Anger in All the Wrong Places

Negative transference. It is a term you might have heard in the realm of psychology, but in case you missed that class, it means the transferring of negative emotions from one source to another. For example, being mad at your boss, but taking it out on a friend.

Anger is something everyone seems to be familiar with. Everyone has felt it, no matter how slow they are to anger. And everyone has probably been on the receiving end of it. But sometimes, it is simply in all the wrong places.

Sometimes, it isn’t even anger. Human emotions are complex. Yet, not enough time is spent teaching people how to identify and name their emotions. According to research from Brene Brown, the average person can only identify three emotions: happiness, sadness, and anger. This means that our complex range of emotions gets pushed into one of those three boxes. And that means sometimes the anger is covering something else.

Often, our anger covers our most vulnerable emotions. For example, we might feel and display anger to avoid feelings of guilt. We might, as mentioned before, transfer feelings of disappointment or resentment onto a different person. This might be because it seems safer, for example taking anger out on a friend or spouse because we don’t think we can express it to our coworkers or boss.

Understanding our emotions better is a key step if we want to put anger (and all our other emotions) back in the right place. It is something I know I personally have worked on a lot in therapy. It is something I am still working on.

However, the good news is that if it is something you are working on you don’t have to go it alone and you don’t have to start from scratch. We’ve been there and we can help. Simply reach out the info@thelegalmindsociety.org to see how you can set up a peer support session.