A Beginner’s Guide to Anger: What Everyone Needs to Know About Feeling Angry
By Laura Meli, PhD
Anger has long been known as the “forgotten emotion.” It is a feeling many of us prefer to ignore at all costs. Understandably! Feeling angry usually doesn’t feel very good. But avoiding feelings of anger rarely works as intended. Anger has a tendency to bubble up and erupt at the most inopportune times, despite our best efforts to keep it in check. Even if bottling it up feels successful in the short-term, suppressing anger doesn’t come without consequences. Plus, ignoring your anger stops you from accessing its benefits (yes – there are benefits to feeling angry!).
To tap into the benefits of your anger, it’s important to understand that anger is not the enemy. It’s healthy and human to feel angry from time to time. The goal isn’t to stop feeling angry, but rather to effectively manage your response to the emotion when you do feel it arise. With the right tools and support, you can learn how to safely allow and effectively respond to your anger instead of letting it get in the way of things you care about. Doesn’t that sound lovely?
First, let’s discuss why we feel anger at all.
Why do people get angry?
Take a moment and imagine – what would life be like if you never, ever felt angry? Initially, it might sound like an attractive option. Easy breezy, going with the flow, and unbothered without anger always ruining the moment.
What happens, though, when someone hurts your feelings? Blasts music at 6am on a Saturday? Steals your brand-new bike? Plagiarizes your hard work? Are there times where feeling angry feels helpful or essential?
Emotions are one way that our body sends vital messages about our surroundings, needs, and values. Just like all other emotions, anger is a message intended to 1) keep us safe from harm and 2) move us towards the things we value. Then what is so special about anger?
Anger is a powerful emotion that draws attention to our unmet needs, spotlights where our boundaries are being challenged, and energizes us to take meaningful actions against injustices. In many ways, anger is like a fairness detector.
Three types of anger
Despite how it may feel in the heat of the moment, there’s nothing inherently wrong with anger. Rather, it’s what you choose to do with your anger that matters. Separating anger, the emotion that you feel, from the reactions you have in response to anger is essential. And not all anger works in the same way. Identifying and understanding the type of anger you’re feeling is a great first step, so you can choose the best way to respond. To get started, I like to split up anger into three different types:
Reactive anger
Suppressed anger
Righteous rage
Everyone is capable of feeling each of these types of anger, but you may notice that you feel one type of anger more often. As you read on, consider – which type of anger feels most familiar to you?
Managing reactive anger to reduce “anger problems”
Reactive anger is the type of anger most of us imagine – seeing red, feeling feisty, wanting to yell and scream. Thanks to movies, like Inside Out, we have a pretty immediate understanding of how this type of hot-headed anger looks and feels. Reactive anger makes us want to act out, sometimes impulsively, and can feel hard to slow down or let go.
When anger feels too intense, it can lead to consequences: aggressive words and regrettable actions or the slow drain of shame and self-criticism. Without the right tools, reactive anger become problematic and leave you feeling disempowered or defunct. But remember: You are not your anger. You are a person who feels your anger. This means you are in the driver’s seat – anger is just a passenger.
If you struggle with reactive anger, mindfulness is crucial to improving your ability to down-regulate – or decrease – the intensity of your anger. I know it might seem counterintuitive – how can you feel “calm” and pissed off at the same time? And that’s exactly the point – you can’t! By intentionally practicing relaxation exercises when you’re feeling anger begin to build, you can teach your nervous system to react differently when you feel angry. Mindfulness helps reactive anger feel less overwhelming and more controlled.
While there are tons of resources out there for mindfulness beginners, it can still be tricky to get started. Therapy is a safe and effective space to learn about your anger, find and practice the right mindfulness strategies for you, and begin to soothe your reactive anger.
Bottling it up: The consequences of suppressing anger
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I’m not an angry person,” you might see yourself more in suppressed anger. Never feeling angry can also hint at an “anger problem.” People who tend to suppress their anger often think they never feel anger or may feel really low-level frustration in response to situations that would make others see red. Chronically low levels of anger in response to injustice or boundary violations can be a sign of difficulties up-regulating, or feeling, your emotions.
Suppressed anger is sometimes adaptive. While anger is universal, culture and society have problematic expectations around who should feel anger and how anger should be shown. These societal expectations can make anger feel incompatible with your identities.
