What is your relationship with your anger?

If it’s anything like mine, it’s a fraught relationship to be sure. Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions, and one many of us feel woefully unskilled to navigate.

I grew up being afraid of anger. Anger in my household was a pretty terrifying thing that involved yelling and slammed doors and passive aggressive punishments. My own anger was seen as something that wasn’t welcome.

As I grew up, it was clear that anger was seen as an “ugly” emotion, especially in girls, which probably explains why so many of my friends had such twisted expressions of their own anger. Instead of being able to say, “I’m angry. Something here isn’t fair,” most of us lied, or played manipulative games, or performed being OK in order to be seen as cool or low maintenance.

For some of us, anger is also a shield that we use to protect against other emotions that are too difficult to feel. Instead of feeling fear, some of us get angry. Instead of admitting disappointment or loss, some of us get angry.

Whether anger is tucked away and rejected or brought front and center as a way to avoid other feelings, it means anger is never really given a chance to share its gifts.

Because what I’ve learned is that anger is one of the most important and valuable emotions we’ve got. Anger is a gentle and wise sentry, carefully scanning our lives for breaches in fairness and justice.

When we befriend our anger and learn how to hear it’s soft call, “Mmm. Something here isn’t meeting our needs. Someone is dismissing something important to us,” anger can invite us into conversation with the context of our lives so that it aligns with our needs, our agreements, and our values.

Anger loves partnering with our voice to help us set boundaries, to ask for what we need, and to honor our own resources and capacity.

But anger doesn’t like to be ignored. It knows it has a valuable place in our lives. When we don’t listen, it grows more insistent, more irritable. Disrespected and devalued, anger begins to turn into low level resentment, passive aggressive comments, judgmental critiques, withheld connection, and discomfort or exhaustion.

Conversely, when anger is given too much power, it can become a weapon that hurts others. The rush of power in scaring someone with our anger can give us a sense of control when we feel anything but in control.

I wonder what it would look like if more of us were encouraged to befriend our anger? If more of us had relationships where we could be unskilled and clunky in our practice of finding our way back to a respecful relationship with anger?

How would it change things if when we felt the soft familiar flutter asking that we notice something that doesn’t work for us, we could turn towards each other and collaborate to find a way forward that felt more fair and honoring of self?

Befriending our anger would mean honoring each other’s boundaries with far more care and attention. It would mean allowing people to feel things that might be difficult to witness and be with. It would mean allowing others to see us in our own anger as we worked to express what needed attention.

If more of us had respectful, integrated, kind relationships with our anger, I suspect more of us would also be mobilized in service to supporting those who experience ongoing injustice (supporting them in ways that actually contributed to change versus the more performative anger many of us rely on to avoid having to make real change).

In a world that is profoundly unfair, when so many of us are chronically under-resourced by dominant culture, there is much to be angry about. There is no fair inside of patriarchy. There is no justice inside of white supremacy.

But I do believe that in the most intimate relationships we have with ourselves and with those we love, there is an opportunity to dance with anger, to explore anger, to invite anger in and to validate what it’s sharing, even if we can’t change the circumstances that led us there.

As adrienne maree brown speaks to in Emergent Strategy, how we are in the smallest moments of our lives echoes out into the larger whole. And she likes to remind us that we are always, always practicing SOMETHING.

For the longest time, I was practicing ways to ignore, deny, and reject my own anger. Now, I am practicing ways to listen, to validate, and to better understand all of the lessons and gifts anger has to offer.