Redefining Our Relationship with Anger

Article #9 - Redefining Our Relationship with Anger

Access the podcast format of this article on my Spotify channel here.

January 28, 2025

“Anger is a productive tool for change when it challenges us to

become more of an expert on the self and

less of an expert on others.”

Harriet Lerner, PhD

I find this quote to be critically important when discussing anger, because this is often an emotion that leads to deflection or externalization, when it can be a very powerful teacher when we approach it as a guide that can help us learn more about ourselves.  We won't be able to have a healthy relationship with anger until we approach it with curiosity and accountability.

What is Anger?

Understanding emotions makes understanding anger a little easier.  My favorite way to describe emotions is to compare them to lights on a car’s dashboard.  Some lights come on when you need more gas in the tank.  Some come on when the engine needs attention.  Some come on when the tires need more air.

Emotions do the same thing for us.  They cue us in to what we might be needing or what is really good for us.  Exhaustion or overwhelm, for example, let us know that we need rest and a lack of stimulation.  Awe or joy tell us that what we’re doing is really nurturing.

Anger can tell us a few different things.  It can tell us that a boundary has been crossed - one that we may or may not have previously been aware of - and that we need to set one or reinforce it.  It can also point us to wounds or sensitivities we have.

Personal Sensitivities and Anger

When I use the term sensitivity, think of it as a bruise.  Someone can poke us up and down our arm and it doesn’t bother us until they poke a bruise.  Then we have a pain response, jerk our arm away, and shield the vulnerable spot.  This is what a sensitivity is.

In my own experience and my practice with clients, I have found that exploring anger responses with the question “What sensitivity does this illuminate?” is very helpful and promotes accountability rather than deflection.

This can change a conversation...

From: “You were a jerk for saying that.”

To: “When you made a comment about ___, I know it wasn’t your intention, but it was really hurtful to me.  I have a sensitivity around ___, so comments like that cut really deep.  In the future, can you not make comments about that?”

I have found that sensitivities are typically based on what was most valued or esteemed, what added to your worth, or what was highly or poorly evaluated in others by your family of origin.  For example, if getting good grades was significantly praised and poor grades were severely punished, you might have formed a sensitivity around your intelligence.  In this situation, you internalized the message “My worth comes from being smart and being a high achiever.”

In my experience - both personally and with clients - sensitivities are most commonly related to physical appearance, intelligence, finances, and competence.

Asking yourself “What do I often get defensive about?” Is a great guiding question to learn more about this.

Why Is Our Relationship With Anger So Complicated?

Many people have negative or fear-based associations with anger, because they might have only seen it expressed through verbal abuse, physical violence, or a withdrawal of connection.  Many people fear their own anger because when they notice it within themselves, they immediately identify it with unhealthy expressions they have seen in others.

It’s helpful to ask how anger was modeled and responded to in your family of origin.  Here are some guiding questions:

• Was anger allowed?

• Was anger punished?

• Were you distracted by your caregivers when you were angry instead of being taught what to do with your anger?

• Was it scary when anger showed up in others?

• Did others’ anger cause you to feel unsafe or disconnected?

• Did your anger cause you to lose connection with others?

• Did you find yourself getting into a pattern of reflexively stepping in to soothe another person’s anger?

• Did you ever see anger being used productively to solve a problem?

• Were you taught about what to do with your anger?

• Were you taught about the purpose of the emotion of anger?

• Did you ever watch an adult regulate through their anger in a healthy way?

• Did you internalize the message that anger was bad or made you undesirable?

• Did you internalize the message that anger is only acceptable in one gender?  Or that gender expressions of anger must be different (e.g. repression for female anger and loud, violent expression for male anger)?

It’s common for well-meaning parents to tell kids that they need to sit in time out or go “cool down” when they are angry.  But this unintentionally teaches kids that their anger is not acceptable and that they must repress this emotion if they want to maintain connection (and avoid the disconnection of time out). This is especially damaging as a parenting practice, because that is the moment when a child needs their caregiver the most - teaching them how to feel their anger and regulate through it in a safe and healthy way.

