Do You Struggle with Anger? Try Regulating, Not Venting
Image by Alain Bonnardeux/Unsplash
How are you with anger? If you have a healthy relationship with this powerful and much-maligned emotion, you will be comfortable both feeling it yourself and handling it in other people. If you get angry, you will be able to express it – telling your unreasonable, bullying boss his behaviour is unacceptable. And if your boss then starts yelling at you, you will be able to stiffen your spine, hold his gaze and tell him, calmly but firmly, that if he doesn’t stop yelling your next stop will be human resources to file a complaint.
Sadly, most of us are not so comfortable with anger, for many different reasons. Let’s start with an evolutionary one: anger, like anxiety, is a threat-focused emotion. It signals danger. That’s why we all stop and stare when we hear shouting in the street, because your amygdala (the threat-scanning part of your brain) wants to make sure you are not in immediate danger.
And for many people reading this, anger was dangerous in childhood. You may have had chaotic, volatile parents who dealt with conflict by screaming and smashing things. They might have reacted to minor transgressions by bellowing at you, which is terrifying for a small child. Perhaps you experienced bullying, at school or by a sibling. If so, the bully’s anger – whether loud and physical, or quiet and vindictive – would have been dangerous for little you.
How we learn to swallow anger
This is how we learn to repress anger as kids, because it’s not safe to be around or express. If you react with anger to that volatile parent, and you are a little seven-year-old, they will probably turn it up to 11 and squash you. So you learn to bite your tongue, say nothing or desperately try to say the right thing to pacify them as quickly as possible, before too much damage is done.
And because so many people have problems with anger, either being explosive – screaming and shouting all the time – or implosive – swallowing it all down – many therapists are taught to help people express anger healthily. During both my CBT and schema therapy trainings, I was taught how to help clients vent, writing angry letters that then get burned, screaming into a cushion or punching a pillow. These techniques are anger-management 101 and I have taught them to people for years, as well as using them myself.
So it came as somewhat of a shock to read this fascinating piece of research, published in 2024, which did a meta-analysis of 154 studies, involving 10,189 participants. The researchers found that approaches like those above actually helped people increase arousal by venting and had no discernible effect on anger, apart from increasing it. And techniques that helped people reduce arousal like deep breathing, meditation or yoga, were far more effective.
Now this is just one piece of research and many experts will disagree, pointing to other studies that do not support this hypothesis. But meta-analyses like these are the gold standard of research, especially when they include such large numbers of participants (always be extremely suspicious of those studies that involve 20 university students and then make grand claims about this or that technique).
Decreasing arousal makes sense
And a common-sense take tells us this makes sense, no? Clearly if I am over-aroused, emotionally, I need to find a way to regulate my nervous system, shift from sympathetic arousal (fight or flight) into parasympethetic (rest and digest). So using techniques like my Compassionate Breathing practice, which help downregulate your nervous system, should help soften those angry feelings and bring you back to a calmer, more balanced state.
The big problem, I think, is if we use deep breathing, mindfulness practice or yoga to deal with the bubbling lava of anger in our chest, but instead of allowing ourselves to feel this natural, healthy emotion and let it move through us like a wave, so it gradually subsides, we instead stuff that lava down into our belly. It will take some skill and practice – and probably help from a trauma-informed therapist – to make sure you don’t just swallow your anger, to join all the other lava bubbling away deep in your belly.
Because I have done that, many times in my life, and it’s not healthy, for body or mind. As with all research, or therapeutic advice like this, it’s important to figure out what works best for you. After all, anger does signal danger, so sometimes we need to shout and yell and may even need to get physical to protect ourselves or our loved ones. But these occasions are (hopefully) very rare. Often, threatening words or behaviour require an assertive response, not an aggressive one. And learning to be more assertive is a key skill, for most of us – as well as a way of healthily releasing anger, bit by bit.
I hope that’s informative for you and helps you think about how best to manage your own anger. And if you do struggle with angry feelings – either your own or those of people close to you – I recommend my 90min webinar, Managing Anger with Internal Family Systems Therapy, in which I discuss these issues in much more depth. I also teach you some IFS techniques for dealing with problematic anger. Click the button below if you’d like to watch it.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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