#20 - Making Anger Your Ally

Welcome to Beyond Bitchy, mastering the Art of Boundaries with Vicky Tidwell Palmer. Do you think of personal and relationship boundaries as harsh, rigid, or bitchy, or do you feel clueless about how boundaries work? Whether you think boundaries are bitchy or baffling, we will give you a fresh vision of personal limits as a source of freedom and liberation. Every week Vicky shares expert information about how you can master the Art of Boundaries, so you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. Hi, this is Vicky Tidwell Palmer and welcome to episode number 20 of the Beyond Bitchy podcast. Today, we're going to talk about how to make anger your ally. Anger can be such a difficult emotion and it's one that most of us don't have a very good relationship with. We usually experience anger at the extremes or we're afraid of it, so I want to break it down and help you to figure out whether you may have too much anger, maybe you don't have enough anger, I will talk about the gifts of anger as well as the consequences of not expressing anger when that's appropriate, and then I'll teach you how to own your anger so that it can be an ally as you are learning about and up leveling your personal and relationship boundary skills. So let's start by just talking about what is anger. There is simply an emotion and as an emotion, it is neither good or bad. The eight basic emotions are starting with anger. There is anger, pain, joy, passion, love, fear, guilt and shame. Those are the eight basic emotions and all emotions are neither good or bad. The reason that we typically think of emotions as being good or bad is because either the way they feel to us when we're experiencing them or the way other people feel in our presence when we are experiencing that emotion or the way we feel when we're experiencing someone else having that emotion. So for example, love and joy, those are for most people pleasant emotions and so we think of those more as good emotions, but when we think about anger, fear, pain, shame, guilt, those emotions feel uncomfortable more often than not and we think of those as bad. But the truth is that they really are neutral. They are just simply experiences and the truth to about emotions is that all of them have certain gifts. And today I'm going to talk specifically about anger and now there are gifts that we get from our experience of anger as long as we are processing it and owning it appropriately, which I will go more into detail about later. So emotions just are, they're not good or bad. So if you've ever been told by someone maybe when you were a child or even as an adult well, you shouldn't feel that way, it's not really helpful and actually it's not true. You simply feel what you feel, what you choose to do about it, how you express that. Those are all choices and they may be skillful or less skillful choices, but emotions they just are. And there are many reasons that people struggle with the emotion of anger and I want to give you some examples, some of these might apply to you and help you to understand better why you might have a conflicted or challenging relationship with anger. So some of us grew up in a home or our family where one or both of our parents didn't express anger appropriately. And there are two options when it comes to not expressing anger appropriately. There's either too much or there's not enough. So I mentioned before that on the continuum of anger, when it comes to just the expression of anger, we might feel mildly irritated or we might feel rage. Rage is an example of too much and rage is not a healthy expression of anger. So that's one extreme we feel rage. And most of us know when we feel rage because it's a feeling, an experience of out of control anger and most of us when we're experiencing rage, we end up doing our saying things that we later regret saying or doing. So maybe one of your parents was a rager and raging can manifest in many different ways. Some people scream when they rage or they may throw things or maybe they may hit things including people. But all of that is an inappropriate expression of anger and it's boundaryless. And if you experience that by one or both parents and it's usually just one, most families just do not have the bandwidth to tolerate two ragers because you know, probably they would destroy each other, but there's something, I think, the human beings in general that seeks some kind of balance. And that's why ragers tend to end up with people who are less expressive or who are on the other end of the continuum where they don't express their anger. So if you had a raging parent, you may be terrified of anger. And rightly so because when your parent was raging, you were terrified. And so people who had had a raging parent will often feel extremely uncomfortable with anger, even very appropriate anger, or you're afraid that if you express it, it's just going to come out exactly like you're raging parent or even when you are in the presence of someone who's expressing their anger appropriately by saying something like, you know, I am really angry about this right now. Or when you did such and such, I felt so angry and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it, but I just need to let you know I am angry. So that's a rather, you know, somewhat, um, expressive, somewhat forceful way to express it. But I'm not raging, but a person who had a raging parent may find