What causes anger? And what does it mean that anger is a secondary emotion?
When you’re angry, it just feels like anger to you. Sometimes it’s hard to notice anything underneath your anger unless you really dig in to your emotions, but anger is an emotion we often resort to secondarily when we’re trying to protect ourselves from feeling a more vulnerable primary emotion such as sadness, fear, or pain. In The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz, anger is described as a mask for fear. Anger is fear that: we (or those we love) won’t get what we need, are not safe and secure, are not loved, valued, or respected, and/or will not be included. Anger has a lot to do with expectation. We expect others to treat us and our loved ones fairly, with dignity, and with kindness. When these things don’t happen, we often react in anger because we have been hurt. Anger is an emotional response to an unfulfilled expectation. We want to resist our feelings of pain and we do this by feeling anger instead. Anger is a natural emotion that we can’t avoid, but it doesn’t have to be negative.
Anger can be healthy if it’s in the present.
It’s natural and healthy to respond to an injustice with anger. It’s also natural and healthy to let this anger motivate us to make some kind of change in our lives or in the world. If we can change the situations that are causing us to be angry, we must. If we can’t change the situations, we must change ourselves. It isn’t natural and healthy to allow anger to persist past the present. When we suppress feelings of anger, they often come back up in the future. Dwelling on past hurt and becoming angry about it does us no good, which is why we must lean in to our anger when we experience it so that it doesn’t come back up.
How do we lean in to our anger?
First, we must identify what’s triggering our anger. Easy enough, your spouse made a backhanded comment to you, your boss didn’t give you the raise you were promised, your pharmacy won’t give you the prescription you need. Of course you’re angry about this. The next question is a little harder and will require you to dig a little deeper. Why are you angry? What’s underneath it? Your spouse making a backhanded comment makes you feel hurt and/or afraid that they don’t love you anymore. Your boss not giving you a raise makes you fear that you aren’t valued and respected at work. Your pharmacy not giving you the prescription you need makes you fear that you won’t get what you need to function. It can be difficult to identify what’s underneath your anger, but if you look deep enough, there’s always something there.
Alternative Anger Management : Reality Checking
Now that you’ve identified the other emotions accompanying your anger, it’s important to acknowledge these emotions. Acknowledge the fear or pain you are experiencing and acknowledge how you feel threatened. These feelings are normal! It would be abnormal if you didn’t experience fear in response to being threatened. Acknowledge that your feelings of fear are normal, but then you must take a closer look at these fears. You must ask yourself if your fears are legitimate. Does your spouse really not love you anymore or were they just having a bad day and decide to take their frustration out on you? Does your boss really not value you or have they simply forgotten about your raise because of their busy schedule? Does your pharmacist really want you to suffer or have you failed to get the proper prescription approvals needed for your medicine? When we can reflect in this way and practice awareness around our anger, we are much more likely to think rationally about our anger. If we can think more rationally about our anger, we can respond to our anger more rationally, as well.
Anger is an emotional response to an unfulfilled expectation
Gabor Maté, a physician who specializes in addiction and who I will most definitely talk more about in a future post, says you should “be at least as interested in your reactions as in the person or situation that triggers them.” If we can dig in and explore why we respond with anger to certain people and situations, we can learn a lot about ourselves. When angry, ask yourself what expectation of yours went unmet. You expected your spouse to be kind, your hard work to be recognized by your boss, or for things to go your way at the pharmacy. What expectations do you have for the people around you and the situations you find yourself in?
We know that life isn’t fair and things don’t always go our way, but we still get angry when we feel we haven’t been treated fairly or things haven’t gone our way. So, are our expectations realistic? Can we really expect for people to treat us kindly, fairly, and with respect all the time? Regardless of your answer to this question, it doesn’t change the fact that people won’t always treat you with kindness, fairness, and respect. There will be times where you’re treated unfairly or without respect, so what are you going to do about it? You can choose to get angry and dwell on this anger for an indefinite amount of time OR you can choose to acknowledge the way you feel threatened, ask yourself if your fears are legitimate, and release your expectations for others.
Alternative Anger Management : The Hypothesis of Generosity
Brené Brown talks about the hypothesis of generosity in her book Rising Strong and this hypothesis has significantly changed the way I respond to frustration and anger. With the hypothesis of generosity, you ask yourself: what’s the most generous assumption I can make about this person’s intentions or what they said or did to me? You are much less likely to be angry about the person who cut you off in traffic if you assume they are speeding to the hospital with their pregnant about-to-deliver wife. You are much less likely to be angry about the person who made a rude comment to you at the grocery if you assume they are going through it because they just lost someone they love. You are much less likely to be angry about your friend cancelling plans last-minute if you assume they have overstretched themselves and are making this decision to preserve their mental health because they just have way too much going on. If we can release our unrealistic expectations for others and accept a hypothesis of generosity, we can live much happier lives.
Alternative Anger Management : Choosing to live on the track of love
Don Miguel Ruiz sums all this up in his book The Mastery of Love as he explains how we choose to live our lives either on a track of fear (and scarcity) or a track of love (and abundance)…
“Love has no expectations. Fear is full of expectations. With fear we do things because we expect that we have to and we expect that others are going to do the same. That is why fear hurts and love doesn’t hurt. We expect something and if it doesn’t happen, we feel hurt- it isn’t fair. We blame others for not fulfilling our expectations. When we love, we don’t have expectations; we do it because we want to, and if other people do it or not, it’s because they want to or not and it’s nothing personal.”
The world could be a much better place if we all decided to choose love over fear.
Alternative Anger Management Worksheet (Feel free to share this resource!)
If interested in seeking therapy for anger management in the Lexington, KY area…
Contact me to see if we could be a good fit to work together and address some of the fears that may be holding you back from living a more joyful love-filled life.