Never get angry sounds unrealistic. People can be rude, insulting, unfair, critical, and sometimes deliberately cruel. Human beings also have emotional reactions before they have had time to think carefully about them, so I am not suggesting that we can eliminate every flash of irritation or that experiencing anger means we have somehow failed.
If someone tells you they’ve mastered permanent, unshakeable calm, they’re either a saint, a Buddhist monk on a mountaintop, or lying to you. Anger is a normal, God-given emotion; even Scripture makes room for righteous anger. What you can do is change how much power it has over you, how readily another person can provoke it, and how quickly you find your way back to peace after it appears. That is what we are really talking about here. And if you like to be more in control, reach out; I can help you.
Much of what we describe as “someone making me angry” is not simply about what the other person said. It is about what their words touched inside us. The stronger our reaction becomes, particularly to criticism or insult, the more useful it may be to ask why those particular words had so much power.
Imagine someone tells you that you are seven feet tall when you are obviously not. You probably would not become offended, call a friend to complain about it, and spend the evening replaying the conversation. You know it is ridiculous.
Now imagine someone tells you that you are selfish, insecure, lazy, controlling, difficult to live with, a poor parent, or not nearly as competent as you think you are. Suddenly the emotional response may be very different. We defend ourselves, explain why the person is wrong, attack their motives, complain about their tone, and sometimes spend hours proving to ourselves that the criticism was unfair.
Perhaps it was unfair. But before deciding that the entire problem belongs to the other person, there is another question worth asking: Why did it sting?
Why Criticism Can Make Us So Angry
Criticism tends to have the greatest power when it lands near something we are already uncertain about. If someone accuses us of something we know with confidence is completely false, their opinion usually has relatively little leverage. When they touch something we have privately wondered about ourselves, however, the reaction can become much stronger.
Suppose someone tells me that I talk too much. I can immediately concentrate on how rude they were, remind myself of all the times they have talked too much, explain why I had every reason to say what I said, and conclude that they are simply an unpleasant person. Or, after the initial irritation passes, I can ask whether I sometimes talk too much.
If the answer is yes, then perhaps I have been given useful information, even if it was delivered badly. If the answer is no and I can examine the criticism honestly without finding anything that fits, then there is little reason to continue carrying the remark around.
This leads to a principle that is simple but surprisingly difficult to practice: If criticism is true, getting angry does not make it false. If it is false, getting angry does not make it matter.
The problem is that anger often gives us a convenient way to avoid this examination. Instead of asking whether there was anything true in what was said, we begin examining the person who said it: Who does she think she is? He has plenty of problems himself. She could have said it differently. He was just trying to hurt me.
All of those things may be true, but notice what has happened. The focus has shifted from the content of the criticism to the character of the critic. Sometimes that shift is justified. Other times it protects us from having to consider something we would rather not know about ourselves.
The More You Know Yourself, the Less There Is to Defend
One of the paradoxes of genuine confidence is that it makes criticism easier to tolerate, not harder. A secure person does not need to believe that every negative observation about him must be wrong. He can hear something uncomfortable, consider it, and decide whether it has merit without experiencing the criticism as an attack on his entire identity.
If I already know that I can become impatient when I am stressed, my wife pointing out that I was impatient does not have to become a major confrontation. I may disagree with some of the details, but I do not have to defend an imaginary version of myself who is never impatient.
There is considerable freedom in becoming comfortable with your imperfections. The more honestly you know yourself, the fewer discoveries other people can make about you that you desperately need to deny.
This is why humility and confidence are not opposites. Humility allows us to admit that we have weaknesses. Confidence allows us to know that having weaknesses does not destroy our worth.
The goal is not to become a person who cannot hear criticism. It is to become a person who does not need every criticism to be wrong.
What If Someone Is Just Being Mean?
Of course, not every insult contains some profound insight we need to examine. Some people are simply angry, cruel, manipulative, immature, or deliberately trying to provoke us.
But that creates another question: why cooperate with them?
If someone is trying to upset you and says something you know is untrue, you are not required to supply the emotional reaction they were hoping to produce. You can recognize the behavior, decide whether it needs to be confronted, and continue with your life.
This does not mean tolerating abuse or becoming passive. There are times when we need to establish a boundary, confront behavior directly, distance ourselves from someone, or even end a relationship. But taking action is different from surrendering your internal state to another person.
You can tell someone, “You cannot speak to me that way,” without allowing them to occupy your thoughts for the next six hours.
In fact, the calmer person often has more power in an interaction because he can choose what response actually serves him rather than automatically producing the response the other person hoped to provoke. If someone knows exactly what to say and can reliably make you lose control, that person has acquired a remarkable amount of influence over you.
Anger Is Information, Not Instruction
None of this means anger should simply be ignored. Anger often tells us that something important has happened. We may have been mistreated. A boundary may have been crossed. Something may be unjust. Or perhaps our pride was wounded, an insecurity was exposed, or we did not get the response we wanted.
The feeling itself cannot tell us which explanation is correct.
That is why emotional maturity requires some space between the feeling and the conclusion we draw from it. Instead of immediately deciding, I am angry, therefore this person must have wronged me, we can become curious about what the anger is actually protecting.
Am I angry because what was said was unfair, or because it was accurate? Am I responding to disrespect or to embarrassment? Is there something here I should address, or am I simply wounded because someone does not see me the way I would like to be seen?
Those questions do not weaken us. They make us much harder to manipulate because we stop treating every emotional reaction as proof that our first interpretation must be correct.
Humility, Anger, and Christian Self-Mastery
Christianity offers an important perspective here because it does not require emotional numbness. Christ Himself displays anger, and Scripture certainly does not present every form of anger as sinful. The question is what anger becomes once it is ours.
Anger can move us toward courage, protection, and justice. It can also become resentment, vengeance, contempt, or an excuse for losing self-control. The emotion may arrive without our permission, but what we feed afterward increasingly becomes our responsibility.
Christian humility also does not mean thinking poorly of ourselves or allowing others to mistreat us. It means becoming willing to live in truth. If someone tells me something true about myself, even unpleasantly, humility allows me to learn from it rather than wasting all my energy resenting the messenger. If someone says something completely false in an attempt to injure me, humility can also free me because my identity does not depend upon correcting every person’s opinion of me.
A person who is governed by every insult, compliment, criticism, or expression of approval is not particularly free. His emotional state is continually being determined by other people.
The goal is not to become indifferent to what others think. Their opinions may deserve consideration. They simply do not deserve sovereignty.
So Can You Really Never Get Angry?
Probably not if we mean never experiencing anger again. That is neither realistic nor necessarily desirable. But I do think we can become increasingly difficult to provoke and increasingly capable of recovering our peace without carrying every insult, disagreement, or criticism with us.
When criticism contains truth, take the truth. When it contains exaggeration, take whatever part is useful. When it contains nothing but another person’s hostility, recognize that too.
As self-knowledge grows, other people tend to have fewer buttons to push. Criticism becomes less threatening because we are already willing to look honestly at ourselves, and insults lose some of their force because we no longer require everyone around us to maintain the version of ourselves we would most like to believe.
Perhaps the real goal is not to reach some mythical state in which nobody can ever irritate us. It is to reach the point where another person’s words no longer get to decide what kind of day we are going to have.
If anger, defensiveness, or recurring conflict continues to interfere with your relationships, you can learn more about my approach to individual therapy in Calabasas or read How to Find a Good Therapist. If you would like to discuss whether therapy could be useful, you can also contact me here.
