If it’s true everyone has a go to emotion, my BFF emotion is certainly anger. I’m Irish, German, and Chinese so the odds of being hot blooded were always in my favor. Over the decades I’ve become more enlightened about my favorite emotion and learned how turn it into constructive decision making more efficiently.

A therapist once told me anger provides a false sense of power. I’ve never done cocaine, but I imagine that anger provides me the same high and sense of invincibility cocaine would. My senses are heightened and the adrenaline that fuels me makes me feel like I could pick up a car and throw it. I still don’t agree with this therapist. Anger is not a false sense of power. Anger is powerful. It courses straight from my beating heart, through my veins to every part of my being. Anger starts wars and finishes them. Sure, anger unchecked can be problematic. But what if the emotion is the misunderstood kid in class?

In my angriest moments as an adult, I’ve gotten really stuck in an angry loop. Anger was eating me alive. Working with a different therapist she told me anger is a mask for sadness and to overcome it I’d have to dig below its surface. I learned how to peel back the mask, label the emotion underneath as sadness and begin to “unpack” that. It is an exhausting amount of work and not for the faint of heart but getting to my truth has allowed me to make an informed decision about what to do about the relationship.

As a work in progress, I robotically practicing rephrasing my anger statement into the sadness statement that is the actual feeling underneath. It’s highly uncomfortable but I’ve seen it work before so I push through the discomfort. This week I spent time with one of my best friends of 15 years and described a big fight I got into with my brother. This brother and I are cut from the same cloth. We both run hot blooded, and we fundamentally see the world differently. As I described our recent fight to my friend, I found myself repeating: He made me so mad, he made me so mad, so mad, just… mad. I was gripping a fist and had so much adrenaline flowing through my body I could’ve knocked out someone twice my size with one punch. It was like putting the phrase out in the atmosphere again and again would lead me to the truth of it. I released my fist and watched as my white knuckles began to receive blood flow again. I’m hurt, I told my friend. I’m really hurt. I’m really hurt. What he said really hurt me. Sure, it’s my feelings he hurt but it might as well have been a physical wound because it felt like a small piece of my heart broke off when he said it.

We’re socialized to believe while anger is a natural human emotion, it can be felt but should not be expressed. Anger is always the emotion people judge and take distance from while sadness garners empathy and is embraced more easily. A person acting angry gives others the feeling of superiority because they have remained in control of their emotions. When did control over one’s emotions become synonymous with emotionally healthy?  In their superiority soup they start to add the labels next: “Look at her, she’s crazy.” “Angry bitch.” “She needs to calm down.” Or worse the angry person is avoided completely. Label and avoid. Avoid and label.

Have you ever just let it rip in anger? It feels good. It doesn’t solve the problem in that moment until you do the work of digging and unpacking yadda yadda. But you know why anger is my favorite emotion? Feeling angry has shown me I still care about the person I’m angry with. If I’m angry with you, I still love you. I care about you. Please don’t be worried if I’m angry with you. Be worried if you can do nothing to anger me anymore. In that space of calm, I’ve done the work on my end and made the decision to move on.

I love anger because it brings me to the edge of my own sanity, and it forces me to solve the puzzle: Why do I feel this way? You see, anger demands to be dealt with. It cuts to the front of the line holding a hand grenade and threatening to pull the pin if ignored. In my most depressed times anger reminded me I am still alive. It pulled me back onto land. It showed me I still cared.

I love anger because it’s versatile. I feel it and I know it’s time to make the logical connection to the sadness. The more I connect with and identify sadness the less I fear it crippling me. I’m cutting down the time I can pivot to positive action without falling into the abyss of sadness. I can also choose to table any follow up action and just free myself from being held hostage by anger. I once told my therapist I can’t take the elevator to the basement where sadness lies unless I must have time off from life to recover from the pain. But in anger I can operate. Hell, I can even multitask. I can meet life’s demands and roll the conflict marble around in my head at the same time. Anger doesn’t ruin my makeup like sadness does.

 I implore you to embrace your own anger the next time it shows up. The worst thing you can do is ignore your anger, repress it, tell it to drop the weapon and get to the back of the line. Let the bubbles rise to the top and enjoy the roar you feel rise from the pit of your stomach into your lungs and out into the world. Congratulations! You are still a participating character in this video game called life. You haven’t given up yet and you can use the strength and power you feel in a constructive way.

 Please trust that exploring your anger will lead you to the heart of why you still care. From there, you can decide to take distance if the relationship needs a pause, triage the wound if the relationship is worth saving, or permanently move on in the name of protecting your own health. And if you find yourself on the receiving end of anger from someone you love (justified or not), please understand you are receiving sadness & frustration personified. The fastest way to disarm an angry person coming at you like swarm of hornets is to give them the reason they feel unseen. Give them the reason so they can access their sadness and put the damn grenade down.