that extremely activating or even triggering and may internally suppress their own anger because it is so fearful to think about being like that parent. And then, you know, literally it is a trauma, it's a type of trauma reaction. It's a result of your own trauma that you may even have some PTSD around people being angry. So that's one extreme and then the other extreme is that maybe you had a parent who just didn't express anger at all. So this could be the parent that, you know, you may even see, they look angry like their face is red or they're, you know, maybe moving in a way that would demonstrate that they may be feeling anger. But when you ask them if they're angry, they say, no, I'm not angry or they deny their anger. So essentially they are out of touch with their feeling of anger or they try to compensate or not compensate, but they try to cover over their anger by plastering a smile on their face. Through their smile, they are really angry. So those are two examples of being at the extreme where the person's either just not expressing it at all, trying to cover it over, pretending like they're not, or they are just out of control boundary list, they're spilling it all over everybody. And if the parent didn't express the feeling of anger, what may happen for you is that in adulthood is that you might feel overwhelmed by your own appropriate and authentic feelings of anger or you may copy what your parent did and this can go both ways. I mean, you may identify with the parent that was more of the rager because that parent usually feels more powerful and to avoid not feeling so powerless, you may imitate that parent. And on the other hand, if you identified more with the parent that didn't express their anger, you may imitate them and feel more comfortable not expressing or stuffing your anger, not expressing it. And another reason that people can be uncomfortable about anger is that in the past, you were criticized for being angry. This actually applies to me in my own childhood because I remember, and I've probably said this before on the podcast, that my mother would sometimes say to me when I was obviously angry, she'd say, "You know, you're a lot prettier when you're not angry." And what I believe that I learned from that is that the highest value in that particular scenario is not on having your feelings and being authentic, but it's about looking good or being pretty. Because even in the moment when she was saying that I wasn't out of control, I wasn't throwing a temper tantrum I wasn't inappropriately expressing my anger, I just had an angry expression on my face. And this can happen in adulthood as well. So you're criticized for being angry. And especially if you're a woman, you may be called a harsh, like when you get angry, people may say, well, what's your problem or why are you being so harsh or they may even call you a bitch, simply when you're expressing healthy, appropriate anger. So in cases like that, I think it's extremely helpful to get a reality check from somebody else, which is often hard to do because it's not like you have the video camera or the audio of what you said or did. But what I often find is that if someone has been told repeatedly that their appropriate expression of anger is over the top or that they're harsh or they're just angry and that it doesn't work for other people, it often has much more to do with the person who is witnessing their anger than it has to do with how the person is expressing it. So I really encourage you to get feedback from other, you know, objective third party people about that. Or you may have been told that anger is bad. So it's a bad emotion and you shouldn't feel that. It's kind of a version of what I was told by my mother, you know, that you're prettier when you're not angry. So it's like, oh, anger's bad. Don't do that. You might have been given that message by your family, by the culture. I think this is definitely more true for girls than it is for boys. Boys are allowed to express their anger more than girls are in general. Or maybe in a spiritual or religious community. So some churches or religious communities, they truly do teach either directly or indirectly that anger is bad. And then we need to avoid anger at all costs. And remember that emotions simply arise. They are neither good or bad. So when we label certain emotions like lover joy as good and emotions like anger or guilt is bad, it can cause us to begin ignoring the emotions that we've been told are bad. In favor of only experience, the ones that we have been told are good. So what we're essentially doing is we're ignoring what is real. And we're beginning to create a false self that pretends to be something other than what is true and authentic for us. And it's kind of similar to saying like the getting hungry is bad. Hunger is just a normal human experience. Sexual arousal is like this as well. So I've had some people tell me how much guilt and shame they may sometimes feel about the fact that they become sexually aroused, perhaps when they see something or they see a certain type of person. And to me that is highly problematic because our body just has certain responses. It's a little bit different than an emotion, but they're very similar. We have no control over how our body responds in terms of if we're hungry or if we experience arousal. And I see emotions as being very much the same way, you know, just to kind of round out that that