Co-regulation is the parent's main job, especially in the first 15 years of their child's life. Children do not come programmed already knowing how to regulate their anger (or any other emotion) in a healthy way, so when they are put in time out, they are forced to figure it out on their own with an underdeveloped brain. This typically leads to issues with repression ("If I push down my anger and put on a smile, I can get out of time out and connect with mom") or outbursts ("You're not meeting my needs, so I am going to make them bigger and louder until you finally acknowledge them").

In his book The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté writes the following excerpt on the price paid when our authentic expression is not allowed in our family of origin:

“The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel?

“What happens, in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict, or profound unhappiness - the stresses imposed by society, on children as well as adults.

“Even without these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient.

“Children often receive the message that certain parts of them are acceptable while others are not—a dichotomy that, if internalized, leads ineluctably to a split in one's sense of self.

“The statement "Good children don't yell," spoken with annoyance, carries an unintended but most effective threat: "Angry children don't get loved." Being "nice" (read: burying one's anger) and working to be acceptable to the parent may become a child's way of survival. Or a child may internalize the idea that "I'm lovable only when I'm doing things well," setting herself up for a life of perfectionism and rigid role identification, cut off from the vulnerable part of herself that needs to know there is room to fail— or even to just be unspectacularly ordinary- and still get the love she needs.

"Although both needs are essential, there is a pecking order: in the first phase of life, attachment unfailingly tops the bill. So when the two come into conflict in a child’s life, the outcome is well-nigh predetermined.

“If the choice is between “hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need” and “being myself and going without,” I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival; by relinquishing who we are and how we feel.

“The fact that we don't consciously choose such coping mechanisms makes them all the more tenacious. We cannot will them away when they no longer serve us precisely because we have no memory of them not being there, no notion of ourselves without them. Like wallpaper, they blend into the background; they are our "new normal," our literal second nature, as distinct from our original or authentic nature.

“As these patterns get wired into our nervous system, the perceived need to be what the world demands becomes entangled with our sense of who we are and how to seek love. Inauthenticity is thereafter misidentified with survival because the two were synonymous during the formative years - or, at least, seemed so to our young selves.”

In my practice, I have noticed that most people camp out on one of two sides of the pendulum of anger:

1. Becoming a serial represser whose calling card is “I’m fine”/“It’s okay” or passive aggressive comments used in place of clear self-definition statements

2. Becoming someone who feels that their anger is out of control, which often looks like angry outbursts, often involving physical or emotional abuse followed by intense shame which causes the cycle to repeat

Both of these are a manifestation of an unhealthy relationship with anger, and both lead to negative mental and physical health outcomes.  And, I think we can all attest that these patterns also cause relational damage.  When we repress our true feelings, we prevent another person from having the opportunity to know us on a deeper level.  And when we have angry outbursts, the words said and actions committed can’t be taken back and can cause long-lasting damage.

How do I Develop a Healthy Relationship with My Anger?

Accountability is paramount in developing a healthy relationship with our anger.  A cognitive reframe I use often with my clients (and myself) is that no one can make you angry.  This is common when people are talking about their experiences of anger: “She made me so angry when she ___.”   

The problem with framing our emotions like this is that we are unintentionally giving away our power over our emotions.  What I encourage my clients to say instead is “When ____ happened, I noticed I had an anger response.”  This helps us to remember that our emotions are our responsibility, which is a cornerstone piece of behaving with emotional maturity.  Posing the observation that way also opens up the door for nonjudgmental curiosity, which is a key component in moving through anger in a healthy way.

Once we have taken accountability for our anger as our responsibility and no one else’s, our next step is to go through the stages of emotion regulation.  You can find the full article on that here.  In short, this looks like:

1. Noticing where the anger is showing up in your body

2. Naming the emotion(s) you’re feeling

3. Practicing acceptance for the emotions that are present without trying to repress, avoid, or distract

4. If the emotion is still strong, use a coping skill or two to decrease the intensity of the emotion

Part of why emotion regulation needs to be our first step when we are angry is because anger has biological coding in our nervous system that causes us to go into a survival response.  When we are in this (often called the “fight or flight” response), because our body is in survival mode, our nervous system temporarily shuts off access to our prefrontal cortex.  This is important to know, because when we are angry and need the ability to reason and clearly articulate ourselves, the brain structure that is responsible for that is offline.  Thus, regulating our nervous system is paramount before proceeding with our anger.

