Anger--What Is It Good For?

Some would say nothing. Many people are taught that anger is bad or morally wrong. This is especially true for women.

I used to work in rural Alabama, and I met with a group of depressed older ladies. One day, one of the ladies was talking about how her adult son was taking advantage of her-living with her, eating her food without contributing to the expenses- and also being verbally hateful. I asked this lady how she felt about this situation, and she said something like “depressed” or “disappointed”. I then asked the other ladies how they felt listening to this story and they said the same kind of thing-“disappointed”, “sad”, etc. I was hoping that one of the ladies would say she was angry so that the first lady would feel better admitting her own anger-well that didn’t happen. It was not okay to these ladies to admit feeling angry. It wasn’t being a good Christian woman to admit anger. Even when I told them that I felt angry listening to the story, they still didn’t want to admit being angry.

What if I said that anger is good? What?! Yes, anger is good. The only bad thing about anger is what we do with it. We can choose to do something helpful with anger, or we can do something destructive with it.

Now it is true that sometimes the anger is out of proportion or inappropriate-sometimes we make an assumption that’s not true that leads us to be angry. In that case, I help my clients to rethink that anger and look at the situation more realistically. But when the anger is realistic, I help my clients to develop skills to use their anger in a healthy way.