ANGER

When I went to a CBT conference hosted by David Burns, I was surprised by the fact that he kept bringing up anger.  It was a conference about combating anxiety, yet he continually found that anxiety was usually secondary to anger, because we live in a "nice" culture where it's not OK to express your anger.  In fact, one of his techniques to "untwist your thinking" revolved entirely around the idea that you may be holding in something upsetting and your brain has converted this anger into a safer emotion (anxiety).

The Hidden Emotion Model: This technique is based on the idea that when you're anxious, you may be avoiding a personal problem that you don't want to face. Bringing this problem to conscious awareness and expressing your feelings will often eliminate your anxiety. Ask yourself, "Am I focusing on my anxiety to avoid dealing with something upsetting? What's the real problem that's bothering me? Do I secretly resent my spouse or my job? Am I unhappy about being in school? How do I really feel?"  (from David Burns 50 ways to untwist your thinking)

That was different from what I heard in my substance abuse classes; there I learned that anger is a secondary emotion and that there is usually something behind the anger, like feeling inferior, that people won't let themselves be vulnerable enough with to express, so instead they take it out on the people around them with anger.   

Which comes first the anxiety or the anger?  I think it depends on which population you work with. If you worked with drug addicts all day, you may see a lot of angry clients and see that the real reason they express that emotion is they are experiencing pain from cravings and withdrawal, pain from abuse and neglect, and sorrow from past mistakes. If you are working with anxious clients, you will see that the hidden emotion is unexpressed anger and they have learned to quickly suppress it because its "not OK to be angry." For example, a client may be really angry they had to work a late shift again but was too nice to tell his boss how mad he was, and may feel he doesn't deserve to be angry anyway and should be grateful he even has the job, so instead he just develops anxiety about going to work, or may have the urge to throw up every time his boss comes around. 

In either scenario, managing anger becomes an important aspect of recovery. Anger has gotten a bad rap because we associate anger with being out of control. Many people get uncomfortable at the least and at worst hurt when anger rears its ugly head. However, anger is an emotion we all will experience and simply having some anger does not make you out of control, any more than having some sadness makes you depressed.  It can actually be quite useful anger, it can defend us when we are in danger and can warn us when something isn't right, and helps us keep healthy boundaries, so we don't want to eliminate or suppress it completely.

So what do we do with it?  There are two options, you can 1. lower your expectations or 2. learn to express your anger in a healthy manner. 
The latter, learning to express your anger assertively but not hurtfully, is by far the optimal decision for your mental health. However, it takes practice, courage and vulnerability to be able to learn how to simply and assertively express that you are upset about something without hidden vindictive intentions.  We first have to identify what is making us upset, and sometimes that alone is very difficult because we've spent a lifetime suppressing or avoiding the emotional pain of anger. Once the source of the anger is pinpointed, we must have the courage to say in a calm voice, "I feel upset about that" without criticism, contempt, defensiveness, or revenge.  (Or "please don't do that" or "I don't feel right about that" or even "I'm so angry I can't see straight.")

If you are not sure that expressing your anger is an option for you right now, you can try to lower your expectations.  Anger generally comes from frustration about something you expected to happen or thought should happen but did not.   The man yelling at his computer obviously thought some technical program should be easier to navigate than it was or doing something that it was not. A wife  cannot be angry with her spouse if there was not some expectation in her mind that he did not meet.  It stands to reason that if you lower your expectations you will lower your frequency of angry moments.  Trying to lower expectations can help you at least start to identify the source of your anger so that you can decide if its worth being angry about, and if it is, explore ways of how to express that.

"Peace comes from learning to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be."