The Emotions Series: Your Anger Loves You
One thing I don’t compromise on, both in therapy and in life? Emotions are morally neutral.
It’s never wrong or bad to experience a certain emotion. Some emotions definitely feel more pleasant or comfortable than others (for example, joy or gratitude vs. shame or resentment), but labels of rightness and wrongness do not apply. When it comes to emotions, there is no virtuous or evil way to feel.
Unfortunately, anger gets a bad rap. Many of us are taught to judge or fear anger the most among all our feelings. From childhood, we receive the message that our anger is not welcome, that it’s dangerous, that it threatens our connection to our caregivers and loved ones.
But as we grow and start healing some of our childhood wounding, we can heal our relationship to anger. Because it turns out that your anger loves you. It shows up to let you know that something isn’t right — that there has been a violation of your values or your dignity. It reminds you that you don’t accept what’s happening, what’s being said, or how you or others are being treated.
Because it loves you, it’s also trying to protect you. It also knows that some things are hard for you to feel. When anger arises, often there’s another, more painful emotion standing behind it. You know how a caring person will sit down with you and hold your hand before delivering bad news? Anger shows up to alert you that, when you’re ready, there’s an important truth for you to acknowledge and a difficult feeling for you to sit with.
When we’re ready to do that work, we can greet our anger when it shows up and then peek over its shoulder. Who is standing behind it? Is it fear, sadness, or shame? Rejection, worry, insecurity? Then, as we deepen our ability to skillfully sit with our emotions, it’s common to start feeling those difficult emotions without anger’s early alert system. When we are less afraid and more welcoming of all our feelings, we no longer need anger to preempt them. Like a loving parent, anger knows when we’re ready to face the tough stuff on our own.
So rather than fear anger as a way of losing our connection to others, let’s honor it as a way to reconnect with ourselves. Instead of pushing it down or denying it, we can get to know it, befriend it, and ask it what it wants us to know. Anger invites us to take a closer look, and to return to harmony and authenticity with our experience. Because anger loves us, it offers us that map back to ourselves.
A note of clarification: the feeling of anger is welcome and important. How we act on our anger, just as how we act on any emotion, is our responsibility to manage well — to express in a safe and healthy way that doesn’t hurt others or ourselves. If you need help managing your anger, please reach out to a therapist or another trusted guide for support.