train of thought. You know, remember, if you remember back when we talked about, especially step one of the five-step boundary solution process. And if that's not at all familiar to you, please go back to especially the first five or so episodes of the podcast where you can learn more about the five-step boundary solution process. But if you remember back to step one, which is a reality exercise of identifying what happened, what your thoughts are, what the emotions are, you'll remember that most of the time our emotions are determined by our thoughts. But still doesn't change the fact that emotions just are, they arise and they occur. And that's just a fact of life. So I also like to use the metaphor of blood circulating in the body to talk about anger. So when you think about the blood that's circulating in your body, what is really healthy and what we're all wanting to be sure is happening when it comes to our own blood is that we want it to be flowing freely inside our body. We don't want it to be flowing out of our body. And we also don't want it to be stuck or stopped inside our body. Both of those issues can actually lead to death. And I see emotions in the same way. I like to use that metaphor. You want your emotions to be circulating freely in you, in your consciousness, in your psyche as you are just going about your day-to-day life. And you also don't want to spill them out. But this whole idea of circulating is that it's much more helpful and healthy for you to allow your emotions to circulate, to notice them when they arise and process them. Then it is to push them down and essentially create like a stuck artery. That is not something what we want to do. It's going to be very unhealthy. When it comes to emotions, it's going to be very unhealthy for us. It's going to be unhealthy for the people around us and for our relationships. So let's look at some of the gifts of anger. Because, you know, especially if you're challenged around accepting anger as an emotion and you tend to be on that one end of the continuum where you are more prone to not expressing or stuffing it, it may be helpful for you to know that there are gifts that anger brings us. The first one is that anger can often give us a signal that something isn't working. So anger is a painful or stressful emotion for most of us. And it's often a signal, hmm, something may not be working right here. So that's an invitation to go into curiosity, into inquiry about what that might be. And again, I go back to step one of the five-step boundary solution process is you could start with that. Well, what happened? And then what did I think about it? I already know what my emotion is. And this is a good example, too, of the fact that often when it comes to identifying your reality, that step one of the clarifier, sometimes you need to start with the emotion because that's all you have. You're only aware that you're having a certain emotion. And then you sort of backtrack or sort of reverse engineer, well, what happened? Like, how did I get here to this emotion? Because the truth is there was some kind of experience, data of some kind. And then there was typically a thought that went with it. Another gift of anger, in addition to being an alert, that something may not be working, is that it could be an indication that a limit or a boundary of some kind has been crossed. And I'll say more about this in a minute, but just for now, another gift is it could be that there's some kind of boundary that's been crossed here. And you know, sometimes we experience this and we really don't even know what has happened, but we know that something is not right. And especially if we're dealing with a really difficult person or a person who is a manipulator or a gas lighter or is very narcissistic, we may just have this sort of sneaking feeling that what just happened or what the person just said, it just didn't land properly, but we're not quite sure. So the second gift is that could be an indication that some kind of boundary has been crossed. It also may be telling us, our anger may be telling us that we need to do some self-care. So I'll talk about some of the consequences of anger in a minute, but often if it's a need for self-care that it's indicating the anger may come along with some resentment. And we need to do some self-care or we need to speak up in some way. Like, for example, if we become angry because we have the impression that people are making a lot of demands on our time or they're asking us to do too much or they're making so many requests of us and when we're struggling with that, we might need to, we may be in a situation where we haven't been balanced in terms of giving and receiving and we need to do that in terms of self-care or to speak up in some way and just say no, I'm not available for that as an example. So anger is often a sign that we need to set a boundary. And I think this is one of the biggest gifts of anger is that it tells us that we may need to set a boundary. So an example of that or several examples of this is let's say that an important person in your life repeatedly breaks agreements or promises or there's somebody else who consistently struggles to listen to you or take in what you're saying to them or they interrupt you a lot or they talk over you and you know there's just a really poor balance between listening and talking. Some people are just a wall of talk and when you get with them it can