At their most basic form, emotions are energy. This energy is there to signal something is up and to motivate us to take action. Centuries ago this action most likely would have been to escape a predator or to catch prey so of course, humans had to be quick to react. Now, however, the opposite is usually true. While there are still times we need to react, we more often need to take a step back and give ourselves more time to respond.
How would you define anger? What is it? What is it’s purpose?
Most of the time I use the terms feelings and emotions interchangeably, but technically, there is a difference between a feeling and an emotion. Feelings are the physical or biological sensations you experience in your body. Emotions are the labels and meaning you assign to those feelings and/or thoughts. Lastly, expression is what you do with that emotion and how you make it known outwardly.
With that in mind, anger is a combination of many sensations, feelings, and thoughts*:
Sensations
- Muscles tightening
- Teeth clamping together
- Hands clenching
- Your face gets flushed or hot
- Shaking
- Crying
Thoughts
- You’ve been wronged
- Something is unfair
- Blame
- Something should be different than it is
- An important goal is blocked
Emotions similar to anger include aggravation, agitation, tense, annoyed, bitter, exasperated, frustrated, furious, grouchy, grumpy, hostile, irate, rage, resentful, and indignant.
The purpose of any feeling is to turn into an action potential. Feelings are there to mobilize energy towards life goals. If you’re feeling angry, yes, you should do something about it. However, that something may not be the first action that comes to mind.
Common expressions of anger
- Physically or verbally attacking
- Clenching your hands or fists
- Making aggressive or threatening gestures
- Frowning, grimacing, scowling
- Pounding, throwing things, breaking things
- Brooding or withdrawing from others
- Walking heavily, stomping, slamming doors
- Crying
- Walking out
- Using a loud, quarrelsome, or sarcastic voice
- Yelling obscenities
- Criticizing or complaining
Is it ever appropriate to be angry?
Yes, and even if it wasn’t appropriate that wouldn’t change how you feel. You are better off allowing yourself to be angry when you need to so the emotion can pass through you. It is always ok to be angry, but there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of expressing anger.
What is the difference between experiencing your anger and/or emotions versus projecting them?
Most of us can get behind the difference between feeling and expressing anger. The challenge is in a relationship when partners have different tolerances for anger and different meanings they assign to anger. This leads to the next piece of the puzzle which is the interpretation of an expressed emotion–the meaning the partner assigns to his or her observation based on previous experience.
So to recap, the process of sharing emotions looks something like this:
Partner A: Sensation/feeling → Label emotion → Assign meaning and experience internal response to meaning → Outward expression of emotion or inhibit expression
Partner B: Observe Partner A → Interpret and assign meaning → React or respond
Gender and socialization play a big role in this. Women are generally socialized to be the nurturers, the soothers, and the peacemakers. In families, women often learn to placate, please, and protect. As a result, women are raised to believe they are responsible for other people’s emotions, often at the expense of their own. Women learn to disown their anger in order to tend to somebody else’s and sometimes doing so is necessary for survival.
Men are taught that anger is a part of masculinity and a means to obtain power. When a man is angry it is usually justified, if not patriotic. So men are more likely to openly express anger, and might even overidentify with feeling angry. For men, anger is often a defense against or a secondary emotion stemming from more vulnerable emotions including fear and sadness.
For women, there is more of a taboo against anger. If a woman expresses anger she is “unhinged”, “irrational”, “a bitch”, “crazy”, or “a man-hater”. Women aren’t supposed to be angry, and they are supposed to soothe other people’s anger. Not surprisingly, studies have found that women are more likely to internalize and blame themselves instead of getting angry with someone else. What this leads to is women being the victim of men’s anger and women being primed to fear any signs of a man getting angry. All of this shapes how we identify, express, interpret, and respond to anger in ourselves and our partners.
“What did anger look like in your family?”
When I ask clients this question, many clients tell the story of an angry father verbally (or physically) lashing out against another family. This representation of anger is problematic for a few reasons. For one, it’s where we get a lot of our myths about anger including “If I’m angry I’ll lose control” and “If I’m angry, I’ll turn into my dad”. Aggression is not the same thing as anger. Additionally, when aggression is the perceived definition of anger, individuals have a really hard time identifying anger. When people have only witnessed or been the victim of uncontained anger, they learn to fear their anger. When we fear our emotions, we don’t learn how to properly identify and express them and so the cycle continues.
From this lens, it’s easy to see how relationships become fraught with projections about anger! I tend to view these projections as either one partner attempting to disown anger and projecting it onto the other (“I’m angry but I’m not allowed to be angry so I think you’re angry”) or one partner interpreting the other’s neutral state as angry based on a fear of anger (“I won’t be safe if you’re angry so I need to stay on alert for your anger”).
The result is both partners can get caught in a bind of not being able to effectively share emotions. The “angry” partner is deemed angry by the “anxious”, “happy”, or “laid back” partner at the slightest detection of anger and the “laid back” partner loses sight of how to identify his or her own emotions and instead focuses on identifying the “angry” partner’s. Over time, couples can get polarized into “the thinker” and “the feeler” or “the emotional one” and “the chill one”.
How can I express anger in a healthy way?
To use Dan Siegel’s term, you have to name it to tame it! For women, that most likely means giving yourself permission to feel angry and learning how to identify when you are. For men, that most likely means slowing down to make sure what you feel is really anger and not fear or sadness disguised as anger. If you tend to internalize anger (ex. Blame and criticize yourself), you might need more practice externalizing it. If you tend to externalize anger (ex. Blame and criticize others), you probably need practice internalizing anger.
Again, anger is usually a signal we need to take action. However, in relationships, we almost always need to wait until we are calm again to take action. Timeouts are your friend! Just make sure you schedule a time to come back to the conversation. I’d recommend saying something like “I am extremely angry, and when I calm down we’re going to talk about this” or “We’re both too heated right now. Let’s take a break and try again in 30 minutes”. The obvious exception to waiting is if you are in immediate danger. One other exception is if you are always the super logical, non-emotional partner. If this is you, your relationship might benefit from you showing some emotion!
The last and perhaps most important piece of healthy expression of anger in relationships is attunement. The conversation is not over when you want it to be over, the conversation is over when one or both of you are feeling flooded. If you are both easily flooded, you might need to work on increasing your tolerance for each other’s emotions but first start where you are at. You might think you are just talking but if your partner says you are yelling, you need to take it down a notch (or more). The best way to build attunement to each other during hard conversations is to maintain eye contact. When one person shuts down, resist the temptation to pursue and instead wait until you get the cue to continue.
Healthy expression of anger is certainly easier said than done. If you are struggling with managing your emotions or if you and your partner are struggling with how to share your emotions with each other, please feel free to reach out to see if therapy might be a good fit for you.
*Descriptors of anger taken from DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition by Marsha M. Linehan.
