Season Two, Episode Eighteen: What is Our Anger Trying to Teach Us?

Now we will take an in-depth look at one of the most controversial and difficult emotions for most people to experience: anger. Anger directed either at ourselves or in relation to other people is often at the core of many different issues that people bring into therapy. In today’s episode, we will start our exploration by delving first into the question, What is anger? We will consider how it is a primary human emotion that is observed across all cultures and across the lifespan. We will discuss what anger represents emotionally as well as what happens to our neurophysiology when we experience anger.

Next, we will discuss how anger as a universal emotion is directly linked to the nature of needs fulfillment. We will discuss how the idea of fulfilling our competing needs drives the very organization of society. We will observe briefly how all cultures must come to terms with the interaction between anger and needs. We will also explore the distinction between righteous anger and selfish anger.

Bringing the focus back to our personal lives, we will next explore how anger and its expression takes on personal meaning in each of our lives. We discuss how we are each trained to cope with our needs, and thus how to express anger, based on our earliest childhood experiences and in the countless interactions with our caregivers and environment. Next, we will explore how these early childhood experiences lead to several different, distinctive presentations of anger in adulthood. Anger often comes into the therapy room in one of several characteristic ways, and we will unpack these presentations and discuss what they tell us about our personal orientation to the emotion of anger and to getting our needs fulfilled.

Finally, we will discuss how we can begin to develop ways of dealing with our anger that will allow it to fulfill its proper and healthy function and not to pose a threat to our well-being or our relationships.

The emotion of anger is the natural response to recognizing that our needs are not being met. We can learn to manage this emotional activation and create new and healthy ways for us to identify, express, and negotiate in order to have our needs met in life.