotivational%2BPoster%2BArt%2BPrint%2B18%2Bx%2B24%2Binches&qid=1651154470&sprefix=managing%2Byour%2Banger%2Bfaces%2Bemotions%2Bmotivational%2Bposter%2Bart%2Bprint%2B18%2Bx%2B24%2Binches%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-5&th=1
Amanda Sullivan, Maed, lcmhc 