be exhausting and so you may feel anger about that or you have a personal or a professional relationship where the other person repeatedly does an honor commitments like you know being on time showing up for a meeting on time or an appointment and these are all common situations that often cause anger and when they happen it can be very helpful for you to act. Is there some kind of boundary here that I need to set or did I set a boundary in the past? Did I have an agreement with a person and it's continually being broken and I need to go to the next level? And by the way, if you're in this situation and this one really rings true for you, step five of the five step boundary solution process is the place to go when you have created an agreement with somebody and it is not working repeatedly and you have to essentially do what I call you. You have to up level your boundary work, you have to increase your level of self-care in order to get your needs met. So I mentioned before, you know, there are consequences to us when we don't express our anger. One of the biggest consequences is resentment and resentment, the definition. My favorite definition from p.m.ality is resentment is victim anger, it's "I'm angry" and I see myself as a victim. And the truth is, most of the time we are not a victim, at least, you know, in that we may be a victim for just a moment, but as we are experiencing resentment, there's almost always a place that we have power over where we can choose to do something different, to make a decision, to say no to, you know, many options here. But again, one of the consequences of not expressing anger is resentment. Another consequence is that you don't get your needs met. So if you're one of those people that tends to stuff your anger or not express your anger, you will often not get your needs met and by the way, that will lead you back to resentment, feeling resentful victim anger because you're not getting what you need or want. And here's another one, and this one may be a little more subtle and hard to kind of wrap your brain around, but it's very much worth mentioning here. When you don't express your anger to people who, especially people who are important to you, your primary relationships, or people who you really want to have a deep or deeper relationship with, when you don't express your anger to them, especially when it's pretty important, it's about an issue that's important to you, you really damage intimacy. Intimacy is an experience of being known by another person and having them know you. So it's a reciprocal experience, so when you share your thoughts and emotions with me, you're being intimate with me, and when I share my thoughts and emotions with you, I am being intimate with you, and with both people are doing that, they are experiencing intimacy between them. So if you don't, if you're not authentic in this way, you don't share that with another person, they essentially don't really know who you are. And long-term, this doesn't really work. I've had this experience in my own life where someone's gotten angry with me over time, or they've collected a number of resentments toward me, and then all of a sudden it all comes up. And all of us, I mean, I've done this myself where I haven't spoken up, and then I sort of explode. And the truth was that there were steps along the way where I didn't say to the person, or the person didn't say to me, you know, I'm really angry about this, or this thing that happened the other day, it didn't work for me, and I really want to talk to you about it. That is a very intimate experience. And I think the reason this is hard for people to understand is that when we think of intimacy, especially emotional intimacy, we tend to have a bias that it's supposed to be feel really good, and it's all about love and joy, and we're all going to feel great. But there's more to intimacy than that, because intimacy also involves having difficult conversations, including conversations that include I'm afraid of you, or I'm angry about what you did, or I felt embarrassed when this happened. Those are difficult yet really important conversations to have in relationship, so it can impact your intimacy with other people. And a final consequence of not expressing anger is I truly believe that people can get health problems, and I mean serious health problems. I believe that there are probably many consequences, health consequences of not expressing anger, but the two that readily come to mind is I think that our heart is very much impacted by our not expressing anger, as well as probably our blood pressure. I mean, some people are predisposed to just have blood pressure problems, but I do believe that not expressing anger can definitely influence your heart, can influence your blood pressure, and probably a lot of other health issues as well. So these are all great reasons to learn how to own and express anger appropriately. So let's go there. Let's talk about how to manage and own your anger. And I want to start with telling you what owning your anger is not, like what it does not look like. It does not look like what I talked about in episode number 19 of the podcast, which is offending from the victim position. If you're not familiar with that term, please go back to episode number 19 and listen to it, but it's basically you stepped on my toe, so I'm going to annihilate you. So you did something I didn't like. I was offended by it