What is the Anger Iceberg?
Someone watching you when you’re angry can see your face swell up, your eyes get bigger, your fists clenching, and your hands in the air. They can hear you yell. That’s all they notice – the anger on the tip of the metaphorical emotional iceberg.
They can’t identify or even guess the myriad of feelings you’re experiencing under it but cannot express. They are oblivious to your vulnerability and experience of sadness, fear, disappointment, stress, guilt or shame – all masked by anger.
In this article, we’ve dissected the concept of the ‘anger iceberg’ as a tool to help you better understand yourself and get to the root of your so-called anger issues.
Table of Contents
Feeling angry is good
Anger is one of the six basic emotions that human beings experience along with disgust, sadness, fear, happiness, and surprise. Emotions become increasingly complicated, and we experience multiple emotions in one go and explore other emotions like disappointment, anxiety, insecurity, jealousy, etc.
Like any other emotion, anger is usually a healthy response to an event that evokes an emotional response that alerts and inspires action. Everyone feels angry sometimes or the other.
Your brain notices an unusual situation and the blood in your veins rushes to your limbs giving your body an immediate call for action. This is your body simply alerting you of the danger lurking around you. We all react to it very differently.
In 2010, a study was conducted to assess the role of anger in a competitive environment. Subjects were shown pictures of certain objects they could win in a game, mixed with images of angry and neutral faces. It turns out that people wanted the objects with angry faces more than the others and they worked harder to get those objects. The study concluded that anger can be a powerful motivational tool depending on the circumstances and the context.
So far so good!
Losing yourself to anger is bad
Some of us express anger by crying, some like to scream and yell, some use the energy to go for a run or hit the gym, some others to sing and write, some start hating other people, some start hating themselves, and some like to throw and break things.
But no one likes to be a screamer in a peaceful room, no one likes to deal with the aftermath of having broken a chair in the process of expressing themselves. No one decides that I’m going to wake up in the morning and hit someone, scream at a junior or throw away my phone today.
They can barely comprehend the extent of action required to resolve the situation so they completely underestimate the consequences of their actions and react at the mercy of their emotions.
Why would anyone in their right mind want to be in an angry state of mind?
Why the anger then, you ask?
Why do people get angry
Simpler to explore and express
Getting angry is easy. It’s easier than being ashamed, disappointed, sad, scared, vulnerable, jealous, and insecure. If you don’t use anger to shut down your emotions in that moment, you’ll have to do the harder work of dealing with your ‘issues’.
Response to call for urgent action
It’s simply a response to your brain’s call for action. While your brain sends urgent calls for action to your body and makes you more impulsive under the looming threat, it does not want to pause to think about the best course of action and its consequences.
As a result, you tend to react quickly without taking a minute to judge the consequences of your actions and understand the risks associated with them.
Lack of self-awareness
Think about the last time you lost your temper about something.
Was it when your friend cancelled your dinner plan the last time and kept doing it repeatedly? Do you have an anger issue or do you feel as if your friend is taking you for granted and you’re feeling rejected by your own ‘safe space’ person?
Was it when your boss told you off for not meeting the deadline for the assignment? Do you have an anger issue or is it that you find it difficult to accept and confront the trauma of failing to prove yourself just too hard to deal with?
When things don’t go your way, you get triggered. You know something is off, but you can’t put your finger on it. As a result, you get frustrated and hence, angry.
Lack of emotional awareness
How would you tell someone you’re anxious if you don’t know it yourself? You can see that your hands are shaking, you can feel your heart beating at 10 times the pace, and you’re nauseous.
Most people will mistake it for a heart or a breathing issue and take you right to the hospital. Only to realize that your lungs and heart are in the best shape but something else is broken – which is hidden underneath because you either can’t put your finger on it or you’re not ready to deal with it yet.
This is also why anger, being right on the surface and visible, is often called the secondary emotion triggered by several other primary emotions.
Emotional suppression
Icebergs are not formed in a day. It takes months and years of emotional suppression caused by circumstances that taught you that expressing them is not going to lead you anywhere, it’s only going to make you look weaker, your emotions are invalid or you’re delusional to be feeling them – you get the drift.
Over time, you registered that getting angry is the easiest way to deal with them. Even if you know what you’re feeling, you don’t express yourself because you don’t believe someone is listening hard enough to help you solve the problem!
The lack of this ability to identify and express your feelings will obviously leave you frustrated because no matter how hard you try, people just don’t get it!
Lack of ability to express
Toddlers who can’t ask for what they need also try their best to explain themselves using sounds and signs. And if you don’t understand what’s going on in a minute or so, the toddler will completely lose its mind.
Now imagine if a grown adult cannot herself even though she is perfectly capable of using language and words that everyone around understands! How frustrating would that be?!
Sense of control and making yourself heard
In the middle of chaos when you’re feeling guilty, insecure, and lost, ‘anger’ camouflages powerlessness with a feeling of having everything under control. This gives you a false sense of being grounded and heard when you’re afraid and feeling unseen.
Untangle yourself using the anger iceberg
None of what is written in this article takes away your responsibility to manage your emotions or justifies the destructive manner of expressing yourself.
