How Do You Respond to Anger?
When dealing with anger, it is important to remember that you always have a choice in how you respond when you feel angry. No one can take away the power of that choice from you. But what choices are available to you? It often doesn’t feel like you have a choice in the heat of the moment. It is more likely that you feel backed into a corner, threatened, and defensive. Knee-jerk reactions take over and you respond automatically. That is why it is so important on this journey of anger management to first learn how to slow down enough to give yourself time to evaluate what is going on inside of you and understand what is causing your anger. If you haven’t read my blog about the 3 main causes of anger yet, make sure you do that.
Once you understand what causes your anger to flare up, you are better equipped to choose how you want to handle it. You are able to determine the significance of the situation (Is this a big deal? Is my level of anger proportional to what occurred?), the emotions present underneath the anger (fear, sadness, despair, hurt, embarrassment), and what you want your response to accomplish in the end (stop damaging behavior of another, prevent future pain, mend broken relationship, help someone understand how their actions affect you). All of these pieces help you to decide how you want to respond to your anger.
In their book The Anger Workbook, Les Carter and Frank Minirth (2012) lay out 5 choices that are made when anger arises. They are suppression, open aggression, passive aggression, assertiveness, and dropping it. Three of these responses are problematic and only lead to more hurt, pain, and anger, while the last two lead to success, healing, and stable peace.
Suppression
There are many reasons people choose to suppress their anger. You might have been exposed to the damaging effects of anger and vowed to never let such a terrible emotion control you. You might have learned from past experiences that no good ever comes from anger. It seems that anger only produces more conflict and more problems, so it is just easier to not make things into a big deal. Or you might have perfectionistic tendencies and find yourself driven to keep up a certain image no matter what is actually going on under the surface.
If you suppress your anger, you might find yourself questioning the validity of your emotions. You probably devalue your opinions and defer to those who are louder and more outspoken. You might shy away from potentially difficult conversations because you don’t want to cause trouble. Exposing personal problems or needs is also a terrifying prospect, because you’re supposed to be the happy and helpful person in your relationships.
The key to figuring out if you suppress your anger is the question of avoidance. In choosing not to say anything when you are hurt, upset, or have an opinion, are you avoiding something? Is your fear of potential repercussions driving you to stuff down, suppress, and pretend that you don’t have any strong emotions? Ultimately suppression is an attempt to avoid pain.
The problem is that ignoring or hiding anger doesn’t make it go away. It continues to grow and spread in the unseen parts of your interior world. It is at best a short-term solution that puts off painful and uncomfortable interactions until tomorrow. Not to mention the fact that you miss out on the potential growth and deeper connections you could experience by engaging in those uncomfortable conversations!
Open Aggression
Open aggression is the most visible and obvious expression of anger. These are the explosive episodes, the yelling, the name-calling, the blaming, and physical violence. It is self-preservation of personal worth, needs, and convictions, but it comes at someone else’s expense. It doesn’t have to be explosive rage though. It can also look like criticizing others, arguing, cutting others off with rebuttals, and using sarcasm.
Often, open aggression stems from a place of being deeply wounded and mistreated in the past. You might have learned from past experiences that the only way to get people to listen to you and take you seriously is to get loud and be intimidating. Open aggression feels powerful and it prevents others from hurting you. It gives you control and it often feels like the only option available to you. After all, someone was wronging you! What were you supposed to do? Just sit back and take it?
Your needs are legitimate and you are worthy of respect, but open aggression takes shape when your focus on your personal needs completely overshadows the needs of others. The result is a blinding insensitivity that is incapable of taking another person’s needs or perspective into account. Your hurt and your need is so great that it feels like you have the right to do whatever you can to protect yourself or get what you need.
We all wrestle with this expression of anger at times. We respond to others without factoring in their needs far too often. We get so caught up in self-preservation or being right, that we lose sight of the human beings we are hurting and trampling in the process.
This anger response only leads to more anger. It only hurts other people and reinforces that they will not treat you with the respect or kindness you long to receive. At best you will be feared and avoided. At worst you will drive others to respond with equal amounts of disdain and rage, or you will completely drive them away. Regardless, you are left completely alone and not respected or valued by anyone. Open aggression brings about the very things it is attempting to prevent. Others will come to resent you, combat you, disrespect you, respond insensitively to your needs, and ultimately reject you. There has to be another way of dealing with your anger!