or I felt disrespected. So I'm going to retaliate and take revenge. That is not owning anger. Also not owning anger is anytime that you explode or you shame another person or alternatively you ignore it. You know, you feel anger, but you just ignore it. You sweep it under the rug or you say, no, I'm not angry when you really are. None of those are authentic or congruent. And when I say congruent, I mean that your insides are matching your outsides. And you know, it's worth saying here that there are certain situations. There are certain contexts in which you may not want to fully express your anger. So like if you're at work and your supervisor or coworker does something and you have a very strong reaction of anger or response, it's probably going to be very helpful for you to digest and process that offline before you express it in the workplace, for example. It's probably a good idea to do in your personal life, but the point I want to make is that it's very helpful to be mindful that we don't necessarily want to express all of our emotions in every context. And this goes to a greater conversation about making choices around what to share and what not to share, but I just want to make the point here around anger to be mindful of choosing who, when and how, you're going to share that. But being congruent means that most of the time, as much as I am able to, what I am experiencing on the inside is going to be matched by what's happening on the outside. And if I'm not able to do that, I will catch up later. So for example, let's say that something happens. And this actually would be more of my tendency because I tend to take in experiences and I'm with kind of a slow processor. So I might have an experience with somebody. And I notice in the moment that I'm getting maybe activated or angry, but my tendency would be to take all of that in and kind of offline in another context, maybe through reflecting, through journaling in some other way or talking to someone else. I will get clarity about it and then I will come back. So in the moment, you could say, well, she's not really being congruent because her insides aren't matching her outsides, but as long as you come back later and you essentially catch up. So being congruent is more about you're looking for a pattern of being congruent rather than thinking you've got to do it exactly right all in the moment. So owning your anger is you want to start with just the awareness, the recognition, the acknowledgement that you're angry. And that can be as simple as just saying to yourself, you know, I am angry right now. I am aware of my anger and keeping in mind it is not good or bad. I am simply having an emotion and that's okay. And if you're a person who has a high level of discomfort with anger, I would add to that too. You can say, you know, I'm really angry right now. And that's okay. I'm going to figure out what it is that I need or want to do about it if anything. So you start with that. You recognize that you're angry. And then I highly recommend that you do a reality exercise on it. So I mentioned before about the first step of the five-step boundary solution process. And any of you who don't yet have the clarifier, the five-step boundary solution, clarifier, you can get it in the show notes for this episode or go to beyondbitchy.com. It's on the homepage. You can just click it and download it right there. Step one is what happened? What did I think about what happened or what were my perceptions? And of course, you already know that you're angry. But I highly recommend that you do that. It will give you so much more clarity about what you're experiencing. So do that reality exercise, which is step one. And then the next thing that you should do, once you've really reflected on it, you've digested it, you've processed it, is that you need to decide what you want to do about it if anything. There are some situations that especially after you've gone through that reality exercise and looking more deeply into what the experience was and what you thought about it. Sometimes with that clarity, you realize, sometimes your anger actually will go away, but if it remains and you see that there's something not working for you, you could rate it on a scale of one to 10, like how serious is this to me? How much does this bother me? And then that would help you to make a decision about whether or not you want to do anything about it. Do you want to make a request? And for those of you who are familiar with the Five Step Boundary Solution process, you can see how this whole experience of owning your anger very much mirrors this boundary setting process of the clarifier. So then you decide what you want to do about it if anything. And then if you have decided to do something, for example, to let someone know, I'd have a conversation about what didn't work for you, or you need to make a request, or you need to revisit a boundary or an agreement of some kind, then you take that next step. If you need to do that. And finally, there are times, as I mentioned before, when you go through that whole reality experience of thinking about what happened, what you thought, and what you felt, you may realize that you just want to release it, or you come to the realization that this is something that you're powerless over. So it's a situation that you have no control over. You can't make a request. There's really not much you can do about it, and you just need