Decoding Anger.
Everyone gets angry including your therapist: “if you’re not pissed off you’re not paying attention” as the direct action news-sheet Schnews used to put it back in the day.
Let’s face it, there’s a lot to be angry about, whether that’s on a global scale or just in the day-to-day annoyances of keeping the wheels on the trolley of life. In this blog article I’ll explore what anger is, what it might be telling you, and how to harness the power of anger so it becomes a friend not a foe.
Psychologist Howard Kassinove defines anger as “a negative feeling state that is typically associated with hostile thoughts, physiological arousal and maladaptive behaviors. It usually develops in response to the unwanted actions of another person who is perceived to be disrespectful, demeaning, threatening or neglectful.”
While this definition of anger is pretty accurate, as Mike Fisher (founder of the British Association of Anger Management) puts it, it’s important to move away from language that is shaming or blaming in the expression (or description) of anger. We also need to keep in mind structural as well as interpersonal anger triggers.
Anger isn’t always negative or “maladaptive” (a very value-laden word). Sometimes it motivates and/or initiates great change. Fisher writes that anger is a spectrum emotion from low threshold (irritated, agitated, frustrated) through to high threshold (shouting, bullying, physical displays of anger and violence).
Anger is a “secondary” emotion: it’s usually riding on the back of other emotions such as depression, anxiety, fear, sadness or grief. We can be anger “imploders” who bottle it up, or “exploders” who, well, you know what they do….
Anger takes its toll on the body too: high blood pressure, heart problems, aches and pains, stomach ulcers, migraines and that's just for starters.
Anger can also be learnt from the people or culture(s) around us. It's the entitled “rights-based, on-demand, because you deserve it” ethos that undermines empathy and infuses our civil and social lives encouraging us to vent our spleen in the face of frustrated, infantile, desires. For example fights in the Sale over the last flat screen TV or screaming down the phone at a call center “agent” who ironically has no agency at all. On the other hand our family system may also have either suppressed expressions of anger with punishment (so anger becomes something to be avoidant of), or been the site of explosive, destructive rage (so expressing anger becomes something to be frightened of).
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, Paul Gilbert the developer of Compassion Focused Therapy, argues that the brain has developed systems for anger in order to help us survive hostile environments. When these systems get activated the feeling of anger sweeps through us very quickly and can take control very easily. Anger can feel like a heady rush, and that feeling of being powered up and invulnerable in the body can become addictive. Especially if we feel powerless in other areas of our life.
This is what the brain has evolved into; it’s not our fault we have these glitchy, easily triggered brains. Telling ourselves we’re bad, shameful or “maladaptive” for feeling anger is only going to make us feel worse. A more helpful way of working with anger then is as Gilbert writes, learning to “spot the anger signals and vulnerable times” we might be more likely to kick off, and then to train ourselves to cope better with anger, rather than taking it out on the people/possessions around us.
Gilbert links anger with the threat/self-protection and the incentive/reward seeking systems of the brain and one consequence of constantly stimulating these systems is that in our quieter moments we start to realise the consequences of angry behaviour; loneliness, isolation, broken or abusive relationships, trouble with the law or attempts to soothe the brain through alcohol, drugs, porn and the internet, gambling, shopping or food.
It makes sense then to try and decode anger and work out what its hidden message is.
What is Anger Telling You?
1. You need to set boundaries – one surprising theme that comes up in the clinical work I do with angry people is that often they are not able to easily set boundaries with other people. A boundary is a psychological line we draw in the sand regarding how others should behave towards us. Sometimes we’re unable to set boundaries because our own boundaries have been broken (perhaps very abusively) by others. If we don’t know how to set boundaries because we’ve never been taught or shown how to, it’s no big surprise that we’re then going to project our anger out towards whoever is stepping on our psychological toes.
2. Your needs are not being met – specifically your emotional needs are not being met. If we’re not feeling cared for, noticed or heard or if we’re being made to feel insignificant or disrespected AND we struggle to let others know this, sometimes due to fear of punishment or retaliation, it is going to make us angry. Usually, this difficulty arises from a need to build up assertiveness and communication skills so we can appropriately tell others in our life what we need to feel OK.
