Today’s column is a conversation with Gloria Huh, a psychologist who centers antioppression in her work with trauma serving BIPOC, queer and trans clients.
I spoke with Gloria about how anger can be an emotion to embrace, and what it can teach us about ourselves.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For audio of the whole conversation, click here.
Jordan Alam: I’ve been writing lately about how we often, in our culture, disavow anger. We have a relationship to anger that’s antagonistic, where we don’t want to feel it and we don’t want to sit with it. But inherently, if you don’t sit with your anger, you don’t get information about where your boundaries are.
What we’re really talking about here is: How do you move successfully through conflict and make conflict a space of potentially deepening relationships?
Gloria Huh: And also becoming more accepting of yourself. Anger is a universal emotion. It is in every being. And it doesn’t have to be toxic or violent. Literally, you can be angry and just calm. It’s not something that always leads to harm. It can be something that is light, almost like an ingredient to passion.
The reason why people do justice work, even healing work, is because they’re angry at some harm being done. And you want to use that to move forward in a way that is meaningful for you.
I had a session recently where I pointed out to my client: “Oh, what you just did? That’s passive aggressive. You’re actually angry.” And my client knows I’m not judging them. They know I want to help them to build better relationships and know their emotions. And it’s beautiful because we can slow down and do this micro-conflict exchange.
There’s something really exciting about, “Ooh, keep talking about the anger,” even if it’s toward me! I definitely had to build a tolerance for that. When they first started to transfer their anger to me, I was like, “Oh my god, I feel horrible.” But now it’s like no, this is the essence. We need them to feel their feelings and work it out.
JA: I really appreciate what you just named about transference. Transference happens between all of us. Relationships are so much about — I’m not going to call it projection because it’s not projection necessarily — this sense that we’re reading the other person, such that we’re trying to get what we want out of a relational dynamic.
And sometimes that means you transfer the learning that you’ve had from your previous relationships — from your parents, from anyone else — to use as a model for how all relationships are going to go.
I want to ground that in an example from our lives, too, because I don’t want it to be seen as this exceptional circumstance, that it’s only in therapy we are talking about transference or projection. That is what you’re doing all the time.
GH: I have thousands of examples. I have the example of where I’m livid at my partner for not returning something that’s literally two dollars, that has nothing to do with the two-dollar thing!
Sometimes I’m afraid that my partner’s stoic face means they’re angry with me. I’m reading, “Are you upset? Are you angry?” And he says no.
JA: It can be such a micro-moment. We sometimes think of conflict as big blowups or whatnot, but it’s partially all of these micro-readings that we’re doing of one another.
GH: I really like that word that you used, the micro-moments. In some ways, we have to press slo-mo to really get at anger sometimes. I could have totally bypassed that feeling.
JA: And ran with your assumption that he was angry with you!
GH: I totally could have. But here’s the thing: Gradually this person gets to know me better and I get to know them. The trust gets deeper when you know what you’re triggered by and when we start to understand we’re on the same page. And then we’re authentic.
JA: You’re shared in your understanding of that moment. That shared understanding is what builds the trust. You can hold that the anger is actually signaling something else, like “That made me feel sad” or “That reminded me of my parent.”
When we don’t even have that shared understanding and are just going off assumptions, it can feel like I’m getting whiplash because I don’t even know why you’re acting that way with me.
GH: And I think it’s really empowering when you know your emotion. If you know what gets you, it’s powerful because you get to figure out what you want to engage with, who you trust with your story, who you want to hang out with. And also, you can say “Screw you” to the people who don’t honor that. And there’s something really powerful about that.
But if you don’t acknowledge that you have anger, then you can’t do that.
I have so many clients that don’t know how to deal with their anger because they’ve been abused by someone who was very angry, so they become people pleasers. They disavow their anger and [have] no boundaries. They don’t know how to acknowledge when they need to stay away from a person because they’re not safe for them.
They can’t do that because they’re like, “No, I don’t get angry, I’m fine. I’m pleasant.”
JA: Everything is fine, I’ll make it work. And that’s how they accommodate overly much.
GH: And that’s tragic.
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