Confronting My Anger Issues

Confronting my anger issues hasn’t been about shaming myself. It also hasn’t been about sedating myself. It’s become a process of learning how to manage the feelings I have.

‘I prefer roaring,’ I wanted to respond as I just stared across the room – steam blowing out of my ears.

How could a cute, picturesque moment like this produce in me the exact opposite feelings it was supposed to generate? What was wrong with me? Why was everything making me so mad? 

I felt like I had lost it. Well, let me clarify. I felt like I had repeatedly lost it for 30+ years, and it was time to be intentional about confronting my anger issues because no one should be set off by an unsuspecting cutie in a tiara. 

What I hadn’t realized until I started to unpack my anger issues was that I had been dealing with anger since my own little princess’s age. However, instead of expressing that anger, I used to suppress my anger. From toddler to teenager, my instant solution was to run to my room, cry, and purge my emotions in isolation. My room was a place of solitude, so instead of acting out in pain for others to see, I would stuff it down, run to my room, and cry alone, telling myself a narrative of the situation that would often make me more mad and resentful. I would get mad, cry, and move on. No need to deal with the anger because going backward was not going forward. 

When I got married at 21 to a wonderful husband who doesn’t allow the “sun to go down” with an angry heart, I had to confront my frustrations in parking lots, car rides, and bedtime conversations. Instead of suppressing my anger, I got really good at expressing my anger – through ugly tears and midnight arguments that gave my eyes great creases for perfect eye-liner lines the next day. My childhood room was 3 hours away and the isolated crying and angry thought patterns weren’t an option anymore.

After creating my own little humans, I discovered that expressive anger is harder to manage when there’s not another reasonable adult around. Anger would build up in trying situations, but other mini-humans in the room couldn’t help me manage my emotions when it was just me and them. Calming down became much harder when I wasn’t being held accountable for my own child-like reactions. 

How did I get here? Why would I get so mad? What was wrong with me? The negative self-talk and shame that I poured on myself after angry outbursts or fits of feisty comments brought me to the state of tears and finally to a licensed therapist’s couch. 

“I want to stop being so angry,” I fearfully told my counselor. 

The words were out. That’s it. Now she knows. I am an angry person. I’m one of those people. I pictured a red-cheeked bull running straight at a scared little child swinging a white flag. That’s me. Watch out for mom. She’s in a mood. 

“Kara, you are not an angry person. That’s not who you are. Your brain has created natural defense mechanisms to what it considers are perceived threats. It’s responding to those threats and creating a fight or flight response to protect you,” my counselor encouraged. What I learned in counseling that day (and every day thereafter), is that my brain, like all of our brains, is constantly scanning my environment to make sure I’m safe at all times. If something feels unsafe, my body will physiologically respond to that threat, and sometimes it responds through emotional triggers.

A trigger is a sensitive area in our emotions that gets riled up by a certain situation, topic, person, memory, or interaction that feels threatening. We may not be consciously aware that we feel threatened, but at some point in our lives, a path has been made in our brains that associates that experience with the feeling of unsafety.  

One of the most important steps I’ve taken when confronting my own anger issues is taking the time to recognize my emotional triggers. When I can slow down, become curious, and start to examine what is happening in my brain before, during, and after I lose control, I can start to name what it is that has triggered me and maybe even figure out why it impacted me in that way. 

Triggers are specific to our own past experiences, personality traits, and current situations. However, I’ve learned that some of my recurring triggers are common ones, including the following:

• Feeling out of control (being impatient, in a rush, or unable to control my circumstances)
• Experiencing injustice or feeling unheard
• Competitiveness

Of the triggers listed, the feeling that I’m unable to control the circumstance I am in is my most common trigger. When I’m running behind on time and waiting for my kids to get in the car, I exude the idiomatic phrase, “I was boiling.” Any time I am waiting on another human or late because of my own doing (my procrastination skills do not come in handy here), I become feisty and quick to explode. Have you noticed that when you’re feeling rushed or dependent on another that you too are easily triggered? I now know I’m not alone.

This trigger is not a fun one for me to examine because what I end up realizing is that I am more in control of my time than I think. It’s my own time-management and procrastination that puts me in a frenzy and then triggers my stress and anger. It turns out, setting my alarm earlier and starting the “get-out-the-door” process sooner are easy fixes. 

Although there are many other reasons that you or I or someone we know may have a short fuse, it’s worth it to slow down, be curious, and examine what’s going on when these moments occur. Daniel Tiger’s countdown and my counselor’s advice are eerily identical when you think about it. Slowing down to recognize these moments and then becoming curious about what just happened can turn your lows into learning moments. 

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