As a therapist, I think a lot about people’s emotions and how various emotions show up in a session, I consider how to understand the emotion, and, of course, I think about what the emotion means to the client. And there is the issue of to what extent the unexpressed emotion needs to be expressed in some way. Usually, I have observed over time, people do not express their emotions very fully, or they tend to over-express them. My training and experience have shown me that people have a basic need to express their emotions, and by “expressing” I mean they have a need to demonstrate them in some way that shows up externally. I think of it as the energetic emotion needing to be moved out of the body/mind and, therefore, “ex-pressed.”
I once read that emotion stands for “energy in motion,” that there is an energy within the body/mind that needs to move. The emotion moves within the body/mind and often moves out of the body in various ways. The nature of any emotion is to move. And it seems to me, having worked in the field of psychotherapy for three decades, that human emotions in our modern society are not well understood and not appropriately exprssed. Which brings me to the current topic: the emotion of anger. So let’s look at this difficult and oh so prevalent emotion and look at the components of it, and later on we will look at the various ways that it may be expressed.
When I was a graduate intern at Family Services of Greater Utica, I was trained in how to work with men who had been involved in domestic violence against partners, and I served as an assistant to the therapist who ran the men’s DV group. We ran the group together, and as the weeks progressed I was learning about DV and how to run such a group. I remember something called “the anger funnel,” and a handout we gave to the participants. It showed how at the wide end of the funnel there were all kinds of feelings, for instance, hurt, sadness, betrayal, fear, loneliness, etc., and at the narrow end was just anger. It was the type of thing that falls under the category of “one picture is worth a thousand words.” The picture demonstrated that all kinds of emotions can occur within a person, and, if channeled through the anger funnel, only one thing is the evident result. This was a huge lesson for me, to understand this concept, as I moved forward into my career.
I always look up things on Wikipedia, a resource that often contains good, basic information, and it is a place to start before getting into heavier, more in-depth websites or resources. The Wikipedia article on anger is quite good, and explains the concept from a number of approaches. It says that anger is related to the word “rage,” which most of us would assume, but it is also related to the word “wrath,” which I think you would agree is a word not in common usage in American English. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online says that the definition of anger is “a strong feeling of displeasure and usually of antagonism.” That sounds about right.
A definition of wrath is “strong, vengeful anger,” and a second definition is “retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement.” This may be helpful to us generally to understand the difference between these concepts, which are related but certainly not the same thing. And it says that rage is “violent and uncontrolled anger.” Now that we have some definitions, let’s look further at the whole issue of anger.
We know that anger has several components to it. A person experiencing anger has physiological changes, including increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and increased levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline. Anger appears to be connected to the “fight or flight” response. Anger can become the predominant feeling behaviorally, cognitively, and physiologically when a person makes the conscious choice to take action to stop behavior that they perceive as an immediate or impending threat to themselves or others.
I think of anger as the emotion which people call on when there is a threat to themselves or others, and they want to contain or control the threat. I see anger as very much involved in the attempt to control a situation that feels out of control, and, therefore, is related to the fear that something is or is about to be out of control, usually because someone or something is likely to be hurt or damaged or destroyed. To me, anger is a response to an immediate threat. It is interesting to compare this to the emotion of fear, which is also defined as a response to an immediate threat. And, of course, anger and fear are very much related emotions.
One of the things I have learned in life, both personally and professionally, is that people often do not handle their anger well. I would say that generally speaking, people in our society are not taught how to handle their anger, do not understand their anger, and do not know how to manage their anger. I remember that Carl Jung said something like “it is OK to have anger. But you need to be able to control it.” In my next article I will go into all this in more depth: the complexity of anger, the management of anger, and the widespread inability of people to express their anger appropriately.
By, Terry McMaster, LMSW, EAP Counselor