“Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness. It takes strength to acknowledge our anger, and sometimes more strength yet to to curb the aggressive urges anger may bring and to channel them into nonviolent outlets.”
-Fred Rogers
I recently asked a client to tell me about his experience with healthy expressions of anger, and he stared at me blankly. For him, “Healthy” and “Anger” are incompatible words. Growing up in his family, anger meant screaming, contemptuous name calling, and sometimes physical violence, so he learned that it’s a “bad emotion” and stuffed it way down deep inside.
After a beat, the client asked, “Can you give me an example?”
“Ok, sure… if I’m angry with a friend, I might say, ‘hey, that thing you did really upset me and I feel really hurt. Can we talk about this?’ And then I get to explain how I’m feeling and why I’m hurt and angry, and the friend gets to present their perspective, and we have a dialogue and hopefully resolve the issue, or if not then at least we understand each other a bit better.”
The client shook his head, still looking shocked. “I’ve never done that. I’ve never seen anyone do that.”
I was floored. Not knowing how to temper your anger enough to do that is one thing… but never having any exposure to healthy anger? I started talking to people about anger, how they express it and get their needs met without losing control, hurting themselves or others, and causing “secondary pain” – that is, pain caused as a result of reacting to one’s feelings of anger.
One of my favorite responses came from my friend Jaime. She told me that if she receives an email or letter that makes her angry, she makes two copies. On the first copy, she highlights all of the words and phrases that make her feel angry and defensive, and on the second copy, she uses a different color to highlight words that help her to understand. This helps her view the information with a more balanced and fair perspective.
I think this speaks to something that I hadn’t addressed with my client: sometimes you’re not ready to have a calm conversation with a person who causes you pain. You have to take steps to mitigate the intensity of your emotions before you can take that step. And another important point it highlights: the antidote to anger is understanding. If you understand where someone is coming from, it makes it more difficult to be angry with them.
A lot of other people talked about catharsis, some of it quite visceral. Debi makes art and writes poetry. Ana practices mixed martial arts. Lizzi writes battle scenes, sings loudly, breaks stained glass to make collages, and chops vegetables.
My friend Niph talked about how healthy anger is about trust and communication. She talked about needing to feel safe enough to be completely honest, because there is an inherent vulnerability in saying to someone, “you really hurt me and now I’m angry.” Sometimes this might include yelling and tears, but she talked about how when she argues with her partner, “He understands that it is a certain behavior on trial and not his entire self, and that if I am bringing it up it’s because I want to find a solution, not antagonize him about it.”
This is so important. Anger is so frequently used as a mask for sadness and other kinds of pain. A lot of people use anger as a shield, as a way to say, “I feel wronged by you and now I am protecting myself.” Anger is big and bold; hurt and sadness are soft and squishy. Niph’s point about vulnerability is very true – once the goal is to achieve understanding, two people who genuinely care about each other can have a conversation about the underlying pain in order to resolve the issue.
Niph also made the point that she sometimes needs awhile to process feelings of anger before she is able to engage in a conversation about it, and that she may need to tell someone, “I’m not ready to talk about this yet.” This is a great point: People process their emotions and thoughts differently, and it’s important to acknowledge and respect those differences.
Perhaps the best articulation of my own views on the subject came from my friend Laura, who is also a therapist. She told me she believes that healthy anger is “anything that doesn’t hurt you or someone else”. Something I frequently say is that I believe that if you’re not hurting anyone else and you feel good inside, you’re probably doing ok. Laura’s insights about anger were very reflective of that core idea.
Like any other emotion, anger serves a function. It exists to let you know that something needs to be addressed or changed. It’s not a “bad” emotion; it’s a frequently unpleasant but still useful emotion. The goal is not to get rid of anger, but rather to learn to manage it productively.