Why anger isn’t a ‘bad’ emotion | The therapist is in

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“I flipped out big time this week,” a client says to me just moments after sitting down. They describe a blowup with their roommate, with whom tension has been simmering for months. “I felt out of control, like I blew the lid off and I couldn’t put everything back in.”

“Can we use that as information?” I ask. They look at me confused.

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds like you’ve been holding back that anger for a long time and it was trying to tell you something. Anger is a boundary-setter. It tells us where our limits are.”

My client considers this for a while. I can tell even in the silence that they want to argue that they shouldn’t feel anger like that at all or make it into some more palatable emotion. And I understand that — destructive anger is scary, can scare us about ourselves. 

Especially for those who grew up in households where anger meant punishment or harm, there can be a lot of shame around it. But anger is also a part of all of us, and if we don’t have a relationship with it then it can take power over us.

Clients over the years have described to me a wide range of relationships to anger. Some seethe for years in the background, others feel frustrated that they often burst into tears in a conflict, and still others find that they don’t feel a connection to how anger arises in their bodies. Those folks may wall it off as a “bad” emotion to be feared and banished.

That disavowal has consequences at both an interpersonal and a larger social level. When we avoid conflict in our communities because it feels uncomfortable or is universally perceived as “bad,” then we don’t get to have honest conversations about how we treat one another. Resentment builds up, and then a community may split or someone may leave rather than address it outright. It leads to more loneliness and disconnection when we don’t have the skills to process anger and sit with that discomfort long enough to resolve conflict. 

We don’t have good models for a healthy relationship with anger in our society and, without them, we all know people who enact their unprocessed anger on others. Perhaps even ourselves.

In session, we gently practice inviting anger — or its cousins, frustration and annoyance — into the room so that we can build up a safer connection with it. A lot of folks have never experienced someone who could sit with their anger who does not try to quickly solve it or push it away. 

For me as the practitioner, I welcome clients to express it in whatever ways that feel accessible to them even if it might seem out of their normal character or they worry about hurting me. I tell them that I can experience their anger and still hold them as a whole person. Importantly, I can also set my own boundaries with them and repair if they’re mad at me or it no longer feels safe.

As an illustration of how we can listen to anger as information, I talk to my clients about how I experience that emotion. For me, it’s a force that flashes white hot in the moment, then flames out just as quickly. It’s hard for me to hold onto anger because I am quick to see the perspective of the other person in the situation, which actually makes it difficult to feel my boundaries sometimes. My anger is telling me where I need to stop and, if I don’t heed that warning, I can fall into resentment and overtax myself. It’s an important lesson that I continue to learn.

My client, with crossed arms over their chest, says, “I don’t like feeling this. It’s like I’m stiff all over.”

For me, this is an opening. I ask them more about the sensation and when they’ve felt it in the past. Slowly, it unfolds that they felt unable to voice their anger out of fear, which was also the reason they kept their thoughts to themself in their family home. I can almost see their body visibly loosening as time goes on, now that they could organize what might be sparking that intense feeling. 

It sounds like a small thing, but that ability to introspect on what anger is telling you can over time help you learn how to set boundaries earlier. I characterize it as being responsive to one’s anger (or other emotional information) rather than reactive or overwhelmed. There is no perfection here, but the hope is that when you know your anger better, you have more choice in your response.