When anger and anxiety hold hands

Both anger and anxiety are common and, possibly, frequent emotional experiences. We might notice them without quite understanding what has hooked them and fanned their flames. And even without understanding how, here they might be: either in isolation, or sequentially, or both at the same time, holding hands.

How might they relate to each other? How might we start to make sense of their relationship? And how might we start to make sense of how they impact our internal world, how we relate to the world around us, and our relationships with others?

Our early experiences of anger might carry significant weight without our being aware. It might be helpful to think about what’s gone on for us, as little children, around anger. We might have had a parent or caregiver who was prone to anger; we might have experienced angry ‘explosions’ without any understanding of the cause.

Were we punished or criticised when, as little ones, we got angry - were we encouraged to follow a calm or even subdued path because anger was “forbidden”? Were “big” emotions destructive ones? What would happen in either of these situations if we were then to feel angry and had to contain it? I wonder if anything else would grow alongside. Maybe… anxiety? If so, unless we were to learn how to better manage it, mightn’t this relationship between anger and anxiety continue into adulthood for us? 
 
Perhaps it would be helpful to think of both anger and anxiety as responses to a real or imagined threat - a sort of fight or flight response? They might become lively as we experience ourselves as vulnerable in some way? We might find ourselves feeling challenged and coming out swinging, ready to defend, pre-emptively angry, finding comfort in a strategy of offence being the best defence - “I can beat any bully on the street!”
 
We could think that what might be lying beneath the surface of this “threat” response is grabbing at anxiety’s hand. What happens if the threat is an anticipated one - if the anger is there ready to spring into action at the slightest hint of it being needed? What might that state of being feel like? Might it feel vigilant? Anxious? 

I wonder what happens when anxiety provides a baseline to how we experience ourselves in the world around us in a more general way? For example, we might feel perpetually anxious and aware in some way that the world can be dangerous and we can be relatively defenceless. Our anger might be more in relation to our anxiety about a world we see as generally threatening because we experience ourselves as generally vulnerable. How is it for us when we’re ready to throw metaphorical punches because we are anxious about “what might happen”? 

Perhaps we experience our baseline anxiety as a sense of frustration with ourselves that we can’t feel more robust and less vulnerable. We might have been told as little ones to “be brave, and get on with it” when really we just couldn’t understand or do that. These messages can be potent ones. What happens if we carry them with us through life? What if our anger becomes focused on ourselves because of that? I wonder if our levels of anxiety might then become both more potent and more persistent because it’s now more about our own feelings about ourselves?
 
The relationship between anger and anxiety can be quite complex. It can also carry really important messages for us about how we experience ourselves, the world in which we live and the people in our relational constellations. We could find that either, or both, of these emotions are becoming uncomfortably dominant or worrying, impacting on how we live our day-to-day lives. If this is happening, then exploring the messages they might have and how they have come to be so entrenched with a trusted counsellor might be really helpful. Therapy can be a truly nourishing space to explore this and to learn to better manage this dynamic.