How to Let Go of Anger: 6 DBT Skills for Managing Anger and Repairing Relationships
Strained relationships and emotion dysregulation often lead to anger. In these circumstances, anger is so understandable… but it’s also corrosive. Anger further strains relationships, increases individual suffering, pushes people away, and keeps you stuck. As the proverb goes, “anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” It’s painful to be angry. Anger also leads us to act very quickly, which can lead to doing things you later regret.
Anger fits the facts when you or someone you care about are hurt or have your rights violated, things don’t go the way you hope and expect, or you’re in pain or lose your status. In these situations, anger can be a primary emotion. However, often (more often than not), anger is a secondary emotion that distracts us from our primary emotions and increases our suffering in the long run. For parents, holding onto anger towards their kids (and vice versa) gets in the way of our top priority goal of relationship repair.
So, managing and letting go of anger is important… so how do you actually do it?
Increase awareness (i.e., mindfulness) of anger. Like with most skills and interventions, we start with increasing mindful awareness by noticing and labeling the anger. Remember, emotion identification is emotion management.
Identify your primary emotion. Ask yourself what the natural emotional reaction to the situation would be. Strip away any interpretations. When in doubt, consult Emotion Regulation Handout 6 (attached). Allow yourself to experience the primary emotion. Let it come and go, like a wave.
Practice nonjudgment. Judgments (aka “interpretations”) are the quickest path to anger (and generally from primary to secondary emotions). When you feel angry, ask yourself what interpretations you might be making. When you notice making interpretations, try sticking to just the facts instead.
Practice curiosity. It’s hard to stay angry if you can be fully and truly curious about the other person’s experience. Ask yourself what might have led them to feel what they’re feeling and do what they’re doing. How did they come to be in the precise position they are in?
Practice opposite action to anger. Sometimes, the best way to change what you’re feeling is to act your way into feeling different. In DBT, we call this “opposite action.” First, ask yourself what the anger is telling you to do (i.e., what is your action urge?). Then, ask yourself what the opposite of that urge would be. So, if the anger is telling you to yell, the opposite action would be to say something kind. Often, opposite action to anger looks like gentle avoidance.
Kick it up a notch with opposite action all the way. For maximum benefit, don’t just do the opposite action, do the opposite action all the way. Instead of gently avoiding, consider going out of your way to do something especially nice for the other person. This isn’t about approving of what the other person is doing or agreeing with them, it’s about changing your own experience.