Master Your Emotions: A Practical Guide to Overcoming Anger
This week I felt incredibly overcome with anger when I was with my family. Anger is something I really struggle with, I really hate expressing it, and yet, sometimes it just erupts out. I wrote previously about the different types of anger, but I thought I’d dig deeper today. I’m writing about why anger happens, what lies behind it, and techniques to manage your anger better. Let’s go.
What is your anger?
Anger is an emotion. So what is an emotion? You might be thinking ‘of course I know what emotion is.’ But, I find if you ask men how they are feeling, they’ll often say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Nothing’. I don’t think this is true, and I’ll explain why shortly.
An emotion is what you feel in response to something happening. Men can usually ‘get’ this in a sporting context – how do you ‘feel’ inside when you or your team win? Or lose? How you see the world changes, how your body feels changes. What you do – jump up and down, gesticulate, changes.
Why does it work like this? Simply Evolution. On a basic level, these are the systems we use to keep ourselves safe and alive. The lower levels on Maslow’s hierarchy, when achieved make us feel better & therefore more likely to do them. Anger can help keep us safe by warding off attackers, or enabling we have food and shelter.
In the modern world, you’re trying to keep the feeling good going, or at least reduce the feeling bad. You’re trying to change the outside world (encouraging your team / discouraging the opponent), and inside world (boosting those helpful thoughts & reducing the distracting ones). This is a legacy of the evolution of survival.
Boy’s don’t cry is the worst lesson
You’ll probably recognise the external action of someone who is angry, shouting, big bold expressions. I think this is the typical ‘allowed’ way for men to be angry. Except some don’t. My normal approach is to go very quiet, almost disappear. I struggle to spot it sometimes, particularly when I’m tired or stressed. Why would we get different approaches?
It’s to do with what we learned when we were younger (Learned lessons on this diagram). You’ll remember some of the rules you had growing up ‘Eat your greens’ ‘Don’t fight’. If you cried ‘Don’t cry’ would be a common response. My parents would both be very calm, but would occasionally have a massive outburst of shouting. I remember being spanked occasionally as a child as part of this by my dad. The rules therefore were ‘bottle it up’ ‘let it out randomly (when things are too much)’
But remember, anger is about safety, and fear. As a child, being safe is having the lowest of the Maslow’s needs met. If you don’t have those, you cannot grow to be an adult. So you learn the rules & play by them. Numbing yourself to yourself to get by, to please the adults around you. And this is the problem for men – as boys they have learned to numb themselves, and not understand themselves. Have outbursts of anger and then pretend everything is fine. And this then sets the scene for being an adult, with anger suddenly appearing out of nowhere (Unconrolled anger)
Learn to use your shield and be fearless
The solutions to this are easy for me to write down, but they are a lot of work. I’ve been on this process for five years now, and things have improved massively, but it still catches me out, and the old patterns of ‘Learned Lessons’ and ‘Uncontrolled anger’ come into play from time to time. But it’s less, a lot less. Beating myself up in my head, and abusing my body through alcohol and over-eating are there so little of the time.
I think there are short-term skills (Shield) and long term skills (Authentic/Fearless). Let’s examine those.
I’ll pick three of this list.
- Accept – Remember anger is there to keep us alive, it is part of us, and nothing to be ashamed of. Next time it occurs, name it – This is anger. It’s OK. It’s trying to keep me safe.
- Meditate & understand. Start to learn about your anger, where it comes from, what it feels like. The more you see it, know it, the easier it is to understand it & let it pass
- Rupture and Repair. External & internal anger can damage your relationship with others. It’s ok to heal those wounds. In fact, rupture and repair is better than supressing and ignoring. Can I say something – I’m sorry, I was angry because of…. can be a great conversation to have. You’re trying to learn about yourself, and the other person is learning too. It’s ok to have anger, it’s ok to make up, it’s ok to be human
Before we move onto the longer term strategies, let’s just pause and remind ourselves of the different anger styles.
The less healthy approaches include aggressive / passive / passive-aggressive. These can either ignore the issue, or try to make the other person ‘feel bad’, which gives you a little hit of adrenaline, which makes you feel better. They can do the same back, and you can play this ‘game’ forever!
Rage is just a volcano of anger which can erupt if allowed to build up. It can be out of context, and out of character.
Assertive anger is the one we are aiming for – containing the feeling of anger (against an injustice for example) and directing this in a cognisant and meaningful way (to solve the problem) without using the other approaches.
So, what can we do here to help ourselves? Try these exercises below.
- Learn the childhood rules. Sit & journal. What are your memories growing up. How did you see anger? What were the rules? Do you remember being scared? Fearful? Ashamed? Then, rewrite the story with compassion. ‘I was scared as a child of being hit. But I survived. My parents knew no better. I know now this isn’t right and I want to learn about my anger’.
- Practice assertive anger. If there is an injustice, which you want to be involved with to resolve, pause, run it through in your head. How will you behave? What will your voice do? Your body? What is the outcome you want? Then, if you still want to , try it out. Reflect afterwards in writing. Start small – a complaint, or return of an item of clothing.
- Holistically healthy – exercise, enough sleep, good nutrition, connection and fun are all fundamentals. Don’t skimp on these. The more often you feel optimal, the easier it is to manage your emotional states.
Assertive anger – Reach out
If you want to do some work about your anger with me, just reach out. Have a conversation & let’s see how we can get you managing your anger in a way that helps you
References:
The Secret Lives of Men – James Hawes
Rupture and Repair in relationships https://www.bristolcbt.co.uk/publications/the-cycle-of-rupture-and-repair-in-close-relationships/
Maslow -1954 Motivation and Personality