A big surprise to many people when first beginning to study anger is to discover how often anger is rooted in shame. Anger is often called a “secondary emotion,” a cover for a deeper more primary emotion – often fear or shame. One of the goals in anger management sessions is to learn to be with your anger long enough to get past the blustering of anger and discover the root emotion of the anger.
Anger is energetic, forceful and strong. Shame is secretive, cowering and vulnerable. In our emotional development many people stay with the energy of anger rather than the pain of shame and become “anger addicts” to avoid the discomfort of shame. Anger is not comfortable either but between the two, anger is more comfortable than shame.
Anger is used as a defensive tool to shield you from being exposed or vulnerable. It is the go-to emotional response whenever you feel threatened. It is natural to protect yourself when threatened. Self-defense is a legal defense in defending one’s physical safety. But when one uses anger to defend from the shame of being found out – whatever weakness or secret you harbor – anger limits the opportunity to explore that vulnerability.
Vulnerability is not a bad thing. Dr. Brene Brown’s famous TED Talk is worth a watch if you are not familiar with it. Her basic message, vulnerability is a mess but embrace that mess to be strong.
When you stay in your anger to defend yourself and blame others, you not only push others away from you, you cut off a part of you from yourself.
Please do not confuse guilt with shame. Guilt is based on our behavior. If you do something wrong, you feel badly about it. The feeling bad is a message that you need to change the behavior. You steal, you feel bad – message – stop stealing. That is a useful emotion to work on self-improvement.
Shame is a sense that “I am flawed, I am unworthy, I am unlovable, I am not enough.” When an incident occurs that touches that deep down shame some of us retreat with a carton of ice cream. Others flare up into an angry, self righteous, aggressive hot head. The goal is neither of these reactions.
The goal is to acknowledge the shame, accept the “yuckiness” of it and try to separate the present incident from the shame baggage we carry with us. This is not something one quickly learns to do. It is a life long practice. But when one can defuse a present angering situation from the ancient shame, our sense of anger feels more in perspective. With the charge decreased you are better able to problem solve rather than react from the primitive part of the brain.
A quick example to illustrate: if you harbor a secret fear of being worthless (not always fully conscious of this shame you have been so good at deflecting it) and a friend shows up for dinner habitually late. You may interpret the lateness as “you do not value my time” or “I am not important to you” or “how can you disrespect me like this?” This thinking coupled with that gnawing but not quite conscious shame sends you into a self righteous, annoyed, blaming posture. Their lateness is taken personally and can send you into an aggressive or passive-aggressive attack.
Hey, the lateness may be some passive-aggression on their part. Or it might just be you have a friend who is bad with time. But if you come at the person with anger fueled by ancient shame you come across unreasonable. The anger is out of proportion to the incident.
The ability to defuse your anger from the old stuff and simply focus on the inconvenience of the present situation puts you in position to solve a situation not throw gasoline on a small flame.
When you begin to understand your shame, you are much better at managing your angry responses to situations. Anger management counseling can help you understand this shame and how it impacts your angry reactions to eventually reduce the angry reactions.