Anger is scary. It’s a high energy emotion that is hard to control. The good news is that you can learn to express it the healthy way. The following journal prompts for anger will help you learn how to process this heavy feeling.
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Before I learned to process anger, I used to repress every feeling, ignore any physical symptom that came up and always pretend everything was fine.
If someone would treat me unfairly, I would invalidate my own feelings, believe it was my fault, bottle everything in, pretend I was okay… then make it up to them.
I truly believed there was no other way to maintain peace in my relationships.
I only have a few memories from my childhood. All I can remember is that, when I was very young, I used to get upset very easily.
Every time I got upset (that I can remember), it ended up in a fight. And not a healthy fight… like a real fight between my parents and I where we were yelling at each other.
Then, next thing I remember is that all these fight stopped. Probably when I was a teenager. I would never get into a screaming fight again with my parents.
I literally shut myself down and started to be very passive aggressive.
In other words, I learned to shut up. Because every time I would try to express my anger, I would feel misunderstood and get even more frustrated.
So I figured it was best to keep everything for myself. I stopped believing I could be understood when I expressed myself.
I realized over time that I never learned to express anger properly. Actually, it went way beyond simply expressing anger: I didn’t even know how to recognize it anymore.
My coping mechanism to deal with anger was to bottle everything in.
From an outside perspective, it worked – I maintained peaceful relationships and everyone liked me. But from the inside, I was far from being at peace with myself.
But there’s hope!
Over time, I relearned to deal with anger in a healthy way.
And that’s what I’m sharing in this blog post. When it comes to anger, I’ll help you to: Recognize it, allow yourself to feel it and, finally, to let it out the healthy way.
The following journal prompts for anger are here to help you process your feelings.
How do YOU express anger?
If you’re here, you probably deal with anger in one of the 2 following ways:
You might either repress your anger and keep it all bottled in. Or you express it rather… uncontrollably.
My guess is that, most of the time, you repress it. However, you might express it harder with very close ones, such as your family or partner, when you have one.
In either cases, that’s unhealthy.
1. Repressing anger
You might keep your feelings bottled in and actually don’t express your anger.
You typically pretend everything is fine and try to ignore the physical symptoms you get from being triggered or upset by something or someone.
If that’s you, you’re probably known as the nice and easy going person who never gets angry and who’s okay with anything.
Your anger might show up as resentment, a passive aggressive behaviour or physical symptoms. Or maybe a good mix of them all.
You most likely feel a lot of physical symptoms related to your feelings, whether you’ve noticed it or not.
And you say sorry a lot.
Can you relate?
2. Taking anger out on people
That comes up in the form of yelling, screaming, attacking or having an aggressive behaviour (even if you’re not being physically violent).
You tend to lose your temper easily and believe that’s the only way to get people to understand that you’re not happy with a situation.
It might happen more with family or very close friends.
In any case, you can use the following journal prompts for anger to help you.
Book recommendation
There are 2 books I REALLY recommend if you want to dive deeper into getting in touch and processing your feelings.
These book will take you to the path of recognizing and processing your feelings, one at a time. They’ll give you a different kind of journal prompts for anger.
Helpful Journal Prompts for Anger Management
1. Journal prompts to recognize anger
Journaling at the stage of recognition will help you make sense of what you objectively observe on yourself. Then you’ll be able to make a connection with how you actually feel.
First, if you’re repressing anger, you might recognize the following behaviours within yourself:
- passive-agressiveness
- sarcastic remarks
- cynic thoughts or remarks
- being easily annoyed
- physical pain or discomfort (gut, stomach, throat)
When that happens, grab your journal and ask yourself the following questions (journal prompts):
- Write down the list of behaviours you’re having that are signs there might be some anger in you.
- Describe how do you feel, physically and emotionally. (Some examples include: impatient, irritated, annoyed, resentful, a tight chest, etc.)
- What thoughts are making these feelings worst? What are you avoiding thinking about right now?
- What exactly made you feel this way in the first place? Can you recall the exact situation that triggered you current state?
- What makes you believe you shouldn’t be upset?
- Is there any other emotion rising up? (example: guilt)
2. Journal prompts to let anger out
Journaling at this stage will help you get in touch with what you need to let the feeling out.
Anger is a very high energy emotion. So we need to find a way to let this energy out. If we don’t it might come up as physical symptoms.
Depending on the level of anger you feel, if might look like taking a deep breath, go for a walk, or punch a pillow.
Journaling at this stage helps, but to really process the feeling, you’ll need to take action.
- On a scale of 1-10, how much agitation do you feel inside of you right now?
- Remove you nice person filter for a moment; no one is going to read this. If you’re being honest with yourself, how do you really feel about someone or something? Permission to use swear words here. (Writing down at that stage might not be helpful for you, you might need to vent by saying this stuff out loud)
- Do you feel like you let it all out with the two previous prompts? If not, write down 3 physical activities you can engage in right now.
- And now, go do it.
Related post: 34 Helpful Break Up Journal Prompts
3. Journal prompts to express anger the healthy way
As a rule of thumb, if you don’t want a situation to happen again, you’ll have to talk about it. Or walk away, you decide.
Here’s a simple yet very effective way to express your anger to someone. With that method, you express clearly what’s bothering you, how it makes you feel and what you need to change.
All you need to say is this (fill in the blank with your situation):
- “[The situation] happened. It made me feel[your feeling]. For the future, I would appreciate if [the change you need to see to stop being triggered]”
Aside from expressing anger, this magical phrase works for expressing literally ANYTHING.
BONUS: Anger journal prompts to help set boundaries
Letting your anger out at the previous stages might be enough for you.
However, journaling to set boundaries will help you move on and prevent anger from coming back.
Reflecting about how you process feelings will take your personal growth to the next level. You will raise awareness and prevent upsetting situations to happen again.
At that stage, you’ll decide if the situation is worth discussing or if you should walk away. If you choose the former, you’ll need to set some boundaries to protect yourself.
The former solution could apply if, for example, the trigger is a recurring situation happening between you and a friend.
Use these journal prompts to set boundaries:
- Is there any way I could’ve prevented the upsetting situation to happen?
- What am I not willing to tolerate anymore?
- What boundaries can I set for myself to protect myself?
- Do I believe that I deserve to express my needs?
- Do I believe it’s worth asking for what I need?
- How can I see this situation coming next time?
- If, despite setting boundaries, this situation happen again, what am I going to do about it?
Conclusion
Whether you’re trying to stop repressing anger or to control it, these journal prompts for anger will be useful any time you’re not sure how to deal with your feelings. Keep the prompts close and use them as often as you need.
You might also like the following posts:
> Challenging Journal Prompts for Women’s Self Growth
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