How to address your anger
Are you worried about your anger? Do you feel angry more than you’d like to? Does your anger come out in explosive or destructive ways?
If you want to change that, read on to find out more about anger and how I help clients with it.
What is anger?
Anger is a normal, human emotion. All of us experience it, though some are more in touch with it than others. Anger can feel really unpleasant and, for some people, scary.
Emotion vs behaviour
When people come to therapy with problematic anger, the problematic part is usually not so much the emotion itself but how they express it. That might look like violence, verbal aggression, self-destructive behaviour or passive aggression, for example.
That’s a really important distinction to make - the difference between feeling angry (the emotion part) and expressing it in a problematic way (the behaviour part).
One of the first things I talk about with clients who come to me to work on their anger is this distinction. I want them to understand that the expectation is not that they should stop feeling anger. I will help them to feel less angry, but they should still expect to feel angry sometimes because life will throw things at them that will anger them. What they can expect is to understand their anger better and to learn new ways to manage it.
In therapy, I work with clients on both the emotional aspect of anger and the behavioural aspect. In this blog, I’ll look first at the emotional side (ie how I help clients feel less angry) and then the behavioural side (ie how I help them manage their expression of anger).
Why do some people feel a lot of anger?
People feel anger when something comes between them and getting their wants or needs met. For example:
you might feel angry if you want security in your job but somebody else takes credit for your work
you might feel angry if you long to provide a safe home for your family but your landlord won’t treat the damp in your flat
you might feel angry if you really want to settle down and have a family but potential partners reject you.
We can also feel angry on behalf of others, for example if we see injustices in society.
Some people seem to feel anger more than others. It isn’t healthy to never feel angry (that suggests you’re cut off from your angry feelings), but if you’re angry a lot of the time it might be for one or more of these reasons:
your life may involve lots of obstructions to your needs being met
you may have cognitive distortions that lead you to perceive situations as angering
you may use anger as a way to avoid the more vulnerable feelings that often lie beneath anger.
In therapy, I address each of these possibilities. I’ll take each one in turn here.
What if there’s a lot to feel angry about in my life?
For some people, feeling a lot of anger is just a natural, healthy response to having a lot of difficulties in their life. If you are one of those people, therapy will provide you with a safe space to express that anger, where you needn’t worry about how it will be received. I won’t be shocked or overwhelmed by your anger, nor will I minimise it or pressure you to be more positive. I will empathise with your anger, understand it and help you to make sense of it.
By talking about the things that make you angry, and about how it feels for you, the emotions will gradually get processed. This means not that the feeling goes away completely, but that it feels less intense and you feel better able to cope with it.
We might also think together about ways to change your situation so that more of your needs are met. Anger can be a great source of energy for making changes in your life, but there’s no pressure to do that unless it’s what you want.
Is my anger justified or am I distorting things?
We all have beliefs about how the world operates, how life should be, how others should treat us, etc, and sometimes those beliefs are distorted. We build this belief system in childhood, often based on our parents’ beliefs as well as our own experiences.
Sometimes anger arises as a result of these beliefs. It’s probably easiest to illustrate this with an example.
When Sam was growing up, her parents would often find fault with public services, organisations, the amount of traffic on the roads, etc. They would find people to blame for every imperfect situation. She inherited from them the belief that everything should run like clockwork, and if it didn’t then it was because someone was being lazy or stupid or uncaring.
As an adult, any time Sam found herself in an inconvenient situation like a traffic jam, she would think things like
It shouldn’t be like this.
This is happening because someone is being stupid/lazy/uncaring.
I need to change this.
Those beliefs would make her feel very angry. And because inconveniences happen all the time, Sam spent a lot of her time feeling very angry.
If, like Sam, you have a distorted belief that is triggered multiple times a day, you will likely feel angry a lot of the time. But even if you don’t feel angry as often as Sam does, it’s worth exploring the beliefs that contribute to your anger.
Together we can identify any distortions and find alternative, more realistic ways of looking at the world. In Sam’s case, this might involve her regularly reminding herself that it’s unrealistic to expect things to run perfectly and unfair to assume that shortcomings are intentional.
Am I angry because it’s easier than feeling other emotions?
Anger can arise as a secondary emotion. What I mean by this is that it covers up another feeling, such as hurt or fear. These primary emotions are hard for some people to tolerate. They might be seen as weak or unmanly, for example. So when they arise, some people push them down and feel angry instead. It’s not a conscious process, but that doesn’t mean you can’t change it.
Being uncomfortable with feelings of vulnerability (such as hurt, fear, powerlessness or loneliness) is one of the most common sources of problematic anger. These feelings are healthy, but often boys in particular are told they shouldn’t feel them. If you are told Big boys don’t cry when you’re growing up, you quickly learn to push down these vulnerable feelings and express your distress as anger instead.
In therapy, I help clients to:
understand if that’s what they’re doing
get in touch with the vulnerable emotions
challenge the belief that it’s weak to feel the vulnerable emotions
become comfortable with expressing the vulnerable emotions, so they don’t need to resort to angry outbursts.
What if I don’t want to give up being angry?
