From Anger to Awareness: How Understanding Your Emotions Creates Growth
The Stereotypes of Negative Emotions
Emotions are often spoken of in black-and-white terms. Happiness is good, sadness is bad, and jealousy is really bad. But amongst the common emotions witnessed and discussed, anger is often viewed as the worst. People who experience frequent and intense bouts of anger are characterized as uncontrollable, bitter, and to be feared. Objectively, there can be truth within these narratives. Emotions motivate behavior, and the most common behaviors associated with anger are yelling and engaging in conflict (both verbal and physical). At its most extreme, anger can result in attacking and harming others, objects, or the self. It is easy to demonize anger when it can cause so much harm.
Understanding the Function of Anger
When clients come to therapy and bring up their anger, I often find myself wondering how it functions for them. Before the angry behaviors, what is showing up for them emotionally, physically, or spiritually?
In therapy, anger is popularly referred to as a “secondary emotion”, meaning that there is often a primary emotion that shows up before anger does. Typically, the primary emotion is something painful: an old wound that has been reopened, a sense of judgment or rejection, fear of abandonment, etc. Pain is, of course, painful and uncomfortable. As a result, we devise methods to avoid it. Anger can be one of those methods. It acts as a sort of defense mechanism; when you are angry, you are preemptively going on the attack in order to protect yourself from others, or from whatever you perceive as a threat in that moment.
Then again, sometimes anger is more a response to the actions and impacts of other people. There are very real, objective experiences where we are openly invalidated, judged, our boundaries are crossed, we are made to feel unsafe, or legitimately put in danger. Still, in these experiences, we undergo a primary emotion. It could be sadness, shame, fear, etc. And again, anger steps in as a protective measure.
The “secondary emotion” theory is not a catch-all explanation for every experience of anger, but it can be a helpful way of understanding the complex experience of anger. When we understand why an emotion is showing up, we can create the foundations for real healing, based in self-compassion and valued decision making.
Using Anger for Growth
Understanding our anger does not mean we excuse the impact that it has on other people, on our relationships, and on ourselves. A healthy therapeutic relationship can help you untangle your experiences of anger and explore what this emotion is attempting to communicate about your history, your relationships, your identity, and your values. Is your anger a response to traumatic relationships throughout your life? Is your anger grounded in a fear of others abandoning you? Perhaps your anger is a result of your values and boundaries being repeatedly violated by others? From the lens of curious inquiry, we learn what anger costs, but also how we can grow from it.
Steps Forward
The next time anger grabs hold of you, try implementing these steps for greater self-awareness and learning:
Step 1: Remove yourself from the trigger and ground yourself.
Mindful learning cannot happen until we are regulated. To the best of your ability, remove yourself from the situation that is invoking your anger before it turns to harmful words and actions. Once removed, take steps to reinforce your own safety. This can mean taking deep breaths, journaling your thoughts and feelings, or even taking a short walk or run around the block. Allow the emotion to settle safely and gently.
Step 2: Revisit the circumstances of the situation with curiosity and compassion.
Take a moment to investigate your experiences. What do you think your primary emotion was before anger stepped in? Work to understand your reaction from a basis of compassion for yourself and get curious around whether any part of this experience is a part of a pattern. If available, bring this to a therapeutic space to further explore.
Step 3: Identify your boundaries, values, and action paths forward.
Use your experience to learn. Perhaps your anger has demonstrated a strong boundary you need to set with others, or has clarified past wounds that require more care and attention moving forward. The various lessons you can take from these experiences are countless, and therapy can help you learn from your emotions with accountability and compassion.
Moving On
Emotions are not cartoon characters; there are no villains or heroes. They are amalgamations of your lived experience, and they are both deeply meaningful and intensely complex and confusing. Every emotion exists to communicate something important, and if we learn to listen openly and with curiosity, we can discover a world where we can collaborate with our emotional experiences and use them in our journey towards greater personal development.