2020-08-12 Validate the anger, p
Anger is the emotion we feel when we believe we’ve been wronged. Aggression, on the other hand, is the act of expressing our anger, mostly in terms of what we do and say.
Most of us aren’t afraid of other people’s anger; we’re afraid of their aggression — of what their anger might lead to:
- Insults, sarcasm, put-downs, shouting, and other forms of aggressive speech.
- Physical acts of aggression from slamming doors to physical abuse or shunning.
- The stress, loneliness, anxiety, guilt, awkwardness, or any number of painful feelings that often follow from a major fight or confrontation.
This distinction between anger and aggression is critical because we need to handle each very differently. Unfortunately, our instincts for how to do this tend to be dead wrong.
Instinctively, we tend to get defensive in the face of anger and say (or think) things like:
- Why do you have to get so angry every time I bring up my parents?
- You need to calm down and listen to what I’m actually saying.
- If you weren’t so angry, we could handle things like a mature adult instead of acting like a child.
The common theme is that you’re being critical of their anger, of their emotional experience. The problem is, anger isn’t really the problem. None of us have direct control over how we feel emotionally. And to be criticized or judged for something we don’t really have control over feels terrible.
This why high-anger situations tend to quickly devolve into unproductive shouting matches. We pour fuel on the fire when we criticize or judge people for their emotional experience of anger.
Then, to make matters worse, we don’t really deal with the other person’s aggression in a smart, consistent way. What I mean by that is, we are generally not good at being assertive about setting and enforcing boundaries on aggressive behavior — including the effective use of consequences.
