Are you allowed to be angry?

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In a poll on Brown Girl Therapy last year, I asked if anyone in the community grew up with anger as a normalized part of discipline or communication and 90 percent of 2,400 respondents said yes.

Why is anger such a difficult emotion to metabolize?

Common experiences with anger in this community:

1. We have been conditioned to believe that anger is “mean” or “disrespectful” or “dangerous.” We have learned that angry is explosive, not a healthy emotion.

2. For many people who were raised in volatile or chaotic households, anger often is equated to punishment. If a parent was angry, then you were conditioned to believe it was a precursor to something bad/dangerous/unhealthy. Many clients will discuss a parent’s emotional and verbal abuse—stonewalling, invalidation, and unfiltered and explosive anger—and defend it as normal and cultural. Here’s the thing: abuse in the guise of love is still abuse.

3. Anger is not a convenient emotion, especially in households where you were expected to always be happy, keep the peace, be agreeable. Many of us in these circumstances learn to suppress anger — which can make it explosive or can take a toll on your wellness.

What is your anger telling you?

Anger manifests and impacts us all differently—especially because of sociocultural and gender narratives. Even today, my mom often tells me that I am “scary” when I am outspoken or advocating for myself. I don’t yell. I don’t use harsh language. I am just clear and direct. Often, she is joking, and I know that, culturally, my way of communicating is strange to her; I am going against the norms of what an “Indian woman” should or shouldn’t sound like. But by labeling me scary rather than showing curiosity about or compassion for where I am coming from, she burdens me with the shame of feeling too much. In this vein, one community member shared that there were double standards in his home when it came to expressing anger.

The explosive nature of anger, directed inward or outward, is a result of an inability to manage our emotions in a healthy way—first, an inability to identify what we are feeling, and second, an inability to learn how to manage that feeling before it turns into anger.

Anger is often a secondary emotion, which means it’s alerting us to something else that is happening and has been ignored. Anger gives us a false sense of control over our emotions, but it’s usually not productive. With that said, anger is not a “bad” emotion. It’s healthy and can alert us to feeling betrayed, frustrated, sad, disappointed, and so on. It has only been categorized as “bad” socially and culturally. The reality is that anger management is emotion management/regulation.

I didn’t know then what I know now: anger protects us from feeling our shame and fear. We may feel internally motivated to choose it over the discomfort of disappointment and disconnection.

Anger is uncomfortable but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

One of my therapy clients started seeing me for anger management because those close to her had told her that she needed it for lashing out suddenly and unexpectedly. In fact, after months together, we were able to identify that her anger was the result of relationship trauma that had started in childhood when a parent abandoned her and later resurfaced with a partner who often made her feel similar feelings of betrayal.

By pinpointing the roots of her anger, she was able to work toward communicating her feelings healthily and approaching her current relationships from a place of curiosity and connection rather than defensiveness.

Keep reading for:

• Explanation of anger privilege

• How unexpressed anger is specifically hurting women

• How culture, politics and injustice feeds anger narratives in BIPOC