For some, it can even feel dangerous to express anger in certain settings. Women and femme individuals, in particular, often have difficulties acknowledging and expressing anger due to ways that society has gendered and socialized emotions. People of color and those with multiple, marginalized identities can struggle with suppressed anger, given stereotyping, prejudices, and oppressive systems.
When it feels unsafe to feel or show anger, it makes perfect sense to seek safety in avoidance and turn to emotional suppression. The choice to suppress anger often goes hand-in-hand with societal expectations of peace-keeping, passivity, smiling and nodding, being demure. However, suppressing your anger doesn’t mean that the anger is gone. No, no, no – suppressed anger continues to live on just under the surface. In fact, research has shown that suppressing anger can actually intensify it, causing irritability, moodiness, rumination, and even hopelessness and depression.
If you’re just beginning to explore the idea of suppressed anger, it can feel difficult to know where to start. After all, you’re probably well-practiced at not feeling. Using therapy as a non-judgmental space to explore your range of emotions can help you feel more emotionally self-aware and confident in expressing your needs.
Identity and injustice: Channeling righteous rage
If you’re paying attention, there is a lot to be angry about these days. When you experience anger in response to a collective injustice – like social inequities, sexism, ableism, racism, colonialism, or climate injustice, to name a few – I strongly encourage you not to suppress it or turn a blind eye. This type of anger is precious – it is righteous rage.
Part of the inherent value of anger is the connection it has to injustice. Righteous rage tells us when our rights have been violated, when we are tolerating an unfair burden, or when we’ve simply had enough. When you begin to tap in to righteous rage, it can feel overwhelming and unwieldy – it’s intense. This intensity is there for a reason, though – to provide you the energy, resources, and motivation for real change. If you learn how to feel and channel this intense energy, it can become a powerful guide for individual growth, collective liberation, social movements, and systemic revolution.
Righteous rage can begin to feel exhausting when you don’t see a way forward. When injustices and stressors feel inevitable, anger can dissolve into hopelessness, or even lead to depression and physical health issues. For many, staying in touch with righteous rage can feel unsustainable, and it may be tempting to ignore righteous rage. Sometimes, it is necessary to step away from your anger for your well-being - and that’s ok.
Finding ways to meaningfully engage in self-care, take healing breaks, and seek connection with others can provide the restoration and balance to feel your anger in a healthy way. Exploring the roots of your righteous rage in therapy can help you increase self-understanding, find your personalized self-care strategies, and begin to channel your righteous rage into the collective action our communities need.
Resources if you’re curious about anger
Everyone’s anger looks and feels different. If you’re curious about getting to know more about your emotional self, I encourage you to explore others’ experiences with and expressions of anger. Below are some of my favorite resources that can help you get started:
See mindfulness for anger in action with Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh’s tools for dealing with anger (9 min watch)
Explore anger as a gendered and socialized emotion in Bahamian-American activist, Soraya Chemaly’s talk on The Power of Women’s Anger (11 min watch)
Psychologist, Maytal Eyal, explores how suppressing anger impacts physical health and plays a role in chronic illness (6 min read)
Poet-activist, Virginia Vigiliar, considers righteous rage (5 min read) and discusses anger and intersectionality with Vietnamese-American writer, Kim Thai (7 min read)
Taking the first step: Consider therapy for anger
If you’ve been noticing that anger, or other emotions, are negatively impacting your day-to-day or feel that something is getting in the way of living your best life, you don’t have feel stuck or suffer in silence. Therapy can help.
Consider reaching out to a therapist who specializes in emotion regulation and mindfulness. The team of psychologists at Manhattan Therapy Collective specialize in multiculturally-informed approaches to emotion regulation and are trained in understanding your mental health needs and lived experiences through a social justice lens.
We welcome you to book a free consultation call with us today, visit our FAQ page to learn more, or ask us your questions over email. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here
About the Author: Laura Meli, PhD (she/her) is a clinical psychologist with a passion for helping empower others through psychoeducation, emotion regulation, and mindfulness. Over the past 10 years of her career, she has learned to harness her own anger (and lots of it!) toward issues of educational and health equity, racial justice, climate change awareness, and queer liberation. She likes to practice mindfulness for anger creatively, through visual art, movement, and breathwork.