Once we have regulated our emotion(s) and used some coping skills to regulate our nervous system, then it’s time to get curious.  This is where inquiring internally about our sensitivities comes in, asking “What am I feeling defensive about here?” and “What sensitivities does that illuminate?”

When we are in this exploratory phase with our anger, a quote that often helps me gain clarity is “Anger is sad’s bodyguard.”  Anger is seen by many mental health professionals as a secondary emotion, which means it is always accompanied by a more vulnerable primary emotion.  A classic example of this is a parent getting upset with their child for running out in the street.  The vulnerable emotion hiding under anger in this context is fear that their child will get hurt.  Asking ourselves what vulnerable emotion(s) are hiding behind our anger can be helpful here too.  I don’t think I’ve ever done this exercise and not found a vulnerable emotion hiding behind my anger.  These emotions are often things like rejection, fear, sadness, and grief.

Once we have engaged with curiosity, we might find that we had an emotional response of anger because we have a sensitivity that we need to work on healing in our own personal growth work.  This is often the case when we have a pattern with taking things personally regarding a certain subject.

In other instances, when we have taken accountability for our anger, regulated through it, and taken some time to think critically about the issue, we might find that the other party engaged in a behavior that was not acceptable, and we need to address that.  When that is the case, our next step is to determine what boundary we need to set and how we will communicate that.  For more insight on boundary-setting, read Boundaries 101 or Boundaries as Levels of Access.  Another skill that is helpful when setting a boundary is the DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) DEAR MAN skill.  This stands for:

Describe - Objectively describe the situation you’re uncomfortable with.

• Non-example: “Your driving is crazy and out of control!”

• Example: “I noticed that the speedometer is showing we are going 15mph over the posted speed limit.”

Express - Briefly state your emotional response to this.

• Non-example: “You’re making me feel very angry.”

• Example: “I feel unsafe when I am in a speeding car.”

Assert - Clearly name what your need or boundary is.

• Non-example: “You need to start driving safely.”

• Example: “I need to be in a vehicle that is driving at the posted speed limit to feel safe.  If the speedometer doesn’t indicate that we are going the speed limit, I will need you to let me out at the next rest stop.”

Reinforce - State how this behavior change will help the relationship.

• Non-example: using shaming language to attempt the person to change their behavior

• Example: “If you start driving at the posted speed limit, it would make me feel more comfortable and safe which would allow me to better connect with you.  I really enjoy being able to connect on our car rides together.”

Mindful - Stay on topic and be mindful about the language you’re using.

• Non-example: “This reminds me of all the other times you’ve driven out of control!  Remember that time…”

• Example: staying on this one specific topic

Appear - Be aware of your non-verbal and verbal cues.  Appear confident in your posture and tone of voice.

• Non-example: avoiding eye contact, slumped shoulders, and speaking in a quiet voice

• Example: shoulders back, making eye contact, and communicating with confidence

Negotiate - Be open to compromising (as long as it’s not a safety risk).

• Non-example: “You have to go the speed limit!  It’s my way or the highway on this one.”

• Example: “I’m comfortable if you’re going 5 miles over the speed limit, but anything more than that I’m not comfortable with.”

As we work on redefining our relationship with anger, it’s important to approach the process with compassion and understanding for ourselves.  Many of us can get stuck in a shame spiral when we start to take stock of our unhealthy relationship with anger.  If this happens, I encourage you to engage your compassion and curiosity.  I’ll end with a Carl Jung quote that has helped me in this way:

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just an I am, then I can change.”

Where Can I Find More Resources on Healthy Anger?

Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Anger is a great resource for excavating unhelpful beliefs about anger we might be carrying and replacing them with learning how to advocate for ourselves in a direct and clear way that promotes healthy relationships. Gabor Maté's book The Myth of Normal is another great option, particularly for those who struggle with repressing their authenticity.