Anger is OK. What a thought!
Like all our emotions, anger is a natural, normal, healthy part of being a human. And, as we often do with our emotions, instead of welcoming and honoring anger, instead of listening to anger, we push it away, suppress it, deny it, use it to hurt ourselves, or express it inappropriately.
It’s not surprising that we are uncomfortable with anger, given our intensive conditioning that anger is wrong or bad or sinful.
From our earliest experiences with anger we have been shushed, shamed, separated, shut away from others, and often slapped or threatened.
“Don’t you talk to me in that tone of voice! I’ll give you something to be mad about [SLAP]!”
“You re so cranky, it must be bedtime. Don’t talk back to me. Not in here, take that out to the athletic field.”
Our childhood is filled with parental, teacher, and other authoritarian messages that our anger is intolerable, unacceptable and unnecessary. Perhaps these well meaning adults were making a distinction between feeling and behavior, but such a distinction is virtually impossible for most children to understand. To be honest, it can be difficult for anyone.
The Danger of Suppressing
By internalizing messages about anger, we become afraid to feel what we feel. We create fantasies that if we let our anger out we might hurt someone, or our relationships will explode, or we will be shunned and shamed and have to go away, etc. But wanting our anger to disappear doesn’t actually work.
Instead, it tends to leak out. You’re on a short fuse. You snap at your friends or family. Your wit is sarcastic and biting. The slightest provocation sends you to tears or rage or both. You find yourself sounding just like your own parents (and you vowed you’d never treat your kids the way you were treated). Perhaps your therapist or doctor or minister or friend has suggested you are depressed (that you are angry at yourself).
Or you let your anger out, you yell, you argue. You tell whoever, in no uncertain terms, that you are boiling mad. And it doesn’t make anything better. In fact, now everything feels a little worse. And there seems no clear way to repair the damage your unchecked anger has caused.
Having read the above you may be thinking, Anger may be OK, or at least unavoidable, but how can I make it less devastating? How can I cope with my anger? How can I cope with your anger? How can I cope with your anger when you direct it at me?
Coping with anger is simple… but not necessarily easy. Like most things, it takes trust, some practice, as well as some learning. And, the better you get at coping with your anger, the more space you create to give and receive love.
Acknowledging the Iceberg
The first thing to understand is that our feelings are rarely one emotion or another. Rather, feelings cluster and combine. We usually speak of feeling angry when we are also feeling frightened and ashamed and hurt. When I became a certified Parent Effectiveness Trainer (PET) through the Gordon Training Institute, I was taught a wonderful metaphor for our feelings. We talked of the feelings iceberg. Remember that only 10% of an iceberg shows above the oceans surface, 90% lies submerged and hiding. Just so with our anger. While anger may show on the surface, beneath the surface can be sadness, fear, shame, hurt, and more.
Physiologically, the part of our brain that is responsible for feeling, the brain stem, only experiences pleasure or pain. That’s it, just pleasure or pain. It doesn’t make any further distinctions.
Then the thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, analyzes, distorts, deletes, generalizes, compares, judges, categorizes the feeling into anger or fear or whatever. Then we apply language to the thought and get even more specific.
So, when we angrily tell someone we are angry, we may never realize all the other ways we are feeling pain. We’ve exposed 10% of the iceberg and ignored the other 90%; letting the submerged part crash into us and sink our relation-ship!
A key strategy for coping with anger, yours or anyone else’s, is to look at the entire iceberg. To find out what is under the anger.
A second important concept is understanding that once a feeling is acknowledged, it transforms. Saying sentences that begin I’m frightened that… I’m hurt that… I’m sad that… I’m ashamed that…, we begin to understand more of what is sourcing our pain and begin to free our feelings to change. When someone is blasting you with their anger, ask them to also tell you about their other feelings. As we acknowledge all the iceberg, it melts.
By Chas August, HAI Facilitator