Anger is a healthy and normal emotion. We may feel angry in response to –

• a negative event
• being unable to get what we want
• being provoked
• someone’s words or actions
• hurt
• a threat

But anger can become unhealthy and abnormal, which can be damaging to us or those around us in the short- and long- term.

Anger is a strong and intense emotional state. It can feel uncomfortable.

The most common cause of anger is being prevented from achieving a valuable goal, although it can also occur when we get something we do not want. When this happens people become frustrated. Frustration can be something relatively small such as when someone jumps the queue in front of us, or it can be a major event such as losing out on your dream job. The cause of the frustration might be another person, a situation, an organisation or indeed, yourself. Nevertheless, frustration need not develop into problematic anger and can be adaptive if we were to consider that we simply wished that the frustration had not happened. 

Another common cause of anger is when we perceive someone, or something as having broken our personal rules. They have not treated us with respect, due care, politeness, and so forth. However, it is more realistic and adaptive not to expect everyone to treat us in a particular way, but to just prefer it. A third common cause is ‘self-defence’ anger. This occurs when an individual’s self-esteem is challenged by the responses of an organisation or another individual. Their anger serves as a self-defence mechanism to protect them from a negative evaluation of themselves.   

Aggressive Anger 

Aggressive anger more often involves violence, such as:

• Bullying physically – pushing, shoving, hurting, driving someone off the road.
• Bullying emotionally – oppressing others, playing on their weaknesses.
• Destructive behaviour, such as harming animals, vandalism, destroying relationships, substance abuse.
• Showing off.
• Expressing mistrust.
• Sexual abuse/rape.
• Verbal abuse, such as foul language, vulgar jokes, discriminatory jokes.
• Ignoring people’s feelings.
• Speaking too fast/driving too fast/working too fast.
• Selfishness.
• Frightening and threatening people.
• Being unpredictable.

Seeking revenge/refusing to forgive and forget.

We often think of anger as physical or verbal aggression, but there are other ways of displaying anger – passive anger.

Passive Anger

Passive anger is a way of expressing our anger by displaying different forms of behaviour, such as:

• Ignoring someone.
• Giving them a fake smile.
• Not responding to the anger of someone else.
• “Sitting on the fence” in an argument.
• Controlling how they feel by substance abuse.
• Overreacting.
• Being evasive.
• Avoiding conflict.
• Being defeatist – setting yourself or others up for failure.
• Relying on unreliable people.
• Being accident prone.
• Sexual difficulties – such as objectifying others, sexual impotence etc.
• Psychological manipulation, such as emotional blackmail.
• Secretive behaviour.
• Gossip.
• Poison pen letters/tweets/social media/trolling and so on.
• Self-blame, apologising too often.

If you are interested in learning more about anger and other negative emotions. Or helping other people to improve their feelings of anger, why not have a look at our Coping with Negative Emotions Ebook.

Or perhaps find a new way to deal with anger by looking at the relationship between nature and our mental health – Ecotherapy short course.