The two “Inside Out” movies have helped people learn how to understand and accept their emotions. Psychotherapists like to reduce the complexity of human emotional experience to four categories: mad, sad, glad, or scared. Of the four, we often label mad, sad, and scared as “negative” emotions and glad as the only positive emotion. No research suggests that anger is unhealthy or harmful for relationships. On the contrary, most psychotherapists believe that emotionally healthy people have the capacity to fully experience all of their emotions in the proper context—i.e., to be able to feel sad when experiencing something like a loss and to feel scared when there is a real threat.

But what about anger? Is there a place for anger in a healthy life and relationship, or is anger just a “negative emotion?” Although anger has gotten a bad name in our culture, anger itself is not a problem. Anger only becomes a problem in relationships when it is not expressed or acted out rather than talked through.

Anger is essentially........

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