One of the most difficult problems most of my clients over the years have had is dealing with their angry feelings in an effective way. The topic is complicated and I shall be devoting several blogs on it, including how to deal with it in therapy. The difficulties fall into these non mutually-exclusive categories:
1. They equate anger with blame, e.g., when they begin to realize in therapy ways in which they were failed by their parents, beginning to feel angry toward them, but then experiencing guilt about that.
2. They have a moral judgement about it, seeing it as a bad, even evil emotion. This attitude is often fostered by certain religious entities, communicating that anger is the opposite of love.
3. They hold themselves up to the standards of certain historical, even spiritual figures who are mistakenly seen as non-angry. One of these figures is Gandhi, who actually felt much anger toward the British, but used his anger is a nonviolently resistant way to overthrow their rule.
4. They don’t discriminate between different levels of anger, e.g., equating all anger as destructive rage.
5. They don’t discriminate between physical and verbal ways of expressing anger.
6. They are unable to express mild levels of anger, squelch it, and then explode with rage when squelching no longer works.
7. They turn their anger against themselves instead of expressing it toward those they are really angry at.
8. They displace their anger from the person they are primarily angry at to someone who is a safer target.
The Etiology of Anger and Learning Its Uses in Everyday Life
Anger is actually one of the eight precursors to emotion that trained psychologists can reliably code when observing the behavior of newborn infants. It would be a mistake to call the yelling, intense facial expressions and thrashing around infants display as anger because infants don’t have the cognitive development and verbal ability to encode intense frustrating bodily sensations as anger. That ability comes later in life when they have parents who, themselves, are comfortable with this emotion and know how to help their children deal with it. This type of parent can help their children label their felt experience as anger and teach them how to use it appropriately. Unfortunately, the majority of the clients I’ve had through the years have not had this type of parenting. Then anger becomes one of the most conflictual and taboo emotions they experience, the result of not having learned how to identity the feeling and how to use it in various contexts throughout their lives. Bob Stolorow and his late wife. Daphne, wrote about what parents need to do in dealing with all of their emotions, including anger. I referenced this article in my blog: Emotion And The Self: Inclusion Of The Concepts Of Robert Stolorow And Colleagues. I shall recap the main points here as they relate to anger.
1. Responding to the child as being the same, worthwhile person whatever they are expressing. In other words, the child is cared for, accepted and valued when they are showing and expressing anger.
2. The parent is able to tolerate the child’s intense expressions of anger without becoming frightened and overwhelmed by it.
3. They are able to understand, interpret and accept the child’s anger and respond empathically to their individualized and constantly changing anger states. In so doing, they are enabling the child to internalize this understanding and acceptance of anger, eventually providing it for themselves.
4.. Desomatizing and cognitively articulating the child’s expressing of anger. This is the process of transforming affects into emotions that can be verbally expressed. The parent can see by the child’s intense bodily expression that they are angry and able to say something as simple as “You look like you are feeling very angry right now.” This eventually helps the child to label their own bodily sensations as “Oh, I’m feeling angry.”
And I would add a fifth job the parent must do: helping the child learn how to express their angry feelings in appropriate ways depending on what the parent can accept and the context in which the child finds themself. For example, telling the parent in an angry voice, “I am very mad at you.” The parent may not accept the child saying “I hate you” or “I wish you were not my mother.” And letting the child know that expressing it to the parent or practically anyone else physically by hitting or throwing something is not acceptable.
And helping the child to understand the difference between feeling angry and expressing anger. The parent needs to let the child know that it’s okay to feel angry in certain situations, but that they need to find some other way of dealing with it rather than showing it openly. For example, Grandma may be a very sensitive, easily hurt person who responds very negatively to anger. A teacher in school might not accept the child’s anger and retaliate in some way. A classmate may become very physically aggressive if the child were to express anger to him or her. I had to learn early in my career that showing anger toward certain clients resulted in them quitting therapy! I had to learn why I was feeling that way and finding a way to deal with it that helped the client and was satisfying to me.
I will discuss some specific examples of client difficulties in dealing with anger in a future post and how therapists should deal with the difficulties.