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Just FYI: Anger is not bad.
Anger is a normal human reaction to any threat in the environment. If your physical or psychological well-being is under attack, anger is one possible reaction. And it’s okay to feel it, just like it’s okay to feel stressed or scared when threatened. There’s no right way to feel. Accepting what you feel, without judging it as good or bad, helps you understand the purpose or cause of your emotions.
Like we discussed in Why Anger Matters – Part 1, anger can be a very positive, constructive emotion. Your anger is a motivating and empowering force when it develops from injustice and you’re trying to fill the gap between inequality and equality, or injury and healing. Protesting wrongs, confronting abuses of power, and seeking to end oppression are all constructive ways to engage your anger. And often these positive movements are in solidarity with other people. There’s a sense of community and togetherness in a movement that has purpose and meaning.
What happens when anger is more intimate and personal, though? When your anger gets kindled by some hurtful words or actions aimed at you within your relationships? Or when your anger is targeted at yourself? Let’s look at 4 unhealthy anger patterns that are typically used when you haven’t been taught how to manage your anger in healthy ways.
Withholding
Something isn’t going your way, or someone didn’t do what you wanted, and so you protest by withholding affection or kindness. It’s a hard kind of anger that sets in and sticks around for a while, and often referred to as “giving someone the cold shoulder.” You develop that kind of silent anger to protect yourself from feeling disappointment or abandonment, and it often leads to dissatisfaction and suspicion in relationships.
Exploding
You have a hair trigger temper and “go nuclear” when most people would normally feel mild irritation. Alternatively, you might be a ticking time-bomb who gets irritated at something, says nothing, and then 3 weeks later explodes. You develop that kind of explosive anger to avoid feeling insecure, or to avoid confrontation. It often leads to isolation, burned bridges, or resentment.
Pressurized Venting
One really hard thing happens after another, it all piles up, and you call or text your friends. You spend the entire phone call or chat session complaining and “getting it all out.” Maybe social networking is your platform, and you feel better when you post an angry diatribe…several times a week. You develop that kind of built-up venting anger to keep the focus off yourself and put it on external things and people. Although discussing your bad days with your friends can lead to feeling better, venting is different, and a lot of research is showing that it isn’t good for you. Venting is all about you feeling justified in your anger, but anger is only helpful when you’re already justified and don’t need to reinforce that over and over and over again. Venting keeps you stuck in negativity and completely unaware of how you’re impacting others around you. It often leads to alienating the very people you were hoping would validate and affirm you.
Self-Criticizing
Criticizing or insulting yourself when you’re angry starts with an automatic script in your mind before anything is spoken out loud. Thoughts like “I’m so stupid. What’s wrong with me? Nothing ever works out for me! Why can’t I do anything right? Why do I always mess up?” That kind of automatic script is almost always written by a critical parent first. If you were criticized early and often as a kid, or one of your parents was highly self-critical or verbally abusive, this kind of anger at yourself can be a natural consequence – you’re just practicing what you were taught. Self-criticism can also develop if you have an overwhelming need to feel in control, or to avoid feeling helpless or unimportant. The problem is you’re creating the very thing you’re avoiding because self-criticism reinforces low self-esteem, high anxiety, and external control of your confidence.
Anger gets triggered hard whenever someone wounds you, or when life seems unfair. It’s also easy to turn anger on yourself if you grew up in a critical or verbally abusive home and you’ve never been shown a different way to handle your anger. Anger can be a shield, a spear, a catalyst, or an equalizer.
Why Anger Matters – Part 3 comes out tomorrow. We’ll look at how to change the 4 unhealthy anger patterns discussed in this post by practicing positive management of anger.
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