Do You Use Anger as Armor?
De-armoring takes guts and curiosity. We owe it to ourselves to ask: what’s behind the shield?
Lu Hanessian, MSc
When you get angry… how would you describe your reaction?
Slow-boil or Mt. Vesuvius? Does it come on like a tsunami or a lightning bolt? Linger for days or quickly dissipate?
Do you stuff it or spew it? Stonewall? High decibel or silence? In anger, do you say things you can’t take back? Or camouflage, slip into hyperdrive, pretend everything’s fine?
Anger is a high information emotion. What does it tell us about who we are and what we need? Anger’s a signal, a response to a perceived threat. We might feel unsafe, unseen, and undone, depending on our story around anger.
Anger is deeply familiar with our narrative self.
The way we’ve created our narrative is based on our experiences, how emotion and how conflict were modeled for us when we were young, and what we’ve practiced over the years.
Anger gets a bad rap. But, why?
Anger is generally perceived as a negative emotion. In early years, we might have received the message that our anger was inappropriate, impolite, threatening, frightening, overpowering and disempowering.