4 Emotions That Are Hidden Beneath Your Anger

The Complex Emotions Beneath Our Anger

We should take time to notice the way that other emotions are so often at work alongside, or underneath, our anger. We could begin, for example, by noticing how often we seem to enjoy the experience of anger. Anger can empower us, energizing us to face a threat or confront a difficulty. In our anger, we find the strength to resist a bully or the determination to launch a campaign. Instead of feeling weak and vulnerable, anger enables us to speak out against something that is wrong or act with courage in the face of injustice.

Because anger is so basic, and because it can also leave us feeling energized, it is an emotion that is relatively easy to slip into. We might say that it doesn’t take much effort to either get angry or express anger. Anger is right there, right away. That makes it different from a whole host of other emotions that are not only much more complex in nature but also much harder to identify and express. We will look at some of those more complex emotions below. First, though, consider anger’s close companion in the choice between fight or flight—the emotion of fear.

1. Fear

When we are angry, one key question to ask of ourselves (and others) is whether fear is present as well. For even though fear is just as elemental as anger, it can be rather harder to admit. Being angry will often help us feel strong, but admitting fear usually leaves us feeling weak. So we may need a little persuading before we are ready to admit our fear.

We might think of a husband who is angry at his wife for arriving home late or a parent who is angry with a child who has stepped off the pavement. What lies beneath the sharp word they express? Very probably fear. The parent is afraid that her child will be hit by a car. The husband, perhaps, fears that his wife’s late arrival home indicates some terrible accident or assault has taken place. Yet instead of expressing that fear, each expresses anger. Remember that it comes easily to us because expressing anger makes us feel stronger, whereas admitting fear forces us to confront our own vulnerability.

But while anger so often divides and disrupts relationships, fear can be much more constructive. If the angry husband with the late-arriving wife were willing to express his fear, then instead of being met with a barrage of accusation and complaint, this wife would arrive home to discover just how much she is loved by her husband and just how much that love led him to fret at the thought of losing her.

And it is not just horizontal relationships that can profit from the admission of fear. Our vertical relationship with God can do so too. Once we are willing to admit that we are afraid, we can begin to speak to God about that fear and also listen to the many ways God speaks into those fears.

We are afraid because we believe we are alone, persuaded that no one cares for us, no one provides for us, and no one is looking out for us. We live as functional orphans, as if we have no heavenly Father who cares for us. And that drives us away from an admission of fear and into an expression of anger. For if I am on my own, if it is only me who can defend myself against threat, if everyone and everything is against me, then I should, I must, fight. The world is far too scary for me to do anything else. In the absence of anyone powerful enough to intervene, I have to rely on me.

But the antidote to such fear involves remembering, bringing back to mind the sovereign care of the Lord. I must remember that there is a God who feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies and that this God also cares for me (Matt. 6:25–34). Our fear, and the anger beneath which it so often hides, arises when we have elevated ourselves and eclipsed God. But our fear, and with it our anger, will subside whenever we remember the character of our God and restore both him and us to the proper places.

Fear, however, is not the only emotion that the husband in our earlier example may be feeling. Suppose for a moment that his fear is justified, that there is some danger or threat. Yet in the absence of information, what is he able to do? His love may be prompting him to act, to care for his beloved, but he lacks the necessary knowledge to know how to act. Therefore, it’s not just anger he feels. Still another emotion lurks beneath his anger, and that emotion is frustration. It is to that feeling that we will now turn.

Our fear, and with it our anger, will subside whenever we remember the character of our God and restore both him and us to the proper places.

2. Frustration

Like kings suffering from the delusion of power, we believe that we should be in control, that getting what we want ought to lie within our compass. I should be able to change that. I am sure that a person like me ought to be able to achieve a thing like that. I hate it that I can’t get my way. It isn’t just frustrating; it is maddening. It makes me furious that I seem to be so impotent and that the world seems so impervious to my rule.

The same themes are bubbling up. My frustration is bound up with self-importance. I am sure I should be able to achieve this or change that because I am living in the self-deluded belief that I am, really, a kind of mini messiah. I want to believe in my own power, my own capacity. I want to feel strong and capable, and it frustrates me that it isn’t so. Behind anger is frustration, and behind frustration is sin—the sin that has led me to take the place of God.

3. Sadness

Fear and frustration are, like anger, relatively raw emotions. The next two emotions we will consider are far from simple. The first of them, sadness, has many shades, especially as it is expressed in relation to grief and loss.