to release it. And you can, I often suggest to people that they release it to their higher power, that they say, you know, this is totally 100% out of my control. There's nothing I can do about it. So here, you can have it. And so you would do that if that's appropriate. I don't recommend that you do that. If it's an issue that you rate very high in terms of how much, how distressing it is for you, or if it's a big ticket issue, or a repeated boundary violation, for example, you're really gonna need to go back, using step five, specifically, of the five-step boundary solution process and figure out what's next. How do I need to take care of myself in this situation? All right, so today we have talked about anger, and how it's experienced at the extremes, and I hope that by now you have, and this is an assignment actually I'd like to give you, is I want you to just spend some time, and most of you will probably know this without thinking about it too much. Where you are in terms of that default, each of us has a default between, we tend to stuff our anger to, we are overexpressive with our anger. So we may go more into rage, and see where you are on that continuum. Because if you're a person who tends to stuff it or sweep it under the rug, my invitation to you is to start experimenting more with expressing your anger. Hopefully you have at least one safe person in your life that you could even just say to, I'm feeling really angry right now. And even if you don't have that, that you start with writing down that you're angry, so that you're acknowledging to yourself that you're angry, and saying whatever you need to say about that, so that you are bringing appropriate, healthy expression and experience of anger more into your day-to-day life. Because anger's just, it's gonna happen. There's no way that we're going to avoid it. On the other hand, if you're a person that's on the other end of the continuum, where you tend to experience rage instead of healthy appropriate, anger, you are going to need to learn how to contain and how to de-escalate and learn tools for that. And that reminds me, I do wanna mention here, and I'm gonna put a link here in the show notes to a fantastic resource. There's a person who has done so much for the whole field of anger management. He's actually based here in Houston, where he used to live here in Houston, where I live, Newton High Tower. He created a system of managing of anger management called angerbusters. And I have a lot of respect for Newton and his work. So he definitely has a book, he's got a workbook, and I'm gonna put a note about that in the show notes, because if you're a person who more struggles with rage, I think it's gonna be really helpful for you to have that information and learn how to recognize anger, to learn how to de-escalate it, and also learn how to express it to another person appropriately. And in terms of expression, I'm also gonna refer to a, I believe that there was a prior podcast where I talked about the talking format. And you know, I'm gonna look for that, but I'm also gonna include that in the show notes, a link for you to get a copy of the talking format. It's a very simple way to express your thoughts and emotions to another person. Essentially, it's a mirror of step one of the five-step boundary solution process, but some people, especially if you struggle to share with somebody how you're feeling, I highly recommend that you use the talking format, and I'm gonna model it for you right now, just to give you an example. You could say, I'll just make up a scenario where, and so I'm pretending now that I'm gonna tell another person what didn't work for me. So the other day, on Tuesday, we were going to meet for lunch. We had a plan to meet for lunch at 12, and you got to the restaurant at 12.30. So that's the data. The second part is the thought. And what I thought about that is that you were not respecting my time, and about that, I feel angry, and I feel some pain. So that is just a very simple example of how to use the talking format. It's data thought emotion, and it makes it so easy for you as the talker, as the speaker to express yourself, and it also makes it easier for the listener. They don't have to wait through a lot of words to figure out what was important to you. All right, so I hope that that has helped you to have a better understanding and better relationship with anger. So we talked about reasons that you might struggle with anger, and what the gifts of anger are, and what the consequences of not expressing your anger, and how to own your anger. So as I mentioned before, if you'd like to get your own copy of the Five Step Boundary Solution Clarifier, which is a downloadable PDF that will walk you through a process of identifying and creating personal and relationship boundaries, and it will give you that reality experience or exercise that I mentioned earlier, head over to beyondbitchy.com, and you can get the link on the show notes for this episode as well. And until next week, I invite each and every one of you to embrace the power you have to create the boundaries you wanna create, so that you can get the space you need, and the connection you crave. See you next time. Thanks for listening to BeyondBitchy Podcast. Head over to beyondbitchy.com for show notes, the BeyondBitchy blog, and other resources to help you master the art of boundaries. Till next time, remember, boundaries aren't bitchy.