But this is being told to you to help you destigmatize the problem and kickstart your recovery by forgiving yourself and being compassionate towards yourself.
Apart from being a really good tool to understand what anger is and where it comes from, it also helps you to address your ‘anger issues’ or should we say, lack of emotional awareness and understanding of how to express them. 🙂
I’m going to break this up into three parts so it’s easy for you to move step by step through your process – Self-awareness, emotional awareness and dealing with emotions. Use this as your anger iceberg worksheet!
Self-awareness – Make a list of your triggers
Your anger is valid. It’s not born in thin air and is coming from somewhere, so explore it further.
Take a notebook and answer the following questions:
- What are the circumstances that have recently triggered me?
- Why did it affect me so deeply?
- Is there a pattern in these circumstances?
- Are there underlying emotions of abandonment, fear, disappointment, and dismissal that I am experiencing?
- Is a second person involved in this? If yes, how? Is it something they said or did?
- Did I feel misunderstood or completely unseen?
- Did I feel like something was unfair or unjust in those circumstances?
- How do I describe my experience of the emotions under each of the triggering circumstances?
I highly recommend that you don’t do this as a mental exercise. You will need to refer to this list again so be as descriptive as you need to be.
Emotional awareness – Name all your emotions
Instead of targeting your anger and trying to understand it, just turn the iceberg upside down and start right from the bottom at the root of the iceberg – where it is the strongest.
To do this, go back to the list of circumstances and name each of the emotions you felt.
Was it any of the following:
- grief
- guilt
- hurt
- shame
- disappointment
- helplessness
- contempt
- depleted
- judged
- abused
- used
- helpless
- incompetent
- empty
- worthless
- invaded
- unwanted
- traumatized
- betrayal
- regret
- lonely
- anxious
- threatened
- stress
- sadness
- embarrassed
- rejected
- overwhelmed
- weak
Once you’ve identified the emotions for each of the circumstances, you’ll know what are the primary emotions that are causing the frustration and deal with them accordingly.
If it’s loneliness, reach out and ask for emotional comfort and company. If it’s betrayal, go and explain why you felt betrayed and how it can be fixed and avoided the next time. If it’s guilt or embarrassment, express why you felt that way and reacted badly because of that.
Deal with the emotions as they arise – Communication is key
The root cause of the majority of interpersonal relationships is poor communication.
We all grow up in different environments and live distinct lives before meeting people. Even if we’ve known someone since they were born, each of us has a unique set of problems to deal with.
Even siblings who share the DNA from their parents and are brought up by the same set of parents in similar circumstances experience the same things in extremely different ways. How then can we expect to be on the same page with anyone unless we talk to them about it?
Talking about your issues will help others to understand your needs. It’ll help you understand what others need from you and come on the same page.
“Anger should be expressed. – Any anger that is not coming out, flowing freely, will turn into sadism, power drive, stammering, and other means of torturing.”
― Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living
Coping strategies for anger management
Maintain an emotional log
I speak from personal experience when I say this – Writing it down, just throwing up everything brewing inside on a piece of paper shifts something internally so deeply. It helps me sort out the mess in my head and see everything much clearer. I physically feel lighter.
You don’t need a fancy journal to do this, although a guided one will help. I use the Notes app on my phone for now – convenient and accessible.
Identify triggers and negative thought patterns
If you’ve done the exercise then you already know your basic triggering circumstances and emotions. Taking cues from there, identify your thought patterns and take conscious steps to fix them. We’ve written more about it in our article on victim mentality here and judger and learner mindsets here.
Thought patterns are not formed in a day. Take it from me because I’m talking from experience – it’s going to take consistent effort and work to re-train your brain to stop jumping to negative conclusions. You’ll have to keep reminding yourself as you find yourself going astray.
There may be some days when you find it exhausting to do this but once you notice how well your healthy and positive mindset affects your life, you’ll want to devote time to maintain it yourself.
Take time off
We have so much to do and take care of. Amidst the chaos, you’ll inevitably feel overwhelmed once in a while. Take time off when you need it! Build it into your daily routines just like the Italians – who make time to do nothing!
The value of good sleep, taking some time off and working to maintain a positive mindset is truly underestimated.
Distract, don’t suppress
If you find yourself getting overwhelmed, it’s okay to find something to distract you for the time being and come back to the situation once you’ve had some time to cool off about it.
Even if the circumstances are not going to change, your calm mind will help you see the solutions more clearly.
But it’s also very important to come back to it and do the exercise of naming your emotions so it doesn’t start to form an iceberg.
Ask for what you need
It may feel like the world is about to end and nothing or no one understands you right now. But I promise you, if only you truly and wholeheartedly expressed your feelings, you’d be surprised to know how many of us would line up just to hear you out.
Wear your heart on your sleeve and ask for everything you need.
While all of this will help, nothing compares to a professional who is trained to help you discover and deal with everything that is underneath. Don’t be afraid to reach out to a professional therapist or a counsellor if you find things getting out of hand too often. Also, don’t wait for the problem to get worse. If you’ve thought about it even once, go for it!
You have nothing to lose!
