When anger is understood as a primary response to something, perhaps mistreatment or injustice, it can be helpful. For example, a person may feel angry in response to feeling hurt or feel fearful or guilty in response to their anger. Greenberg distinguishes primary emotions, a person’s “most fundamental, direct initial reactions to a situation,” such as anger at a loss, from their secondary emotions, responses to one’s thoughts or feelings rather than to the situation itself. “Many people think that anger is always dysfunctional, that it’s maladaptive, but – handled well – anger can be a very healthy emotion.” “Another controversial idea is that anger can be adaptive and healthy,” said Emotion-focused therapist and founder Dr. Distinguish adaptive from maladaptive anger.Īny emotion can offer us clues into who we are and what affects us. When we fester in the process of building a case, we tend to hurt ourselves or others and are more likely to engage in destructive actions. It’s often a natural, instinctive response that we can be curious about, but we don’t need to let it hijack our thinking. Remember, an angry feeling doesn’t have to make perfect sense to us in the moment we’re experiencing it. Avoid building a case.Īllowing ourselves to acknowledge and accept our anger doesn’t mean we should get carried away in the details or an effort to rationalize what we’re feeling.
Pat Love puts it, we can always “feel the feeling, but do the right thing.” 3. Daniel Siegel calls a “COAL” approach to our anger, which means we’re Curious, Open, Accepting, and Loving toward ourselves and what we’re experiencing, even when it feels unacceptable to us. Taking a nonjudgmental approach to our feelings means we can allow them to be there without getting too attached to them. Every feeling we have is acceptable and is not damning or determinant of who we are. Remember, anger doesn’t have to be rational.
We may turn the feeling against ourselves, or it may seep out in passive aggression, cynicism, irritability, or hostility. When we’re not honest about what we’re feeling, our anger can wind up being misplaced. The only difference is we drift further and further from consciously processing or making sense of it, which leads to more confusion around how we feel in general.įailure to process our anger, as well as outright attempts to suppress it, can have negative effects on us mentally and physically. Don’t ignore it.ĭespite our best efforts to deny or gloss over an emotion, it still tends to affect us.
Here are some helpful principles to adopt that can transform the way we deal with our anger. This means challenging our existing ideas about what it is and finding more adaptive, nonreactive, and nonjudgmental ways of approaching it. In order to find healthier ways to cope with anger, we have to change our relationship to it.
Yet, failing to face and accept our anger can lead to a series of maladaptations and take a toll on our physical and mental health. As a result, they develop conflicted feelings and unhealthy patterns around this heated emotion.īecause anger often gets confused with aggression, people tend to think of it as something toxic that they should avoid. They may struggle with any stage of processing, coping with, or expressing their anger.
Yet, many people have a complicated relationship with it. Anger, Critical Inner Voice, Self DevelopmentĪnger is a natural and inevitable human emotion.