What Is My Anger Trying to Tell Me?

If you’ve read articles in my Energy Library that talk about emotions, then you will be familiar with the idea that I see them as messengers (if you’re not yet a member of the Energy Library, it’s free to join – get your virtual library ticket here). And if you’re familiar with the Kolorlan System – specifically the colour Red – then you will know that I see anger as an emotion designed to indicate a boundary infringement.

(And if you're unclear about why I see it that way, check out my last article, called Why is setting boundaries so hard?)

You may also have noticed that the emotion of anger isn’t often welcomed. It feels very uncomfortable to experience, receive or witness in others.

But what if that discomfort is important?

If anger is a messenger, perhaps the question isn't simply “How do I stop feeling angry?”

Maybe a more interesting question is: “What is my anger trying to tell me?” Or “why does anger feel so uncomfortable?”

Remember, I said I see anger as an indication of a boundary infringement and, as I see it, boundaries keep us safe. So, when they’re threatened, it is important that we notice this.

However, the level of discomfort we experience – even to the degree that we may have learned to avoid or suppress our anger – is not, I feel, by design. That is more reflective of how we were taught to recognise and experience our anger.

Without understanding it, we often take one of two paths through it – to bring it inwards, which can harm us, or send it outwards, which can harm other people. In addition to the potential harm it can cause, simply expressing anger without understanding its message is often unhelpful.

So perhaps there is another possibility: noticing the anger, allowing ourselves to experience it, and then becoming curious about why it appeared.

Could your anger be showing you a boundary?

If anger is a messenger, then once we have noticed and processed the emotion, there is a next step which involves understanding what it is trying to tell us.

One possible message is a boundary threat:

• This might be a physical boundary – perhaps somebody has physically hurt or threatened you.
• It might be a mental boundary – someone is imposing their rules or beliefs upon you against your will.
• Or it might be an emotional boundary. Someone else taking their anger out on you, for example, is very likely to make you feel angry!

But the boundary isn't necessarily obvious before the anger appears. If it was obvious, we would probably already be protecting or maintaining the boundary, so we wouldn’t require the message delivered through anger.

Let me try and give you an example: Sometimes we simply don’t think – or don’t yet have the skills – to communicate our needs. So, it isn’t necessarily that the other person is trying to harm us or be unreasonable. They simply don’t know we have a boundary there.

Possibly, we didn’t realise we had that boundary either. In which case, the anger is a really helpful message because it allows us to see a boundary we might not otherwise have noticed.

So, here’s an invitation: If you wish to better understand anger, instead of immediately judging the emotion – or yourself for experiencing it – you can become curious:

• What happened immediately before I became angry?
• What felt uncomfortable about that experience?
• Was something important to me being threatened or ignored?
• Is there a boundary here that I hadn't previously recognised?
• Does the other person actually know about your boundary?

Now, if you discover that your anger has highlighted a boundary, the next question might be whether you have ever communicated it. For example, if someone is asking you to follow rules that don’t feel good for you, have you ever told them that these rules don’t feel good?

We can easily assume that another person “should know”. But perhaps they genuinely don't. And that creates a very different situation from somebody who understands our boundary perfectly well and chooses to ignore it.

So, what about the people who refuse to listen to or respect our boundaries, even when we express them clearly, calmly and rationally? Well, continued infringement of those boundaries might then be an invitation to change our relationship with that person. Could this be done via a conversation? Or is this someone who would be best out of your life?

There isn't one answer that applies to every person or every boundary. The anger has provided information. What you choose to do with that information remains your decision.

What if you don't know how to communicate what you need?

Stating and defending boundaries – particularly with people who don’t wish to respect us – can be difficult.

Sometimes the difficulty comes from our own lack of practice and skills. If we grew up in environments that didn’t allow us to express ourselves, then we may have missed out on learning how to state our needs. In particularly controlling environments, the lack of freedom may even have led to us never having the opportunity to explore or uncover our true essence, so we don’t truly know what we need.

So, the anger can end up highlighting missing skills for us. And it may feel confronting to recognise that we’re lacking those skills. That can trigger secondary emotions of shame or self-blame, or blame directed towards others.

If this feels like it might apply to you then, after noticing and processing the anger, the next step might be to begin developing those missing skills. You could begin by asking yourself a few questions:

• Do you know what your needs are in a given situation?
• Are you able to express them to the other person?
• Are you willing to express them to the other person?

Each of those is a question worth pondering as you contemplate a situation that recently triggered anger to arise within you. So, you don’t need to wait until the next time you experience anger – you can return to a previous situation and start viewing it through this new lens.

What if you don't actually know what you want?

If you find you’re unsure about your preferences and desires, then that invites a daily inner connection to notice what you experience and how it feels. Notice where you are today and make choices in alignment with those preferences to see how this feels. Then you can experiment with different experiences – slight modifications to your norm – and see how those feel.

It’s a silly example, but one that struck me once in the movie Runaway Bride: how do you prefer to eat eggs? Maybe you always eat them a certain way. Is that genuinely your favourite way, or is it something you adopted from someone else?

Similarly, if you’re someone who has difficulty making decisions, then this can be an indication that you’re not fully aware of your needs. So, if you notice this pattern, you can treat that as a signpost to guide you to explore your preferences and desires – circling back to the point above.

On the other hand, if you know exactly what you desire but you just don’t know how to ask for it, then your missing skill may be the skill of communicating your boundaries.

These are quite different discoveries about yourself. And perhaps this is why simply trying to “get rid of” the anger can cause us to miss something useful. The emotion may be pointing towards something we don't yet know about ourselves.

What if your anger isn't about an obvious boundary?

There is another possibility worth mentioning: Sometimes anger arises when the boundary infringement seems obvious. Someone hurts us, imposes something upon us or repeatedly ignores a clearly expressed need. But what about the anger that seems completely disproportionate to what just happened?

What if somebody says something perfectly calmly, perhaps not even directed specifically at you, and you suddenly feel furious?

Or what if somebody is genuinely trying to help you — and their attempt to help makes you angry?

That may be pointing towards a rather different kind of boundary. And that's where we'll go in the next article.

So, what is your anger trying to tell you?

I don't think there is one answer. As with so many things, the emotion is a messenger, but the specific message is personal to each of us. It is inviting us to become curious and through compassionate enquiry, get to know ourselves more deeply.

• Perhaps somebody crossed a boundary you already knew about.
• Perhaps anger has revealed a boundary you didn't know you had.
• Perhaps you know what you need but haven't communicated it.
• Perhaps you're still discovering what you need in the first place.
• Or perhaps the anger is protecting something deeper that isn't yet obvious to you.

The invitation, as I see it, is not to automatically suppress the anger, project it onto somebody else or judge yourself for experiencing it. Instead, what happens if you become curious?...“I'm angry. That's interesting. What is this trying to show me?”