Discovering What Your Anger is All About
Photo by Ryan Franco on Unsplash
Why am I so angry?!
I found myself searching for a good target for the rage that was steadily building steam in my chest . . . suddenly, my husband walked in. He’s always a good target!
I vent.
I explode.
I settle.
I wait.
I regret.
Why did I do that? He didn’t really deserve that. What’s going on with me?
Have you ever had an authentic French baguette—fresh and warm out of the oven? It smells so good that you can’t wait to get home before breaking off a piece of that crunchy crust and biting into it. If you're lucky, you get both the crunch and a bit of that soft, tender interior.
“Did she lose her way in this article?” you begin to ask yourself. What do baguettes have to do with anger, anyway?
Actually, really good, crusty French bread has a lot in common with our anger. Some emotions, like anger, are similar to the crusty exterior of perfectly made French baguettes (not to be compared with what you get in an American grocery store). Anger, irritation, and rage are crusty, external emotions that often cover a more delicate form of emotion that’s underneath—like the soft interior of a baguette.
We can’t get to the tender interior without a bit of work to get through the crusty (and somewhat satisfying) external emotion.
It may be time to explore what emotions lie underneath the crusty ones you experience and uncover what’s beneath. Let anger open up discovery.
Underlying Emotions of Anger
When I look beneath my crusty, exterior emotions, I often find other, more tender, emotions lying underneath.
We have so much going on in our lives at any given moment, it’s normal for us to encounter multiple feelings at the same time. Noticing all the varied emotions, and seeing what subtle ones may be playing a part in our experience, can be extremely helpful. It enables us to attend to our inner needs and break open awareness and new discoveries that can help us grow as a person.
Fear:
When your life feels unstable, uncertain, and/or threatened, fear may be the softer emotion underlying your anger. Fear may result from physical threats to our wellbeing, but there are more subtle threats to our identity, our role, or our self image that can also cause fear and get baked into anger.
Anger seems an effective defense against fear. Why? Because it’s not possible to feel fear when we are angry. I can protect myself from feeling fear by being angry. When I am angry, I feel powerful and justified. When I am afraid, I feel vulnerable.
For example, sadly, every time my children get hurt, I react in anger. I instinctively yell and scream at them, a direct response to my fear.
Hurt:
The pain that comes with rejection, or other types of wounds, leaves us in a very tender, vulnerable, even exposed posture. It’s common for our emotions to reach out and grab anger as a response. It makes us feel like there is something we can do to soothe the pain. It gives us a comforting sense of control which may temporarily ease our pain—but doesn’t really heal it.
Loss and grief are special forms of hurt that we regularly experience. It can help to take time to “Identify the Losses of Expat Life.” One of the most common losses is having so many people move in and out of our lives every year. We don’t always get to say good goodbyes. “The Many Pieces of Grief” is an emotion chart focused on the numerous emotions we can experience in loss. Anger is one, of course, but there may be others that surprise you.
Interested in identifying your own emotions?
Download SeeBeyond’s Emotions Chart now offered in French, Spanish and Arabic too!
Click here.
Guilt or Shame:
Having a sense of being wrong, feeling regret, being blameworthy (guilt), or feeling humiliated or deeply embarrassed (shame) can be profoundly uncomfortable. Like the previous categories, guilt and shame both threaten a stable or safe sense of self and identity. We don’t enjoy seeing ourselves through the lens of either, so we naturally look for ways to change our experience. Latching on to anger makes us feel more powerful. It can shift the focus to someone or something else instead of the uncomfortable awareness we might be experiencing inside of ourselves.
Where do these emotions come from?
Our emotions, both tender and tough, can come from many sources. Here are a few for you to consider:
Transition and Culture Shock:
Transitions (specifically cultural transitions) send our whole being through a series of unsettling experiences. We often don’t have a recognized “box” to categorize these experiences. Our minds get thrown off balance, and we begin to feel unsafe in the ups and downs of the transition or the culture shock cycle. Fear can grow. Embarrassment at not knowing how “this” is supposed to work affects our sense of identity. Those early months (even years) of learning a new language are a familiar example. We feel inadequate, and even childish, as we fumble through trying to communicate.
Guilt or shame can creep in when we don’t act as we “should.” All these tender feelings easily transform in the heat of our experience—like the heat of an oven—into the crusty experience of anger, irritation, frustration, or something similar.
