How to deal with your anger (when you’re normally calm)
If you’ve spent a lifetime being the level-headed one, it can be difficult to stomach genuine feelings of anger.
You might worry you are losing touch with the calm and compassionate person you have always been, or wanted to be.
Some people seem to express anger easily, but to you it might feel like a strange and unfamiliar thing.
It can feel so apart from ourselves that it feels like: “Here is me, and here is my anger, but we are not the same person.”
“Abby, I’m never normally this angry…why am I like this now?”
It’s fairly common that if anger was less acceptable (or safe) to express openly, you may have redirected your anger into more ‘allowable’ feelings such as helplessness or shame.
This is a completely normal adaptation, by the way. If expressing anger would have created unsafe situations for you, you may have learned to suppress it, turn it inwards, or barely notice that you’re angry at all.
But what about when those old rules fall away? Unfelt anger can resurface in its own time.
It can also come back once we have processed some difficult things that we’ve gone through, and we realise that it was not okay. We realise, perhaps fully for the first time, that we were not deserving of those things.
Perhaps we grew up hoping that one day, as an adult, we’d be able to “do something” about the injustices in the world, and now realise that we are, in some ways, not as powerful as we imagined we would be.
All of these situations can create feelings of anger, and it’s… valid.
“I almost don’t recognise myself when I’m like this… am I turning into a bad person?”
If we’re not used to our own anger, it can come as a really horrible shock.
When it comes in the middle of our day, roaring to the surface — or worse, unexpectedly pouring out of us as we find ourselves shouting at someone either in real life, or mentally— we might look back and think:
“Gosh, was that really me?”
You’re okay. Anger can be surprisingly sharp, and it can be shame-inducing if you believe that “good people don’t feel angry.”
They do!
You might worry that you’re losing the compassionate, kind version of yourself that you thought you were.
But as understandable as that fear is, you’ve not lost yourself.
What is your anger protecting, or asking of you?
Surfacing anger frequently contains information such as:
A boundary: “That wasn’t acceptable.”
An injustice: “I was treated unfairly and I want my pain acknowledged.”
An unmet need: “I needed support and didn’t get it.”
A loss: “I shouldn’t have had to lose that.”
Self-protection: “I don’t want this to happen again.”
Agency: “I want something to change.”
Sometimes there is sadness, fear, shame or grief underneath anger. But importantly, anger doesn’t always need to be reduced to another ‘real’ emotion. Sometimes anger is the appropriate primary emotion.
If you can understand the message your anger is trying to give you, it can result in something utterly beautiful.
Perhaps it’s acknowledgement to yourself that you deserved better, deciding that you will never treat anyone the way you were treated, choosing to walk away from a situation where you are repeatedly devalued.
And I’ll be honest here, often, it’s not ‘utterly beautiful’. You just feel angry for a bit, and nothing miraculous or therapeutic happens.
Yet in that brave act of letting yourself feel what you wish you didn’t have to, you also allow space for your own humanness.
Life can hurt, very badly.
Terrible and unfair things happen, and sometimes there was no repair made, or the attempt was too little, too late.
Anger can be a completely healthy response to the injustices of life.
How to not let the anger overtake you
Anger often isn’t a gentle emotion. Sometimes the waters are bloody rough.
Having the right to feel angry does not give us the right to do awful things because we are angry — but neither do we have to make our anger smaller, softer or more palatable inside in order to be acceptable to ourselves.
I picture anger a little like finding ourselves in rough water in a boat.
The water around us might be absolutely raging. We might be jostled around by it for some time.
We can feel the force of it, acknowledge just how rough it is, and still keep our hands on the oars.
Importantly, we don’t need to tell ourselves the water isn’t there, or beat ourselves up that it is.
We also don’t need to churn the water up even further ourselves — replaying the injustice, adding another venomous thought, imagining one more argument — scooping up the water with our hands and dumping it into our boat.
We can learn to experience angers’ force without assisting it to capsize us.
Our anger can be real, justified and worthy of our attention. It is also wise to not assume that everything we think, say or do while angry being helpful - it may not be!
How do I know whether I’m actually dealing with, or worsening my anger?
Good anger work often leaves you feeling more powerful but less activated.
There is a difference between feeling your anger, and feeding your anger.
So much of therapeutic work is in navigating the grey area between the two.
The grey area is a little uncomfortable and murky, but it’s healthier compared to the extreme ends, where we deny and shame our anger completely away is harmful, and so too, fuelling and deepening it causes harm to ourselves and sometimes others.
What healthy processing actually looks like:
Let yourself know you’re angry.
Don’t immediately explain it away, forgive the person, shame yourself, or convert it into sadness.
Listen for the information.
What boundary, injustice, need, loss or value is being highlighted
Distinguish between the emotion, the story, the urges and the behaviour.
Emotion: “I’m outraged and angry.”
Interpretation: “They did this because they clearly wanted to hurt me.”
Urge: “I want to scream at them.”
Behaviour: Screaming at them.
These aren’t all the same thing.
Decide whether something actually needs doing.
A conversation? Boundary? Complaint? Leaving? Asking for repair? Or simply acknowledging that something happened which cannot now be repaired?
Notice when processing becomes festering.
Rehearsing imaginary arguments, repeatedly constructing evidence for why you’re entitled to be angry, fantasising about somebody finally understanding how badly they hurt you, checking whether you’re still angry — these can feel like emotional processing while actually keeping your threat system engaged.
Give yourself permission to stop
You don’t have to remain angry to prove that what happened really mattered.
Feeling less angry over time doesn’t mean that your anger wasn’t real.
It doesn’t mean that what happened was ‘fine’, that you’ve forgiven someone who you don’t want to forgive, or that you were wrong to feel as strongly as you did.
You don’t have to keep hold of the anger as proof that you were hurt.
It can simply mean that you have moved through your anger, listened to what it had to tell you, and are now able to focus on what you want to do next to support your life.
What happened can still matter, even when it no longer makes you angry.
Get some support if it’s helpful
If anger feels unfamiliar, frightening or difficult to manage, a good therapist can be a great support in helping you process it healthily.
Therapy can give you a safe space to understand where your anger comes from, explore what it might be asking of you, and learn how to experience it without either pushing it away or letting it take over.
If this article resonated with you, you’re welcome to get in touch with me to arrange a free initial call and see whether working together might be a good fit.
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