It’s really common for angry people to be reluctant to work on their anger. They may be scared it will leave them defenceless, or anger may be an important part of their identity. Certainly, I often hear “I’ve always had a temper since I was a kid,” or “I was known as the feisty one at school.”
It can be terrifying to contemplate giving up something that’s been a bit part of how people have seen you for years. If you’re not the angry one, who will you be? Will you be dull? A nobody? Feeble? These fears are really big and totally understandable, but they don’t reflect what actually happens when people work on their anger.
We don’t completely cut out the angry part of you; we just adapt the problematic parts of it. So we identify which relationships are negatively affected by your anger, which expressions of anger are destructive, what distorted beliefs are creating unfounded anger, and so on. We think about the cost to you of holding onto those problematic parts, and the benefits you’d get from changing them. You get to decide what to change and how.
Maybe you decide to work on how you behave towards your partner when you’re angry with them, or on strategies to keep your temper in check at work, but you still get to be angry about politics and to be feisty, passionate, loud, principled or whatever else is bound up with the angry part of your identity.
How does anger impact my relationships?
Part of the work we’ll do together is around appreciating the impact your angry behaviour has on others. You might not realise how threatening, intimidating or frightening it is to others. You may not recognise how damaging it is to your relationships.
It’s easy to think “I’ve just got a bit of a temper, but I’d never hurt anyone,” when you’re the angry one. For the person on the receiving end, they can never feel sure that this isn’t going to be the time when your verbal aggression turns physical, or when your punching the wall turns into punching them.
Whether or not your anger is expressed physically, it is still likely to have a significant impact on your relationships. People will probably be fearful of triggering your anger, so might feel intimidated around you. They might not tell you about things between you that are upsetting them, for fear of how you’ll respond. Issues between you are likely to build up rather than get resolved. Ultimately, people might choose to end their relationships with you because it’s too scary to raise issues with you.
If your anger reaches problematic levels with your partner, you may be interested in how I work with domestic abuse.
Is controlling anger just a question of discipline?
We’re coming to the behavioural aspects of anger work now. Some people think controlling your anger is just a case of biting your tongue or walking away - in other words, discipline. It’s not as simple as that. If you just bite your tongue and don’t express your anger, it will build up inside you and is more likely to come out in an explosive way. In fact, bottling up one’s feelings is a common cause of problematic anger. There need to be other ways of expressing your anger rather than bottling it up, which I’ll come on to shortly.
Returning to the matter of discipline, although it’s not the solution on its own, discipline is an important tool in managing anger. Problematic angry behaviour is sometimes presented as out of the person’s control: the person “saw red” and then there was nothing they could do to stop themselves.
If you tell yourself this about your problematic angry behaviour, then I’m afraid you are deceiving yourself. I’m sure there are situations in which, even if you were really angry, you would keep your behaviour under control. At your gran’s’ funeral? In a major work meeting? In front of your children? If you can do it there, you have the ability to do it in other situations too.
The difference between these situations and the ones in which you express your anger problematically is that, at some level, you believe the problematic behaviour is okay in some situations, and therefore you choose not to exercise the muscle of self-discipline in those situations.
In therapy together, we will think about the situations in which you exercise control and those where you don’t. We will explore what behaviour is acceptable in different situations. Together, we will think through what you could do differently in those situations.
How can I stop myself before my angry behaviour becomes problematic?
The key to this is noticing your feelings. Remember I said that bottling things up can lead to explosions? If you learn to notice all those little bits of anger that occur over time, you can express them (and any underlying vulnerable feelings) as they happen rather than bottling them up. That way, your internal anger levels don’t reach problematic levels. It’s a case of little and often, like a pressure release valve.
At first, your therapy sessions might be the only place where you feel comfortable doing this. However, with time you will become more at ease with it and be able to express your little bits of anger, in non-problematic ways, to others in your life.
Of course, sometimes anger builds very quickly and you don’t have a chance to release it along the way. And sometimes your attempts to release it along the way might be poorly received and things might escalate. In those situations, you need to buy yourself time to calm down. So I will talk to you about strategies to safely and calmly remove yourself from the situations where your anger escalates. It’s not about avoiding the conversation or running away; it’s just about addressing the situation at a time when you are better able to do so in an unproblematic way.
How can I communicate anger better?
In one way, this is simple: you use only words. Not tone of voice, not physicality, not aggression, not intimidation. You calmly say “I feel angry about…” then explain why you feel angry. Of course, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Telling somebody about your anger in a calm way is a really hard thing to do because when you’re angry you don’t feel calm! It takes practice, but it’s really worth it because the other person is much more likely to hear you and take what you say on board when it’s not accompanied by aggression.
In therapy sessions, I help my clients to master this. Once we fully understand what angers them, we consider whether it would be helpful to have conversations with other people about that. Sometimes that’s about trying to change the circumstances that lead to anger; sometimes it’s just about being understood.
If there is an unfolding situation they are angry about, we will have time in our sessions to think through what they want to say, how it might be received, and so on. But I also give them tools so that they can respond in the moment to new situations that anger them. These include strategies such as taking time out until they are calm enough to have a safe conversation; building blocks of non-confrontational language and skills such as putting themself in the other person’s shoes.
Are you concerned about your anger? If so, feel free to contact me or book an initial consultation and I will be happy to help you.