COVID-19 Note: When a crisis happens that changes our routines, disrupts our lives, and forces us into a “new normal,” we go through a similar type of transition or culture cycle that happens when people move internationally. As a result, we can expect the same types of experiences, with possible honeymoon, frustration, adjustment, and acceptance stages. Anger would likely manifest in the “frustration” stage. Some of the COVID-19 humor expresses the anger that comes from a new living situation:
Unmet Expectations:
No matter how much we try not to have expectations, we do. Our brain is much more settled and feels safer when it explicitly or implicitly can picture what might happen. We often don’t realize that we had any expectation at all until it goes unmet.
Be it finances that don’t come in as we had planned, material losses, an unfulfilled hope, or relationships we believed would be fulfilling but turned out not to be, expectations play a big role in our emotions. It’s no wonder, then, that John Shindeldecker, team mediation expert, estimates that more than 95% of conflict on teams he works with comes from unmet expectations.
Self-Pity:
Self-pity is an inward focus over our own problems that can lead to a downward spiral, sucking us into a very self-absorbed pit. It’s a type of entitlement or pride that makes us think our suffering is worse or more significant than others.
Certainly, we all have legitimate needs that we’d like to have met. However, when our gaze gets focused in an unhealthy way on “me, me, me,” and we start to feel entitled, we dip into self-pity. Anger can rise when we let our pride and self-focus cloud our judgment and twist our expectations of others.
Loss of Control/Feeling Unsafe:
I don’t know about you, but driving in a foreign country—especially with my spouse at the wheel—has a tendency to produce anger in me. He would say the same thing! It’s not uncommon for those living cross-culturally to experience a “road rage” they have never experienced “back home.” One kind, caring woman I know, when living in North Africa, actually broke the airbag in her steering wheel from hitting the horn too hard—angry with a driver who threatened the safety of her passengers!*
We don’t relish being out of control. It tends to make us feel unsafe, insecure—whether or not that’s actually true—and thus, fearful. So anger naturally raises its head in an effort to seek control.
Memories:
Sometimes we have a big reaction, like an explosion of anger, to something that should be no big deal. Often, this is because a piece of the current situation triggered an implicit, unrecognized memory from a time when our sense of self and view of the world was shaped.
I had a car accident many years ago in Morocco. It was actually very minor, but the way the other driver ignored me when I was discussing it calmly caused an explosion of anger inside me. I realized later that his response had triggered an old hidden memory of how one of my four parent figures related to me. You can learn more about this in “Little Event, BIG Response! What just happened?”
Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
Injustice:
Maybe more than any other trigger for anger, injustice seems to produce anger more directly, rather than flowing through another softer, more vulnerable, emotion first. Being accused wrongly, or seeing others get away with wrongdoing, produces what I might call a “pure form” of anger.
It may be the taxi driver overcharging your visitor, the way that street boy was just mistreated, older foreign visitors who take advantage of poor local youth, or required bribes to get the papers you need for your business. These injustices naturally produce anger.
Let anger open up discovery.
On a hot summer day, maybe 22 years ago, when I was still fairly new in Morocco, I’d stopped in the local hanout to get some things for lunch. The gentleman ahead of me had asked the store manager, Khalid, to make him a sardine sandwich on a French baguette. Khalid grabbed a baguette and cut it lengthwise to prepare it. Then he took his two fingers and dug out the tender part of the bread on both sides, setting the interior on the counter.
He noticed my surprised look and said, “It makes you fat.” Moroccans don’t like the soft centers of their French baguettes.
Personally, that was my favorite part, and I started a habit of asking for those soft interiors when I saw them sitting on the counter. I gobbled them up as my little treat when I visited the hanout.
The crusty part of the bread has a purpose. It has its own flavor, and it’s crunch can be very satisfying. It’s also a sign—a sign that something soft and tender may be lying just beneath—with its own treasures to share.
We can tend to think of anger as “bad.” However, just like every other emotion, anger is neither good nor bad. In and of themsevles, our emotions, including anger, are a gift—signals that something significant is happening inside you.
Let anger open up discovery.
What is going on inside of you that needs some attention?
Maybe it’s a good time to read back through this article with your journal in hand. Or share it with a friend or coach and talk about it over coffee. Maybe it’s time to download our emotion chart and discover what else you are feeling besides your anger.
*Story shared with permission.
