Anger — An Important Feeling, and How It Forms

A Podcast That Got Me Thinking

The podcast is called “Psychologie konkret,” a format produced by the Institute for Mental Health at ZHAW. Host Ellen Gundrum talks with Ramona Chicherio, a psychologist, psychotherapist, and lecturer who works with children, teenagers, parents, and couples in stressful situations, among others (Psychologie konkret: Why Anger Is an Important Feeling, February 2, 2026). The episode is titled “Why Anger Is an Important Feeling” — and it was exactly that reversal I found remarkable. In my coaching practice, I often see anger treated as something you should get rid of, suppress, or at least keep well hidden. The conversation shows why that reflex does more harm than good.

Anger as an Important Feeling — What the Interview Actually Means

Chicherio describes anger as an emotion with a clear message: it shows up when we’ve been treated unfairly, when our boundaries have been violated, when we feel threatened, or when a goal gets blocked. Like every feeling, it’s also a kind of navigation system — it shows us where we need to set a boundary or stand up for ourselves, and it supplies the energy to do it.

Physically, anger starts out as a stress response: the brain’s emotional centre registers a possible threat, blood flow to the muscles increases, the pulse rises, energy gets mobilised. At the same time, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for calm deliberation — gets throttled. That’s exactly why it’s so hard to respond thoughtfully in a state of intense anger: an older, faster response system takes over.

How anger shows up varies a great deal. Some people barely notice it anymore because they learned early on that this feeling wasn’t allowed to have a place. Others express it passive-aggressively — eye-rolling, talking behind someone’s back. The healthiest form is controlled, direct boundary-setting: clearly stating that something has gone too far, without losing control. Only after that comes the escalated form many people equate with anger — the moment a situation “explodes.”

According to Chicherio, this escalation often happens when an already overloaded regulation system hits its limit. Everyday stress, work pressure, and family tension pile up until a comparatively small event becomes the final straw. Sometimes, too, a different, harder-to-bear feeling like shame or powerlessness is hiding behind the visible anger — Chicherio calls this secondary anger. She shares a case example: a father who felt increasingly helpless and ashamed in conflict with his daughter, and whose shame eventually turned into anger and overstepping behaviour — until he sought professional support himself.

Why Anger Is Judged Differently in Women Than in Men

One point from the conversation has stuck with me in particular: anger isn’t perceived neutrally. When a man shows anger, we instinctively look for an understandable cause in the situation — we assume he has a good reason. When a woman shows anger, we’re quicker to draw conclusions about her character: she’s more readily seen as difficult, unstable, or overly emotional. Chicherio emphasises that this difference in judgment isn’t about the emotion itself — anger is innate in all of us equally — but about socialisation, which starts as early as childhood.

The Role Anger Plays in Childhood

As an innate basic emotion, anger appears very early. According to Chicherio, its first forms show up as early as the first six months of life — for instance, when a baby’s movements are blocked. The second year of life brings the well-known defiance, or autonomy, phase — a normative developmental step that essentially all children go through, though with varying intensity depending on how much room it’s given at home. Developmentally, this phase matters: children begin to separate from the tightly fused system with their parents and experience themselves as a separate person with their own needs and boundaries for the first time. Anger thus becomes an early form of social communication and of standing up for oneself.

According to Chicherio, that’s why it should be allowed to exist — though its expression should be limited: a child may cry and scream, but no one should be harmed in the process. For parents, that’s a demanding balance. What matters most, she says, is accompanying a child’s anger instead of judging or condemning it — for instance, not telling the child they’re being “bad.” Labels like that link the feeling to the relationship with the parents, and can teach a child that anger is dangerous and needs to be suppressed.

If a child’s anger is punished or met with withdrawal of love, Chicherio says, children can internalise negative assumptions about themselves and start questioning their own self-worth. Some then learn to experience anger as threatening and push it down — which can make room for other, more “permitted” feelings like sadness to appear instead. Gender-specific conditioning also starts early: girls are more often told not to act aggressively or demandingly than boys are. Chicherio recalls a line from her own grandmother: “Girls don’t push people” — while the same behaviour in a same-age brother went uncommented on. Early judgments like these often stay influential for decades.

