Ugly Emotions Series: Anger

Part 3 of The Ugly Emotions Series: the series where I talk about the emotions none of us want to think about. And yet, here we are, talking about them. (If you missed them, check out Part 1: Jealousy and Part 2: Shame.)This week’s article is on everyone’s favourite emotion to repress and (probably) your dad’s favourite emotion to absolutely misrepresent: anger!

Let's try and define anger: Anger is a powerful, complex emotion characterized by strong displeasure, hostility, and antagonism toward a perceived wrong, injustice, obstacle, or threat. It can range from mild annoyance and frustration to intense rage or fury. Anger can, at times, act as a “secondary emotion,” sitting on top of and masking feelings like fear, sadness, or hurt… and other times anger is just anger. 

Why do we hold anger inside? 

Both in and out of my job, I’ve talked to a lot of people about anger, especially anger that feels difficult to name, feel, express or release. The common thread in those conversations is the belief that anger is ugly. When we are angry, people's feelings get hurt, we say things we don’t mean, it hurts our reputation, bad things happen! 

However, when we repeatedly ignore or push down our anger, it doesn’t exactly disappear. It becomes harder to understand and regulate, and it can eventually show up in ways we never intended. We build this belief about what anger looks like (“explosions” and those unintended spill-outs of harshness), and a cycle starts: we avoid anger because we’re afraid of what it can look like, it becomes bottled up and harder and harder to manage until it “spills” out of us, and then the cycle starts again. 

Anger isn’t actually ugly

Anger itself is a natural, human emotion. It can be useful. It can protect us, and can let us know that something is wrong, unfair, or threatening. It can also give us the drive to do something about it. Humans have adapted partly by listening to their anger. Imagine this: you’re stranded on an island and the one other person around steals your food. Without some anger drive, there’s a chance you’d eventually starve. To some extent, anger is a survival instinct. It tells you that something is wrong; that you need to act. Anger can act as an alarm system. It can tell us that a boundary has been crossed, or that something important to us is being threatened. It creates energy and motivation to respond. In this sense, anger isn’t inherently the problem. It’s just information. The important part is learning how to listen to that information without letting the anger make every decision for us.

Here’s a probably more relatable but more subtle example: A friend says something that hurts your feelings. You could push down your feelings, including anger, in the hope that things will blow over. After all, you don’t want to hurt your friend. This then builds into resentment, while your friend is unaware of how they hurt you, and how to avoid doing it again. Now we have resentment growing, and a friend in the dark. 

A different response might look like acknowledging that what your friend says was hurtful, and paying attention to your anger. Maybe your anger is an alarm asking for clarity and a conversation with the friend. Maybe it’s highlighting a deeper insecurity that's been swept under the rug. What action would be helpful for this moving forward? Maybe a conversation with the friend and some deeper work within. Now the anger has been heard, and hurt was expressed. There’s nothing pent up, and things were dealt with appropriately. Which would you choose?

But if this is the case, and facing anger head-on feels like an obvious choice on paper, why do we still struggle so much in acknowledging it? For a lot of us, our relationship with anger gets complicated pretty early on. A child might be scolded for expressing their anger or for asking for what they need. Or maybe the anger they see at home is frightening or destructive enough that they decide they want nothing to do with the emotion at all. Family dynamics, culture, gender expectations, and a whole mess of other things shape what anger is “supposed” to look like. 

I made a joke at the expense of dads everywhere at the beginning of this post. There’s something worth talking about underneath it. So many boys and men are taught, directly or indirectly, that most emotions should be kept to themselves, while anger is treated as the “masculine” exception. Anger is valid, and anger is manly. This creates its own version of the cycle: repress, repress, repress, and then only recognize an emotion once it’s become overwhelming, or when anger builds up on top of it. 

Where can we stop the cycle? 

The probably irritating but truthful answer is: literally anywhere. 

I’ve said this before here, and I don’t imagine a world in which I will stop saying it: every emotion has a function. Your anger is trying to tell you something. If you want to understand what that is, you need to feel it first. Feeling anger doesn’t mean yelling at someone or breaking things. Feeling something and acting on its most immediate, base impulses are two different things. 

If you can notice the anger, sit with it, and get curious about where it comes from, you have a far greater chance of understanding what it’s telling you. If you’re feeling brave enough, try asking and listening for what your anger is asking of you. Maybe trust was broken; maybe something feels unfair, or you’re overwhelmed, scared, hurt, frustrated. Maybe you need to speak up (or walk away). Maybe you need to scream or run or advocate for yourself. 

This is just the beginning. If we know and sit with the fact that anger has a function, we can work on healthy ways of expressing it (not rage). What that looks like moving forward is up to you, and is different for everyone. If this feels manageable to explore on your own, that’s fantastic and I wish you the best. For a lot of us, it’s not that simple. Support groups, trusted friends and family, and therapy can all help you understand what your anger is telling you and find healthier ways to respond to it. You don’t have to figure it out alone.