Passive Aggression
This expression of anger is a more sly version of open aggression. It shares a similarity in that those who are passive aggressive also do not factor in the needs of the other person. Passive aggression is not loud or explosive, but it is still destructive and used to harm other people. It is preserving your own personal worth, needs, and convictions at someone else’s expense. It is less vulnerable than more explosive forms of anger, meaning it is not easily discredited and doesn’t have the harsh repercussions that losing your temper can have. But it is still an adversarial way of expressing your anger.
Passive aggression can take many forms such as giving the silent treatment, using hidden meanings to insult others, complaining about others behind their back, putting off tasks, giving half-hearted efforts, subtlety sabotaging others’ efforts by procrastinating or not following through on promises, and playing dumb. The list could go on, but the damage of passive aggression is that it is so subtle and difficult to address openly.
As you can see, passive aggression is a powerful tool to manipulate and control others. It screams of distrust and a conviction that open communication will not benefit anyone. Instead those who are passive aggressive communicate angry messages without ever actually coming out and saying it.
If you tend toward passive aggression, you might have learned from the past that your concerns and emotions would not be taken seriously. Maybe you were surrounded by controlling and insensitive people who used your emotions against you or discredited you. Either way, you learned that openly communicating about things that bother you is unsafe and unproductive.
This style of communication only breeds confusion, misunderstanding, and hurt. There is no hope of mutual understanding or productively working through a conflict when passive aggression is used. Communication becomes a game and your only goal is to win by looking better than the other person.
Assertiveness
Assertive expressions of anger are defined by preserving personal worth, needs, and convictions while also considering the needs and feelings of others. Assertiveness is an open and honest form of communication. It is clearly stating your emotions and the cause of your anger with a combination of firmness and respectfulness. You have dignity, but so does the person you are angry with.
The key to assertive communication is first asking yourself, “What do I want to accomplish by conveying my feelings? Why does the anger need to be expressed?” If your answer is, “I want to get even, or I can’t let them get away with this,” then you are headed towards a destructive and adversarial expression of anger. Think about how different your expression of anger would be if your goal was to establish increased harmony in the relationship! The goal dictates what will be said and the tone in which you say it.
It is not attempting to convince someone or win an argument. It is simply laying out what you are thinking and feeling in a bid to deepen the relationship and overcome the current conflict. The other person can take or leave your assertive statement, but that is their choice not yours. Their response to your assertive expression does not invalidate what you communicated.
We live in a broken and imperfect world. Interactions with friends, family, and coworkers will sometimes leave us feeling disrespected, ignored, invalidated, or insignificant. We have legitimate needs that do not get met. In these instances the goal is to properly address your needs, worth, and convictions in a way that builds the relationship and enables you to grow closer to the other person. Conflict can be really good for your relationships if handled respectfully and compassionately! It opens the door to talk about needs and convictions, which can actually reduce conflicts going forward and enable you both to care for each other better.
Dropping It
There are other times, where simply dropping the issue is the healthiest way of dealing with your anger. You can discern when dropping it is appropriate by again asking yourself the question, “What do I want to accomplish by expressing my feelings? Why does my anger need to be expressed right now?”
When answering this question, you might discover that the matter is trivial and your initial emotional response was excessive. You might conclude that it would be unnecessarily harmful or bad timing to express your anger. Or you might decide that there are some things that you can work on in yourself that might improve the situation without confronting someone else.
This takes a great deal of wisdom, self-awareness, and restraint. Ultimately you need to discern when it is appropriate to put aside your need for self-preservation in order to meet the needs of the person you are interacting with. Releasing your anger involves growing in your ability to deal with imperfection in this world and being able to acknowledge that things won’t always go exactly as you planned. Being able to drop it also often involves choosing to forgive.
Dropping it can seem like suppressing anger on the surface, but they are actually very different. As noted above, suppressing anger is a choice motivated by fear and it is an attempt to avoid something. Releasing anger is motivated by a desire to pursue good for yourself and those around you. It is determining which conflicts are worth engaging in for the benefit of the relationship and which conflicts are not beneficial to pursue.
Seeking Help
Learning how to interact in new ways with people in your life can be extremely daunting! If you are at a place where you feel ready to start making some changes in your life, counseling might be a good option for you. I encourage you to reach out to someone for support as you seek to learn more about yourself and grow into the person God created you to be.