Growing up, I learned that one of the most useful emotions was unacceptable: I internalized it was bad to be angry. Expressing it was punished with neglect or abuse from my childhood bullies or parents.
And a punishment from the powerful (them) to the powerless (me) is unimaginably cruel.
Like a weed plucked again and again and eventually removed by the root, I made my anger disappear. But when a magician makes something disappear, it doesn’t vanish – he just puts it in a pocket you can’t see.
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I felt like you’re not supposed to feel anger, much less express it. If you do, there’s something wrong with you. This came from my immediate environment, but the broader culture carries the same sentiment.
When people have anger issues, they need anger management classes. It’s curious that no other emotion gets this explicit treatment: Who has sadness issues? Where are the shame management classes?
It makes sense: Uncontrolled anger leads to starting bar fights and screaming at your wife. Uncontrolled sadness leads to video games in your mom’s basement. Anger poses a bigger threat to society. Because anger can become violence.
But we didn’t waste millions of years evolving anger. It’s an important feeling.
Anger is a high-energy emotion. I recently went to a new coworking space and saw an acquaintance had left WhatsApp open, with a message that included my name – twice: “Good news, [my name] wasn’t there yesterday and I hope he doesn’t come back.”
My brain jumped into fifth gear. Anger rose, my brain condemned those two and my mind instantly imagined me revealing her for the awful person she was in a grand confrontation – in front of everyone, of course.
Anger drives action. It’s like a security protocol on a military base: Close the doors, ready your weapons, be ready to shoot.
Anger protects us. Well-expressed healthy anger enforces our boundaries. It’s our emotional body guard that protects us from attack.
But if you’ve learned to suppress anger, you’ll be like the magician vanishing something. You’ll put it elsewhere.
Maybe you internalize it: You convert anger into depression. “you can’t treat me like this”, becomes “I deserve to be treated like this”
Maybe you bottle it up and let anger accumulate until it explodes. When people explode over small things, it’s because they didn’t express their annoyance the first 28 times it happened.
As Ava from bookbear express puts it:
“We might describe ourselves as avoiding conflict, but I personally believe there is no such thing as avoiding conflict. There is only transmuting how you experience conflict.”
If you turn anger into depression, you’ll view yourself as less and have worse relationships because you can’t advocate for your needs. If you bottle it up, your outbursts will ruin relationships the other way around.
But if you’ve been taught that anger is unacceptable, you default to these options and never reach a healthy emotional state.
So we have to do what every rom-com wife asks her husband to do: Reconnect with feelings.
Rediscovering and then expressing a buried feeling is like using a shower you’ve never used before: First it’s terribly cold and nothing seems to change it, then it’s piping hot and it won’t get colder. Eventually, you understand the knobs and buttons and it gets easier to find a good middle ground.
When you first express something you haven’t allowed yourself to feel, you’ll feel it more intensely than normal – often more intensely than appropriate.
How do you know whether you’re going too far? I’ve found a simple heuristic with anger:
Am I making my life better or making theirs worse?
After a month of dating, her communication changed over night, from flirty and cute to cold and short. From sending me pictures with her friends to “good, you?”. From “What would you say is your love language?” to day-long radio silence.
She ignored every question about what was going on. When she was finally honest and told me she didn’t feel emotionally available, we made plans to have lunch. But when I asked her to chat through this for 5 minutes so it’s not between us, the response was in past tense. *“You’re cool and it was so nice meeting you, I’ll say hi if I bump into you”*.
This made me angry: I deserve better than to end it over text, to discard me because you’re too immature to talk for 5 minutes. It wasn’t that she was ending it (I had had my doubts too), but the way she treated me.
I told her this and said it had made me angry. I don’t think I’ll get a response.
But my mind fantasizes of getting back at her – saying I wish she wouldn’t say hi if she bumps into me and please don’t text me again. And by the way, I feel sorry for the next guy you date.
This is where anger becomes violence. Me saying this changes nothing: She disrespected me and doesn’t care that she did. Our situationship is over and we won’t see each other again.
It’s just that a part of me wants her to feel what I felt: Hurt, pain, anger. But this is pointless. There’s no outcome here.
If I bump into her, it’s easy enough to ignore her. I probably won’t see this woman again, even without telling her.
If I told her this, I wouldn’t make things better for me, just worse for her.
If anger is your security protocol, make sure that protocol isn’t mutually assured destruction.