The links between grief and anger are well established. In her famous study of the way patients responded to the news of a terminal diagnosis, one of the key things Kubler-Ross identified was the prominence of anger. Faced with an untreatable condition, patients were angry about the illness, angry with doctors for not having a treatment to offer, angry with whatever delayed them seeking treatment, angry with a world that doesn’t seem to care, and angry with God for not answering their prayers for healing.¹

Her findings have been extended to many of our other experiences of loss but most particularly to the experience of bereavement. And even if those who have been bereaved rarely negotiate loss in the neat phases the theory suggests, many of these elements do seem to feature. And knowing that anger is one of the emotions that may surface is important because it helps us to be on the lookout for it. That is important because it isn’t intuitively obvious that anger is a feeling we may experience in our loss, especially anger toward the person who has died. Yet such anger is surprisingly common. Sometimes it is expressed in relation to feelings of having been abandoned: “How could she leave me?” Sometimes it appears wrapped up in expressions of regret: “Why didn’t he do as I said and get help earlier?” But often it is voiced as an essential failure to care: “If she loved me, she would never have left me like this.”

Look beneath anger, and you will often find grief and loss. But as we seek to speak into our experiences of anger in the face of loss, we need to be alert both to right and wrong expressions of indignation. It is right to feel indignant when our enemy death does his damaging work; that anger is right and proper and was shared on earth by Jesus himself. But there is also a wrong kind of indignation that we come to feel because we have forgotten who is on the throne and feel frustrated because our own sovereign plans have been disrupted.

4. Shame

The final emotion that we may find beneath our experience of anger is shame. It’s a familiar combination. We hate being humiliated, and it’s not at all unusual when our humiliation spills over into rage. When others see our failure, the impression that we want to present to the world is undone. We want the world to see us as strong, and we are exposed as being weak. We want the world to think of us as experienced, but it becomes clear that we are a mere novice. We want the world to admire us for our cleverness, but it is our ignorance that is revealed. The image we have of ourselves and the image we want to project to the world are unraveled. And it makes us angry.

The strangeness, once again, is in the extent of our self-deception. As the boundaries of our strength are revealed, we could simply acknowledge our limitations. But something gets in the way of us doing that. We hate feeling weak. Humiliation is the result. It comes from our determination to claim strength that we do not actually possess.

It’s just the same in relation to a lack of experience. We could simply acknowledge that we still have lots to learn. But we don’t want to do that either. So we are humiliated because we seem to need to pretend that we know everything.

Consider what happens when people see that we are struggling and step in to help us. We could thank them for their help and acknowledge that we can’t do everything on our own. But that too often seems too difficult a step for us to take. Instead we simultaneously reject the help and feel humiliated, all because we seem to need to pretend that we are entirely independent and self-sufficient.

All these delusional beliefs of comprehensive knowledge and unlimited power and absolute self-sufficiency are ways we pretend to be God. They are qualities that belong to him. But in our madness we pretend they are ours, and that leaves us vulnerable to humiliation when it becomes clear that this is not so.

Now, of course, it is vital to recognize that this isn’t the only way shame comes about. Sometimes we feel shame, not because we have been treated in a way that is out of keeping with our bloated self-image, but because we have been treated in a way that is out of keeping with the dignity given us by God. An abuser shames his victim by forcing her to do degrading things. A boss humiliates an employee by ridiculing him and bullying him in public. A husband shames his wife by constantly insulting her and ridiculing her for everything she does. In these cases, it is not an exaggerated sense of self-importance that is being undermined but the sense of worth that we should all have as those made in the image and likeness of God.

But, interestingly, that kind of shame is less frequently expressed in the form of anger. Anger, it seems, is much more regularly tied to the shame and humiliation we feel when it is our exaggerated, God-replacing image that comes under threat. Yet it is into this precise experience that the gospel speaks, for once we have seen that beneath our expression of anger lies the experience of shame, we are ready to hear the twofold comfort of the gospel. First, we are ready to hear its call to repent, to admit the sinful presumption that persuaded us toward godlike pretensions and to decisively set them aside. And this repentance is a comfort—sometimes even a joy—for it is such a relief to stop chasing after something we were never designed to pursue.

The second comfort we find in the gospel is the provision of a gift, a gift that meets us in our shame, and instead of exposing our disgrace, it covers it. This gift of righteousness provides us with a standing and status before God that mean we need never feel cowed or bowed down. He has counted us worthy. We are precious in his sight. There is no need for shame, ever again.

And in this relief of our sense of shame we also find the defusing of our anger.

This article is adapted from The Heart of Anger: How the Bible Transforms Anger in Our Understanding and Experience by Christopher Ash and Steve Midgley.

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