You Have the Right to Feel Anger and Protest Your Discomforts

Although they might want to convince you otherwise, you have the right to get angry. Feeling annoyance, indignation and rage or bewilderment is the first step towards confronting a problem and is an emotional necessity. Keep in mind that if we limit ourselves to swallowing our anger over and over, without confronting it, it will harm us and make our self-esteem vulnerable.

You have to be clear on one thing: allowing yourself to feel anger doesn’t equate to losing control or showing signs of weakness. Often, we tend to confuse certain terms and ideas. We know that he who angers us, dominates us. But we’re not going to deactivate that negative emotion due to it. We’re not going to hide it, refuse to accept or manage it. Anger has a very clear objective: it urges us to resolve a concrete threat.

Our everyday lives always put our emotional balance to the test. There will be people who are constantly and eternally offended. But there will also be those who don’t take anything personally. Each one of us moves through our everyday lives with a certain filter, through which we let certain emotions and thoughts slide.

However, everything has a limit and an unbreakable barrier. We refer to this barrier that is often arbitrarily crossed to vilify our self-esteem, in order to rip or emotional integrity to shreds, or to manipulate us. Anger has a reason for existing. Expressing anger in a respectful way in the right and necessary moment is something very cathartic and healthy.

Protesting and giving your emotions a voice is also helpful

As curious as it may seem, very few books explain the benefits of getting angry or feeling indignation. Traditionally, this type of emotion was always linked to rage and a lack of control or temperance, of tact and skill when it comes to dealing with an obstacle.

However, it’s good to remember that, just like what happens in a process of grief, we must take this step towards the acceptance of our own emotions before channeling and transforming them. Knowing what you feel and why you feel it is vital when it comes to resolving an emotional dilemma. For a book that is as interesting as it is illuminating on this topic, read “Annoying” (2011). It was written by the scientists Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman.

In this text, the topic of anger is examined from a multidisciplinary approach including neuroscience, sociology, anthropology and psychology. The first thing they reveal is that often anger is compared to rage, frustration or repugnance towards something or someone. This isn’t true. In fact, experts attempt to understand bouts of anger as a unique and exclusive emotion.

At the same time, anger never emerges from a specific action or event. It is an accumulation of “a lot of little things adding up to a lot”. It’s like the mosquito that buzzes around your room every night and drives you crazy, making you incapable of falling asleep. Making you focus on that and nothing else. However, and here is the most important point, without discomfort, there is no possibility of change. That is to say, that negative emotion has a purpose: it wants us to act.

Getting angry intelligently

Charles Darwin once said that negative emotions, such as fear and rage, are warnings that lead us towards putting into practice appropriate behaviors in order to avoid or do away with a threat. Paying attention to what bothers us, causes us displeasure or unease is a show of self-awareness. Behaving in an appropriate manner according to these emotions undoubtedly shows emotional intelligence.