What Is Your Anger Trying to Tell You?

What Is Anger?

Anger is often viewed as a negative emotion to be avoided. However, anger is a normal emotion which exists on a spectrum and can range from feeling irritated or annoyed to experiencing intense rage. Like other emotions, anger is often accompanied by physical sensations, such as becoming flushed, energized, or noticing a faster heartbeat. While anger can feel uncomfortable, the emotion itself is not necessarily a problem. Anger can communicate important information about what is happening internally or within a situation, and it is separate from whatever behavior follows it, as feeling angry and acting aggressively are not the same thing.

What Is Anger Communicating?

When anger comes up, it can feel automatic to categorize the feeling as good or bad. Instead, anger can be treated as information and explored for what it may be communicating. It may indicate that a boundary has been crossed or that something important feels threatened. Anger can also exist alongside other emotions, common ones include sadness, fear, and shame. Recognizing another emotion does not mean the anger is not real, as multiple emotions can be present at the same time. Anger can also motivate action, providing the energy to address a problem, advocate for oneself, or communicate that something needs to change. This is part of why simply trying to get rid of anger can mean overlooking useful information about what caused it in the first place.

Anger's Relationship to Trauma

From a biological perspective, anger activates the sympathetic nervous system, which helps the body respond to potential danger and prepare for action. During traumatic experiences, there is often a threat to safety, making anger a common response that can help someone protect themselves or respond to danger quickly. These responses do not necessarily disappear once the traumatic experience has ended. After trauma, the brain and body may remain more alert to potential threats as a way of preventing another dangerous experience, and a situation that resembles or brings up memories of the trauma may activate anger quickly, even when the current situation is different from what happened in the past. The relationship between trauma and anger can also develop in another direction. Some individuals have experienced anger through violence or punishment, and as a result, they may learn to fear their own anger or disconnect from it entirely. Feeling angry can become associated with being dangerous.

When Is Anger Helpful vs. Harmful?

Viewing anger without immediately judging it can make it easier to understand what the emotion may be communicating. Anger may identify a problem, bring attention to a boundary that has been crossed, or provide motivation to change a situation that is not working. The anger is serving a function even if the emotion feels uncomfortable.

Problems can develop when the way anger is expressed begins causing harm, whether that's aggression, impulsive decisions, or reactions that repeatedly damage relationships. Suppressing anger entirely can create difficulties as well. When anger is consistently pushed away, it can become harder to recognize what is causing it, and it may eventually come out more intensely.

Anger can also become the emotion someone recognizes most easily. If it regularly takes the place of sadness, fear, or shame, it may become more difficult to understand everything contributing to the reaction. The same is true when the body remains activated long after the original situation has ended. At that point, understanding both what caused the anger and what happens in response to it becomes particularly important.

Working With Anger

There are different ways to understand and respond to anger without ignoring the emotion or immediately acting on it:

• Notice physical cues: Recognizing the sensations that go along with anger. This could include tension, feeling hot, restlessness, or a fast heartbeat. Noticing these cues can make anger easier to identify before it becomes more intense.

• Identify what happened: Looking at what triggered the anger and why the situation mattered can provide information about what the emotion is responding to. If the anger is connected to a crossed boundary, unmet need, or conflict, identifying the concern can make it easier to communicate what happened and your needs.

• Give yourself space: Stepping away from a situation can allow the intensity of the emotion to decrease before returning to a conversation or making a decision.

• Therapy: Therapy can provide additional support when anger feels difficult to control, is connected to trauma, repeatedly affects relationships, or causes significant distress.

  
  

Anger does not need to be eliminated in order for the response to it to change. Sometimes anger is communicating that something is wrong, while other times the intensity of the response may be connected to experiences that happened much earlier. Understanding where the emotion is coming from can provide more information about what is happening and create more choice in what happens next.