The opposite extreme can become just as much of a problem: if parents always give in to a child’s anger, the child learns that pressure and outbursts get results — with consequences reaching into adulthood, when it comes to setting healthy boundaries for themselves. Patterns learned this early often keep working across generations — I looked more closely at how strongly family conditioning shapes our later behaviour in the article Family Systems: How They Shape Us.

How to Handle Anger Well

For parents, Chicherio’s first piece of advice is to be less afraid of the feeling itself: knowing that outbursts of anger are a normative developmental step makes it easier to stay calm and give the emotion room, instead of fighting it. In practice, that means naming and validating the anger instead of arguing or justifying decisions in the middle of an outburst — the prefrontal cortex is barely active in that moment, so arguments won’t get through anyway. Short, consistently repeated boundaries provide more orientation. And parents themselves are allowed to name their own anger, as long as they don’t judge the child’s character while doing so and don’t become aggressive. Children take their cues from observed behaviour far more than from words anyway.

For adults, Chicherio emphasises consciously turning toward your own anger: asking yourself how the feeling shows up in your body, where you notice it, and which situations typically trigger it. With very intense, highly charged anger, simply breathing deeply is often not enough — this calls for physical strategies to discharge the energy, such as screaming into a pillow, exercising, or boxing. Chicherio herself uses short, intense workouts like skipping rope for this. Only once the body has calmed back down can you constructively address the actual need behind the anger, instead of reacting impulsively.

It also helps to keep old, unprocessed experiences in view: anger can be anchored in emotional memory, so that similar current situations also activate earlier strains — the reaction then turns out stronger than the current situation alone would justify. And it’s worth recognising when a different feeling, such as shame or powerlessness, is actually hiding behind your anger. In the end, anger is also a matter of self-regulation under strain — I covered how this capacity for regulation relates to stress and recovery in more depth in the article Understanding Resilience: How We Cope With Stress and Recover.

My Perspective From Coaching

What convinced me about this conversation matches what I see in practice: anger that’s permanently pushed down doesn’t disappear — it just changes shape. It shows up as exhaustion, as withdrawal, as resentment that builds up over years, or as the sudden outburst that no longer makes sense to anyone, least of all to the person themselves. The first step is almost always the same: listening to your own anger again, instead of judging it. Only once it’s clear which boundary was actually violated can something change.

Reflection Questions About Your Own Anger

• When were you last genuinely angry — and what was actually going on underneath it?
• How did you learn to handle anger in your childhood? Was it allowed to exist, or was it quickly suppressed?
• Do you recognise recurring situations that reliably trigger anger in you?
• Is there sometimes a different feeling hiding behind your anger — shame, disappointment, or powerlessness, for instance?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is anger a bad feeling?

No. Calling anger an important feeling gets closer to the truth: it signals that a boundary has been violated or a need hasn’t been met. The problem isn’t the feeling itself, but how it’s handled.

Why do some people get angry faster than others?

That depends, among other things, on how full a person’s “barrel” already is — through current stress or unprocessed past experiences — and on how well their emotional regulation was supported in childhood.

Should I just let my child’s outbursts of anger happen?

Not without limits. Anger should be allowed to exist, but its expression should be limited — no one should get hurt. Clear, calmly repeated boundaries help more than arguing in the middle of an outburst.

What should I do if anger regularly boils over?

With intense tension, physical strategies often help more than simply breathing — movement or a deliberate physical outlet, for example. If anger is frequently disproportionately strong, professional support can help you understand the patterns behind it.

Conclusion: Anger as an Important Feeling

Calling anger an important feeling sounds unusual at first — and yet it’s accurate. It arises when boundaries are violated or needs are disregarded, it takes shape as early as childhood, and it can’t be made to disappear by suppressing it — only by handling it consciously. Anyone who listens to their own anger again, instead of pushing it down, ultimately gains more clarity about themselves — and more room to act.