It is important to recognise that anger is not necessarily a mental health problem. Everyone experiences the emotion sometimes. It is often a response to mistreatment or abuse. When used in a positive way it can help us drive change, such as refusing to accept mistreatment or stopping a harmful situation. But anger can become a mental health issue if it becomes disordered. If you become angry at very minor triggers, have little ability to control it or express it in harmful ways like physical aggression, self-harm or passive aggression then your anger may be disordered and you might benefit from help to control it.

Anger is usually caused by feeling threatened, disrespected, invalidated or otherwise mistreated. If these things are happening then appropriately controlled anger is a valid emotion. Anger is disordered where it is not a proportionate response to a situation or we cannot control ourselves during it (e.g. becoming physically aggressive). So why do some people have disordered anger?

For many people, they learn disordered anger throughout their lives. Growing up, if our needs and fears weren’t taken seriously we become afraid that our needs won’t be met. This causes us to not express ourselves well as we see no point in doing so. These bottled up emotions may come out as anger which gets more attention from people. This may subconsciously teach us that we need anger to have our needs met so anger becomes our default emotional response. As this beds in we start to find it harder to control the anger and it becomes disordered. We make the faulty assumption that we must be angry at and control people or we will never have our needs met.

Another way is social learning. If we grow up in environments where anger is often displayed we learn it as the “right” emotional response. We don’t develop healthy coping styles or ways to express ourselves. In these circumstances a person might not know any other way to express themselves. Finally, a person with a history of neglect or mistreatment make may the faulty assumption that people are out to get them so may over-monitor for mistreatment. This causes them to misinterpret situations so they become angry more easily.

As we can see, disordered anger is often based on inaccurate thinking, such as assuming we ill be mistreated, thinking it is the only way to express ourselves or get our needs met. A therapist might be able to help you challenge this. Importantly, they will not be telling you that you are wrong to have felt what you did, at one point in life you may have needed anger to express yourself or kept yourself safe. But we now recognise that you will be happier and have closer social relationships by learning a new way to cope and express yourself. We will look at what your messages are and support you to reconsider inaccurate beliefs and try new strategies for self-expression. These will all be based on making the changes you want to see to feel happier, safer and more secure.

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Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the psychological therapies we offer at our facilities that could be able to help with anger-related problems.