I come from Aotearoa/New Zealand and I reckon as a society we have this weird relationship with anger.* In the land of the tall poppy syndrome (don’t get too big for your boots) and hardening up (build a bridge and get over it, and for goodness sake don’t look weak!) it seems that although losing your cool is not always cool it is much more acceptable to express anger than it is to express fear or vulnerability. Yes, this is a gross generalisation but when I look around me I see it, and I see the harm that is done by it too.
Anger as an emotion
Anger as an emotion can be amazing! If Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa didn’t get angry they wouldn’t have changed the world like they did. It can communicate that there is an injustice being done in some way, to you or others. It is an energy that can create positive action. I may stand up for myself or someone else, I might create a campaign or contribute to a group, I might make a decision to not engage with a particular person or group of people, I might spend some time journaling or reflecting to understand what the anger is communicating with me… I use the energy to take action. I don’t need to do this in a violent or angry way. There is a difference between emotion and behaviour- and it is one we have to address.
Emotion and behaviour
Our emotions generally come unbidden and for a large part they arrive whether invited or not. They just are. I see emotions as energy in motion, that they are there to help move us toward or away from something. Emotions help to give our world colour and shape. Behaviour is about the actions that we take. Behaviour is what we do and say and how we engage with the world. Our behaviour can be influenced by our emotions BUT our emotions are not an excuse for poor behaviour. Just because we feel angry, even justifiably, does not mean that violence to self, others or things around us is OK. We can use the energy from anger to take action without violence.
One of the big problems I see with anger is that people often suppress their feelings of anger, for fear that they will hurt someone’s feelings or that it isn’t lady-like (I have actually been given that advice before) or that it won’t make a difference. If, like I have suggested, emotions are energy then the old scientific law that energy doesn’t go away it just transforms into another form can apply here too perhaps. What happens when we don’t express our anger is that it gets stored in our bodies perhaps as potential energy… store it for long enough, constantly adding to it, and at some point that potential energy is going to be realised, it’s going to either implode or explode and leave a mess behind! We don’t want that.
We can learn to express our feelings of anger in healthy ways. We can create boundaries, we can say what we think, we can write (journaling is fabulous!), we can use the energy that anger gives us to move our bodies (I have discovered ball slams at the gym… thoroughly recommend, it feels amazing!!!), we can cry, scream, write poetry, sing, kick a ball, we can take action, we can use our voice, we can undertake a campaign, we can learn to say no. We can express our anger without violence. Angry does not mean violence.
What lies beneath
This is angry’s dirty little secret, especially in spaces where showing vulnerability is a taboo. What lies beneath anger is often a whole lot of other emotions that we are just scared of or ill-equipped to express. Emotions like fear, loneliness, anxiety, shame, grief, sadness, disillusionment, embarrassment can all lurk under the cloak of anger. As I said at the start, expressing anger appears to be more socially acceptable than expressing vulnerable emotions like fear or embarrassment so often what we see is not a fair representation of what is being felt. (The Anger Iceberg is a great visual to help people understand this, like an iceberg, what lies beneath is wider and deeper than what we see above). Anger can act like an invisible shield or armour protecting us from the vulnerability of exposing our deeper, more sensitive emotions.
People expressing anger, especially in verbally or physically violent ways, causes us to move away from the ‘angry person’ or punish them for their angry outbursts which isolates them further. Sometimes those people are really experiencing a depth of vulnerability they are ill-equipped to manage. This punishment or isolation can fuel their anger as it feels unjust, this is the vicious cycle of unhealthy or immature emotional expression. It hurts.
What can we do?
Emotional literacy encourages us to notice. name and respond to our emotions. It supports us to recognise our own emotional landscapes and identify ways that we can express our emotions in a healthy manner. We don’t come out of the womb with this knowledge, we come out feeling our emotions but the rest we learn through co-regulation with others. We learn by seeing, feeling and doing with other people. If we want to have young people who can regulate themselves (if I got a dollar for every time I heard this desire over the last 10 years I swear I’d be a millionaire) then the adults around them need to do the work too. We can suggest and guide of course but we must also use the language and model emotional literacy and regulation ourselves, and then do with our children before we expect them to go solo.
What if we made it normal to talk about tough stuff and how we really feel? I remember a while back I was going through a really tough time and a colleague asked “how are you?”, I responded with “not great to be honest” and they walked past saying “sorry to hear that’. It was a gut punch, they were clearly not in a space ready to receive an honest response, and internally my anger rose her head as it felt unjust. What would happen if we made it normal to pause when we ask how someone is, and really listened to the response? What if it was OK to not be OK?
What would happen if when we see someone losing their cool, we paused and looked beneath the tip of the iceberg of their behaviour to the emotions that lie beneath? If we want our children to learn to regulate themselves we need to help them understand their own emotional landscape and teach them (model, describe, practice, coach) about regulation, first through co-regulation (which I’ll talk more about at a later date).
The time to talk about the anger and what lies beneath is not in the heat of the moment, things are too hot and explosive in that space. In the heat of the moment we can only see the pain and anger, our focus is narrow. We need to address this outside of the crisis or distress, when things are cooled down. Then we can see our wider emotional landscape and explore.
We are so much more than any one of our emotions. I honestly believe learning to befriend our emotions by noticing, naming and responding to them has the capacity to help us live happier, healthier lives.
*I am aware that this is not all people in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I am also aware that this is not isolated to Aotearoa/New Zealand.