Do you feel as if anger explodes out of you?
Most likely, you’ve had people tell you that your anger is a problem. Or, maybe because people are scared, you haven’t heard it out loud, but you can sense it. People feel uncomfortable around you because they never know when you’re going to explode. Perhaps a loved one has given you an ultimatum. You know how icy things can feel after one of your blowups.
Maybe you feel really out of control with your anger. You’re fine, but then something happens, and it simply sets you off. The explosion is quick, harsh, and it feels like you don’t have any control over it. The anger certainly feels out of control, but peoples’ reaction to it may leave you feeling in even less control.
Anger can be easy to justify.
“They’re acting stupid.”
“It would be easy to not get angry if people acted reasonably.”
“I only get angry sometimes.”
“People don’t listen until I get angry.”
The thing is that anger has worked for you. That’s what makes it easy to justify. People listen because you get angry. You get things done because there are times when the anger comes through. It works, but at what cost? Likely, if you’re here, you’re starting to realize that even though anger has served you in some ways, it has also caused a lot of problems.
The goal of therapy is not just to just provide new skills, but we want to understand how anger became a main strategy. While anger may have “worked” for awhile, you’re realizing that it ultimately doesn’t work in the ways you need it to. We’re going to have to dig up some of the deeper reasons behind the anger. If we do this, we can start to replace anger with some strategies that will actually work.
There are different types of anger. Some are like an exploding firework. Others are like a tea kettle that has been simmering for far too long. One of the common denominators of any kind of anger is that it causes relationship issues with the people we would most like to be close with. Distance from spouses or partners, scared looks from kids, lack of invitations to join at various social events. Anger creates distance from those we most most to be close with.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way. Despite how it is often looked at, anger is not an incurable disease that you just have to deal with for the rest of your life. The descriptor, “oh he’s an angry person” makes it seem like anger is as set in stone as skin color or height. It is not. In therapy, there are pathways to understanding and reducing anger in order to see change. I don’t want to make it seem like this is an instantaneous process. Often it takes time because anger has been there for a long time. However, change is entirely possible.
You are not alone with anger being a problem.
You’ve likely felt alone at times, but the reality is that many people resort to anger as a way to fix. Anger, especially for men, is an “acceptable” emotion in today’s culture. This means that anger is a secondary emotion. Anger indicates that something else is going on in a situation, but somewhere along the way you, along with many other people, learned that anger is the best method to try to fix things. However, if you’re reading this right now, I’m guessing you’ve either known for a long time or are starting to realize that anger doesn’t actually work.
When people go to anger, it is for a reason. Their movement to anger is because it worked for quite a long time. It is more rare for anger to simply pop up later in life. To a degree, this is something that people have struggled with for a long time. The issue is that in today’s culture, it often gets swept under the rug, joked about, or not taken seriously. That is until it has to be taken seriously. This is often when people come to therapy. Perhaps there has been some major event that was an explosion of anger. Other times, anger can be like corrosion where it has slowly worn away and its impact can no longer be ignored.
Anger is a secondary emotion. That means it is actually covering up other emotions. Usually, more vulnerable emotions that are tougher to feel. To work on anger we have to get to a point where we are uncover what anger is protecting. Many people who struggle with anger are not even aware that there is anything underneath their anger. They assume the false belief that “I’m an angry person” and that sentiment is usually a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
This could not be further from the truth! When I work with clients that are struggling with anger, simply providing them with tools when they are feeling anger is not enough to be truly beneficial. Don’t get me wrong, these tools can be beneficial, but they aren’t addressing the deeper work that is needed. We have to get to what is underneath the anger, and discover what they are trying to accomplish, even at a subconscious level, by getting angry. If your house had foundation issues, your strategy would not be to simply throw a new coat of paint on it and call it good. To truly work on anger, it requires a deeper understanding about what is going on.
Once we start to understand the “why” behind anger, that is where transformation starts to happen.
We have to get to what’s underneath anger.
It’s normal to question if therapy will work.
Most people who say they “struggle with anger” have been struggling for years. Sometimes it may have been bubbling under the surface for years, but it’s been there. It’s only natural to doubt that things really can change and get better. Not wanting to change is often a barrier to therapy, but being skeptical doesn’t impede therapeutic work. I’ve worked with many clients who aren’t sure if therapy will work for them. This makes a lot of sense for people to be feeling towards something they’ve struggled with for so long. However, I find, that when clients are digging into their anger, the understanding of their why starts to come up, and this is what leads to the capacity for change.
Sometimes people don’t even look at anger as something their struggling with. It’s simply who they are. They’re an angry person. This is where I would disagree. They’ve been taught or modeled anger as what works. Sometimes that’s what works for getting things done, taking control, or it may feel safer than emotions like sadness. I believe it is far more common that anger is learned than it is an inherent quality. Working under that assumption, there is then room to change anger because it is not inherent to who someone is. At first glance, that thought may seem insane to someone who has been exploding since they were a child. While this has been learned, it certainly is not permanent.