Tuesday 6th of August, 2024.
Written by General Psychologist, James Blaze.

Understanding and Managing Anger: Exploring Human Emotions

Pain, suffering and being human.

Everyone has experienced emotional suffering in the past, present and likely future as well. However, many of us may not understand that experience of emotional pain (amongst other pleasant and uncomfortable emotions) is an unfortunately a recurring theme of being human. Feelings of injustice or unfair treatment may be one of these emotional experiences, whereby we have a mix of thoughts, emotions and urges to act, called anger.

Purpose of anger.

Like all emotions, anger is temporary, concealing a wisdom and guidance to impart to us. This is to warn us we are not being treated well and to do something about it to prevent ourselves from further potential harm. It may also serve to communicate to others that our needs are not being met and we are not capable of clearly asking for them to be, that we are hurt, scared or unheard. We evolved anger as a biological function to regulate stress and keep us safe. For some of us, this anger can be uncomfortable to experience for long, to the point we often have great difficulty hiding it, distracting ourselves or suppressing it.

Expression and consequences of anger.

When it feels uncontainable, we may often find ourselves acting in ways that have negative consequences for ourselves and others. People who feel angry can express themselves in various ways. They may criticise and provoke, grow silent and withdraw from conversation, destroy property make threats, raise their voice or swear. As a result, we may experience outcomes like missing out on social invitations, losing our job, physical injury from fights, prolonged stress, having our feelings hurt from verbal retaliation and even legal repercussions. Given all of this, it seems that the emotion of anger is not the problem, in fact it was designed to be useful. It is the inappropriate actions that we often reactively do following anger that might be the real problem.

The link between anger and aggression.

We may hold strongly beliefs about a relationship between feeling anger and consequently acting in harmful ways. However, we might not consider the breadth of alternatives to this way of thinking. For example, although combat sports athletes must be violent, anger may be a detriment to them winning a bout. Soldiers are instructed to cause harm in battle, however they may not harbour anger towards their enemy. Likewise, those who hunt and kill their food may feel impartial about their victims (aside from hunger!). When we experience overwhelming emotions associated with anger, like frustration, it may be easy to excuse our aggressive and regrettable behaviour due to this linkage. However, in the case of receiving an unexplained late pay check, we may have available the option to bring this to the attention of the accounts team and write a formal complaint. This seems more practical in acting on the message our frustration is telling us, than lashing out at other people in our life in frustration. These situations may show us that the link between anger and aggression is not the only one and we could have other available options.

What anger looks like for you.

• In exploring what anger looks like in your life, ask yourself whether you understand the function of anger in the context of your past experiences that stand out. What are some situations in the past where anger was trying to warn you that you were not being treated right?
• Understand your needs at the time that were not getting met. Think about whether there is a pattern of these needs being unmet that might have begun a long time ago.
• Know yourself better by brainstorming a list of situations or people that trigger your anger to gain awareness when anger is likely to show itself.
• Acknowledge how you cope with your anger when it shows up (what you do when you feel it). How do you tend to express anger to others?
• Gain insight into the costs of the way you express anger. What impacts has anger had on your life. Consider negatively affected areas like family, friends relationships, health symptoms (stress, muscle tension and headaches), career opportunities lost, uncomfortable emotions (guilt, regret, hopelessness, shame), time and energy spent on anger.
• Consider if there are new ways to communicate how you feel around negotiating unmet needs and asserting boundaries. Would you be open and ready to explore them now?

If you have started thinking about these questions and require more help in exploring what anger looks like in your life, consider contacting professional support to practice creating new ways to respond to and communicate your experience.

References 

Eifert, G.H., McKay, M. and Forsyth, J.P. (2006) Act on life not on anger: The new acceptance and commitment therapy guide to problem anger. Oakland, CA, CA: New Harbinger Publications.

Gupta, A (2022). Anger. Understanding and managing anger in the therapy room [PowerPoint slides]. https://elearning.psychology.org.au/pluginfile.php/121061/mod_resource/content/0/anger%20slides_March2022.pdf