Everyone gets angry sometimes but some people really struggle with a hot temper. I’m one of those people.
When I was a teenage girl, I was fighting physically with my family. I thought there was no hope for me because once I got mad, I couldn’t seem to calm myself down no matter what I tried. People would tell me to take a step back from the situation and breathe, but that wasn’t enough to make the anger subside. When I was an addict, the words I would say were often vindictive and designed to destroy the other person’s confidence. Then the anger would subside and I would feel awful for hurting them, but it was too late to take back what I said and did.
Coping with intense anger is notoriously difficult and even the best psycholgists don’t have all the answers. For example, there is still no highly effective treatment for physically abusive people- they are widely considered by society to be incurable and incapable of change. We may feel for them, since most of them were abused themselves as children, but we are told we cannot be in any kind of relationship with them.
So what is a person supposed to do if they are the angry one? Whether you have angry outbursts or you hold all your anger inside until you start to get resentful and bitter, there are some coping skills that can help. Some types of therapy, as well as many addiction recovery programs, address anger directly. These programs attempt to provide some insights and solutions so you can have healthy conflict resolution in your life.
Why Some People Experience Anger More Intensely
Anger is a powerful, natural emotion that acts like a built-in alarm system for your brain. It usually starts in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which scans the world for threats. When you feel like you’ve been treated unfairly, or when someone crosses your boundaries, the amygdala sends out a signal that triggers a “fight, flight, freeze, or faun” response. This floods your body with chemicals like adrenaline, making your heart beat faster and your muscles tense up as your body prepares to protect itself. Your genetic disposition and early childhood can determine whether your instinct is to fight, flight, freeze, or faun- and it’s so instinctually rooted it can be hard to overcome.
While everyone gets mad sometimes, some people experience anger much more intensely due to that mix of biology and life experiences. For some, their “alarm system” is simply more sensitive, reacting to small problems as if they are major emergencies. This can be caused by high levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) or a brain that is wired to stay on high alert. Additionally, if a person grew up in an environment where they had to be loud or aggressive to be heard or safe, their brain may have learned that intense anger is the most effective way to stay effective or get their needs met.
Understanding why anger happens is the first step toward managing it. When the emotional brain takes over, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for logic and decision-making—often “goes offline,” making it hard to think clearly. It’s also important to recognize that anger is often a “secondary emotion” covering up deeper feelings, like hurt or fear or shame.
Coping by Changing the Way You Think About Anger
Anger can be an alert to your values and boundaries. It can point out what bothers you and what really wounds you. It can even connect you to your sense of justice and your empathy. But using anger in this way requires pausing before reacting, so you can investigate what your anger is trying to tell you. The surge of adrenaline makes some people (like me) aggressive, but if you can use a coping skill and get alone for a little while, you can learn a lot about yourself and the world by investigating why you’re angry and making a plan to handle it.
Some coping skills to create that pause and personal space include:
-Splashing some cold water on your face
-carrying headphones everywhere with you in case you get overstimulated/need some alone time and privacy even in public
-Soothing yourself with a comfort object, favorite snack, or time in your bedroom relaxing.
Then it’s important to identify what’s beneath the anger. Do you feel hurt? Betrayed? Violated? Your anger is there to motivate you to set a boundary, but ideally you can do this in a legal and fair way.
Try writing down what you’re going to say to the person before you even approach them again.
How AA Tells Us to Deal with Anger
The recovery program of AA has its own recipe for dealing with anger.
It advises us to remember that all human beings are sick, and have problems of their own- it’s not about you.
Step 4 advises us to take an honest inventory of our resentments and bitterness, look for the ways we contributed to the situation ourselves, and make a real effort to let them go. In the Big Book it says that step 4 of AA involves making “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves” to identify personal flaws, resentments, and behaviors that have contributed to problems in life.
AA actually states that these steps are necessary parts of a good recovery plan from addiction.
Journaling About Anger
To process your anger and resentments in your journal, try these journaling prompts:
The Resentment Inventory: List a specific person or institution you feel angry toward. Describe the exact event that triggered this feeling. Instead of focusing on their “wrongness,” focus on the specific instinct of yours that was threatened (e.g., your self-esteem, security, safety, sense of justice, or personal ambitions).
Cognitive Distortions Check: Identify a recent moment of intense anger. Were you “mind-reading” (assuming you knew their intent) or “catastrophizing” (believing the outcome is going to be worse than it is)? Rewrite the event using only objective, neutral facts without any adjectives.
The Part We Played: Step 4 emphasizes looking at our own “side of the street.” Reflect on a recurring conflict and honestly ask: Where was I selfish, dishonest, or afraid in this situation? How did my own actions or expectations contribute to the conflict?
The “Should” Saboteur: CBT often identifies “should statements” as a source of anger (e.g., “They should have known better”). List three “shoulds” you are currently holding against others. How would your stress level change if you replaced “should” with “I would prefer”?
Fear Beneath the Fire: Anger is often a secondary emotion used to mask vulnerability. Beneath your current resentment, what is the underlying fear? Are you afraid of being controlled, being unloved, or being seen as inadequate? Describe that fear in detail. Where does it come from? Did someone say something to you when you were young thta stuck with you?
The Cost of Carrying: Imagine your resentment is a physical weight you carry everywhere. What is it costing you mentally, physically, and socially to keep this anger alive? Is the “justice” of being right worth the price of your peace of mind?
The Letter of Release: Write a short, searingly honest letter to someone you resent. Do not hold back or be “polite.” Once finished, do not send it. Instead, write a second paragraph describing how it feels to have those words out of your body and onto the paper.
The Benefit of the Doubt (CBT Reframing): Think of a person who angered you. Brainstorm three alternative explanations for their behavior that have nothing to do with you (e.g., they were exhausted, grieving, or lacked the tools to communicate). How does this shift your internal temperature?
Values vs. Reaction: Describe a situation where you reacted in anger. Does that reaction align with the person you want to be or the values you hold dear? If not, what would a “value-aligned” response look like if the situation happened again tomorrow?
The Pattern Recognition: Look back at your history of resentments. Do you notice a theme? (e.g., feeling overlooked by authority figures or let down by friends). How much of your current anger is about the present moment, and how much is a “memory” of a past wound?
Leave a Reply