3. You are feeling vulnerable – sometimes we get angry at injustice and it moves us to do something to change the situation. Other times, anger arises as a way of avoiding feeling emotions such as fear, insecurity, humiliation, shame and that sense of vulnerability that emerges when we fear something or someone we love may be lost to us. We then angrily project those feelings onto the other person…”you made me feel like this…if you hadn’t done X then I wouldn’t have done Y…”
Usually though, what’s happened is our own feelings of shame or anxious insecurity have been triggered and we need to examine what the function of those feelings are, and what unresolved issues are tangled up in that web of emotions, behaviours and thoughts.
4. Your values are being compromised – In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) we often spend some time answering the question “What do you want your life to stand for?” We all have different values around relationships, justice, community, freedom, spirituality, sexuality and so on and these values are strongly connected to our emotions. We feel passionate about our values because they are what we stand for in the world. If a situation or person is compromising or disrespecting our values, they are basically attacking us at the level of our “core self”, and that’s going to make us angry.
Anger may be telling us we’ve drifted and that it’s time to make changes in our lives to align with our values again.
5. Your trauma is still unprocessed – we should never forget that anger is a trauma survival response, we may have expressed anger when the trauma happened to us to enable us to repel the assailant(s). Or more likely, thanks to the freeze response, we carry it around inside us because we never had a chance to express it at the time, especially if we were children when the trauma happened.
Specifically, anger will be stored in an unprocessed state in the brain, nervous system and body and any reminders of the trauma will also retrigger those stored emotions. That reminder can be a sight, smell, taste, sound or visual similarity to the trauma event. One of the key indicators of PTSD for example is being on edge or easily angered because we are constantly scanning for threat or danger outside and inside us. This doesn’t excuse the damaging actions taken when we’re angry, but at least provides an explanation for them, so we can then work towards changing them.
Anger may be telling you it’s time to process your trauma memories and somatic responses. EMDR and other therapies can help with this.
Harnessing Anger
Consultant Psychologist William Davies provides a useful CBT based contextual model of anger – he agrees that sometimes anger is the right response to a situation but much less anger that you’d think.
The factors that influence anger may include:
our beliefs about self/others/the world;
the mood we woke up in that day and
the appraisal or meaning we attach to a trigger event. For example someone cutting in line at a coffee shop may not bother you if you’ve had a good nights sleep and plenty of time, but may just send you over the edge if you’re in a rush, feeling tired, have a bullying boss who will slate you if you’re late one more time, and having to corral a couple of kids in tow too.
We tip into anger or irritation because we’re wired that way. But the difference between acting on it or self-soothing is often connected with:
the inhibitions in the situation – internal and external. Using the same example, you may have thoughts of giving the person who cut in a piece of your mind, and perhaps a dousing in iced coffee, but you know that if you do, it will all end in tears (the kids, yours, theirs) and expensive court costs/lifetime bans from the coffee shop. However, if you're drunk, stoned, traumatised or sleep deprived, that may be enough to overcome your inhibitions. Before you know it, it's all coffee soaked patrons; frappes, fuzz and fisticuffs.
Subsequently, thanks to therapy, and some of the tools you’ll have to recognise the signs of anger, you’ll realize in future that when triggered your mind/body organises itself around perceived threat in the situation and blocks out everything else. You'll cool your jets first using emotional regulation skills in order to see the bigger picture, think clearly, and then act accordingly.
Your response then, is influenced by how easily you’re able to compassionately self-soothe and contain the anger until it naturally drains away. This should then enable you to assertively remind the person cutting in, that “the queue starts behind me mate…” Or to let it go, because well, there’s always going to be another schmuck along soon who presses your buttons, and wouldn’t you prefer to be living your valued life elsewhere rather than getting into pointless rows in a coffee shop?
Of course this is all easier said than done, and doesn’t account for the possibility that the person who cut in front of you is even angrier than you are. That’s where de-escalation skills come in useful…
….If you feel that you would benefit from finding our more about how to manage anger and irritation using CBT, Compassion Focused Therapy, Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, feel free to contact us at Rhizome Practice to see if we can help.
