When I was a child, my Dad always used to tell me that anger was wrong. He warned that anger got you nowhere and that it was destructive. Of course, as a child, I thought that meant I ought not to feel anger, and so for many years, when my life was going wrong, I suppressed my anger, feeling bad about myself when it inevitably came up.
It wasn’t until I felt so bad about things and I sought help that a very wise therapist helped me to shout my anger at an empty chair. I felt odd at first, but then when I got going I let rip. After my long-suppressed rant, I felt that energy physically rise up and leave my body. Afterwards I felt like a new person.
The Truth About Anger
It wasn’t until this point that I fully faced my Dad’s warning and realised that what he really tried to protect me from was reacting badly when I felt anger. Not to deny the emotion itself.
The truth is anger gets a bad name. We’re told to control it, manage it, or just let it go. Yet it can be a useful emotion, and, in some cases, it can even make us feel better.
When we’re hurt, frightened or powerless, anger can be a relief. It makes us feel stronger and more in control. The problem arises when we act on it without any real understanding of what it’s telling us. When practising Living From Your Higher Self, emotions are less of a call to action and instead useful information telling us what we are thinking or believing.
Why Anger Can Make Us Feel Better
In my experience, anger is always a reaction to some form of pain (even if we don’t immediately recognise the pain), although not all psychologists would agree that anger always masks another emotion. Injustice, rejection, danger and someone crossing our boundaries all hurt because something we care about has been threatened.
Researchers Leonard Berkowitz and Eddie Harmon-Jones found that physical pain, unpleasant circumstances and social stress can all trigger anger. Anger is also an emotion that gets us to act, and that’s what makes it so much more empowering than fear or helplessness.
It’s useful to think in terms of an emotional staircase, where we climb from one emotional state to the next. If you’re powerless in a situation, you’ll probably start off feeling frightened or deeply hurt. Then you get angry, and suddenly you’ve got a burst of energy. You feel indignant, and you want to do something. That energy is a lot better than the complete helplessness of the situation. The danger, of course, is that we confuse that temporary feeling of being better with having solved the underlying problem.
When Anger Is Masking Hurt
I’d done a fairly substantial piece of work and was at a meeting with some of the very top people in the organisation. During the meeting, my boss went through and criticised my report in front of the whole room.
I was furious. She’d had the report well before the meeting and could have raised her concerns with me privately. She didn’t. I was publicly criticised in front of people whose views I cared about. I couldn’t show my anger in that room, so I excused myself, found an empty office and let the fury run its course until I was in a state where I could go back.
For a while after that, I continued to feel anger at the sheer unfairness of it. Eventually I came to see something else, though. I was genuinely hurt. Someone I trusted and respected had apparently been prepared to sacrifice me in front of others. Whether that was what she’d intended or not was another issue entirely, but that was how I interpreted it at the time.
It took nearly two weeks before I was able to broach the subject with her at all. If I’d done so earlier, I might have said the wrong thing or simply been too upset to explain myself. When we did talk, she did apologise, and I came to understand her reasoning. By that stage, I was able to tell her what had upset me rather than just vent my anger. I can honestly say that the encounter actually improved our relationship moving forward. If I had acted on my anger at the time, it could have evoked a completely different outcome.
The Drawbacks of Anger
Anger has its uses. It alerts us to injustice; it can signal a line has been crossed, and it gives us the impetus to act. Its biggest downside is the damage we can do when we react before we’ve properly understood it.
In the heat of the moment, we don’t have all the facts, and yet our version of events can seem completely true. We go over conversations in our heads, imagine what other people were thinking and convince ourselves we know their motives. I’d decided my boss didn’t care about me at all, but there was more to it than that, as I found when we met.
Discerning Your Thoughts When You’re Angry
The ego thought system is concerned with protecting us. When we feel hurt or threatened, it urges us to defend ourselves, blame others, or retaliate. We may be justified in feeling aggrieved, but the stories we tell ourselves can prolong our suffering.
Our Higher Self helps us see the situation more broadly. We can acknowledge how we feel, examine our assumptions, and decide which response would help most.
There’s also a difference between reacting angrily and deliberately expressing displeasure. When my children were growing up, there were times when I wanted them to know their behaviour was unacceptable, and I let them see how seriously I took it. The difference was that I chose to be stern, rather than lose my temper with them.
Using Your Emotional Compass
I’d arranged to pick up a colleague from the railway station where some building work had made access a bit of a problem. I pulled up in a hotel car park, got out to wave to my colleague, leaving my car door open; I was so close to the car. I turned back to find a parking attendant approaching my car. Despite my protestations, he smirked as he stuck the ticket on my windscreen. My angry words to him were that I had no idea how he could sleep at night!
I was busy with my colleague, but when I got home I fished the parking ticket paperwork out of my bag. It made me feel really angry, but I realised I had a choice in how I saw it. He was doing his job, and I knew nothing about his circumstances or the instructions he’d been given.
I calmly decided to challenge the ticket and did my research, which meant my appeal against it was successful. I didn’t need to hold on to my anger towards him. My emotional compass was telling me that the unfairness of his actions mattered to me. What I did about it was my responsibility.
Expressing Anger Wisely
Aristotle summed up the difficulty more than two thousand years ago:
“Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
We can feel angry without necessarily acting on it immediately, and we can deliberately express that anger when the situation demands it. Additionally, we don’t have to wait until all the anger has gone. We do need to be aware of it to a sufficient degree to be able to choose our words and our actions (particularly with those people we are closest to, where a few angry words can take a long time to undo).
Five Practical Ways to Handle Anger
Give yourself the right to feel it. Anger is a natural human reaction, so there’s no point in criticising yourself for having it. Rather than suppress it or react straight away, let it rise and settle.
Work out what the anger is giving you. Is it lending you some strength, or relief from feeling hurt, powerless or afraid? It’s fine for it to be a step towards a better emotional state, as long as you recognise that the underlying issue is still there.
Look for the hurt beneath it. What’s really bothering you? It might be hurt, fear, rejection, disappointment or a sense of injustice. Sometimes it’s obvious; often it takes a little quiet reflection to work out.
Check your assumptions. Separate what happened from the story you’ve told yourself about it. What do you know for sure? What are you guessing about the other person’s motives? You don’t have to justify their behaviour in order to question your own interpretation of it.
Wait until you can choose your response. Unless you need to act straight away, don’t react until the intensity of the anger has passed. You may still need to set a boundary, challenge the situation or make your displeasure known, but you’ll be doing so on your own terms rather than letting the anger drive your response.
Anger Is a Part of the Journey
I used to think becoming emotionally intelligent meant learning not to get angry. I see it differently now. When we’re angry, there’s something painful worth understanding. We may need to heal a hurt, change a situation, or re-examine the meaning we’ve given to what happened.
Living From Your Higher Self doesn’t stop us from feeling difficult emotions. It helps us listen to them, understand them, and choose how to respond. And as my experience with my boss showed me, even after years of practice, some situations take a little longer to work through.
This article reflects my personal experiences and the Living From Your Higher Self philosophy, and isn't intended as a substitute for professional psychological support. If reading it brings up painful past experiences or causes you significant distress, please seek help or consider working with a qualified therapist.
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