The Hidden Side of Anger: What You Might Be Feeling Instead

Anger is both a helpful and unhelpful feeling. It can help defend something important in your life - for example, if someone you love is being hurt, or someone is pressuring you to break a principle you hold, anger can give you the energy to defend what is important to you. On the other hand, anger can be an incredibly destructive force. It tears apart families. It leads to abuse. It all too often leads to unnecessary hurt.  In my ten years of practice as a therapist in downtown Hamilton, I have seen this happen.

Anger is unfortunately especially a problem for men. Men are too frequently taught that being masculine means limiting emotional expression to a very narrow range.  Men are ‘allowed’ to be neutral, angry, or maybe a little happy. Any expression of other emotion comes with the perceived risk of being weak or ‘less of a man.’ So, men learn to express any uncomfortable feeling as anger. This is not only the case for men, but it is especially the case for men.

So, (especially if you are a man) if you are finding anger causing you to hurt people you love or put distance between you and others, or get you into some other sort of trouble, my advice for you is this:

 When you feel angry, look for the other emotion. 

The next time you are angry, try running through these other labels for emotion to see if they fit.  If possible, even take the risk of voicing this other, underlying emotion to someone you love.  

When you feel anger, look for fear.

Anger provides energy for a defense of something important to you. What follows is that if there is something to defend, then there is also a fear of something that may be lost. Anger takes the fear of loss and turns it into action to protect against that loss. For example if you are a dad and you see your young child pulling a big chef’s knife out of the knife block, you might yell and get angry at your child. Yes, you are angry. But, the other feeling there is fear. Fear that your child might get hurt. Fear that you might feel guilty if your child gets hurt. Fear that you are not doing enough to keep your child safe. If you can notice fear in the moment, you might be able to pivot your reaction to teach your child about being safe by speaking about your fear to them. Instead of encouraging your child to be more afraid of you, you can share a healthy fear of what knives can do.

When you feel anger, look for hurt.

When something is hurting you, fighting back can be a good option. For example, if a little creature is biting you, it makes sense to get mad and try to smash it. However, when the hurt is more complicated, sometimes the angry energy intended to defend yourself can lead you to smash all kind of important things that are close by. For example, when I was a younger man, a partner asked me to hold her purse while she went to the bathroom. In that moment, my sense of security felt hurt; I felt she perceived me not as a man, but as an accessory. When she came back, I was mad and huffy at her and she was understandably confused. In that instance, I wish I would have been mature enough to ask myself, ‘What is the thing that hurts here? Is my gender identity and sense of importance so fragile that holding a purse for 3 minutes in a public place really threatens it? Was it really her action that hurt me or my own beliefs around masculinity that hurt me?’ In some cases where it is difficult to answer what is making me mad, it might help to look out for hurt.

When you feel anger, look for sadness.

Sadness helps a person let go of something that has been lost and is not coming back. If a person feels sad about losing a pet, they are less likely to accidentally keep filling up that pet’s food bowl. However, being sad also means admitting a loss of control. Being angry can make that loss of control more palatable, because at least there is something to do with it.  For example, following a break up, a person may go to all their friends, expressing anger about how their ex was terrible. This might even make them have a greater sense of control. However, holding onto this anger instead of feeling sad about the loss can lead a person to be closed off, which may limit them from other potentially fulfilling connections and becoming more lonely. If you feel you are often angry, and it doesn’t seem to be going away, look for the sadness that might help you accept a loss.

When you feel anger, look for shame.

Shame and embarrassment preserve social order. If you had no shame, you would go around taking what you wanted, no matter the damage it did for others or chaos it caused in the systems we all need to survive. A totally shameless person is a naked toddler standing in the middle of the road, blocking traffic because they want to hear what the sounds of a car horn’s honking is. However, shame can cause a hiding that only obscures the true problem. When you are ashamed, you might not fix what you can fix, but instead hide. Anger provides an all too effective way to hide shame or embarrassment. For example, how often have you seen a kid make a mistake and get mad and hit the kid next to them, yelling about how it’s the other kid’s fault? We don’t always stop doing this as we get older, but we might get better at hiding it.  When you are angry, look for what might be causing that sense of shame and if you trust the person you are with at the time of your anger, tell them about it. You might get a much more meaningful interaction at that point, but you have to risk having that shame exposed.

Hopefully this helps you find a different way to react when that burning sense of anger comes up, particularly if it keeps getting you in trouble.  If you want some extra help in decoding and defusing your anger, please reach out to talk further about how we can work together. 

-Scott