Think about how we express ourselves when we are angry. It is fine to let others know that we are angry, we do not need to stuff it down, but we need to be careful about how we express the anger. If we own our anger and just say such and such happened, or you did this and that and I reacted in anger because this was the effect your actions had on me, that is owning our anger and also stating to the other person that we want to work on it. But when we express our anger simply by insulting others or imputing motivations to them that they do not have, or accusing them of having certain personality traits, that is not conducive to good communication.

We need to look at how we express our anger. Sometimes when we are angry, we will say, “Why did you do that?” But I think before we ask that question, we have to ask ourselves, “Is it really important to me why the person did that?” Sometimes it might be important, and we really need to understand why somebody did something to work out a better solution. Sometimes we say, “Why did you do this?” almost like a rhetorical question because whatever they say, we are still going to be angry. It is said as a way to accuse the other person. We need to work on our anger internally and try to resolve it, but it is okay to tell somebody else that we are angry because of something that happened in a situation. Nonetheless, we should be careful about how we say it so that we are talking about ourselves and how we are feeling and not imputing motivations and meanings to others’ words and actions.

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