The Importance Of Boundary-Protecting Anger

Why Anger Phobia & Spiritual Bypassing Can Lead To Collapsed Boundaries

If you’ve been following along with The Boundaries Handbook as one of my paid subscribers, THANK YOU! I hope you’re finding ways to apply some of what you’re learning in daily life.

Now that we’ve reviewed the “how” of healthy boundary setting, let’s examine what gets in the way of good boundaries. Any trauma-induced condition that shuts down the full range of healthy human emotion or activates conflict avoidant or spiritual bypassing parts will interfere with the ability to set and enforce healthy boundaries. This is why emotional mastery, especially fluency with healthy anger and healthy shame, is a key tool in the setting, maintaining, and respecting of your own boundaries and the boundaries of other people. While anger gets a bad rap, mostly because boundary wounded people may use anger to abuse others (or we may use anger to abuse ourselves,) the healthy version of anger is necessary in order for boundaries to be shored up. Along with healthy guilt, shame, and remorse, anger is one of the maintainers of our boundaries, so we have to be able to feel anger in order to be well boundaried humans who are safe in the world and safe around others.

In The Language of Emotions, New Age intuitive healer-turned-empathy researcher Karla McLaren makes the point that healthy anger protects your personal boundaries from other people who threaten to violate your boundaries from the outside, while healthy shame keeps you from violating the boundaries of others. In other words, if someone is behaving in ways that are intrusive, hurtful, violent, emotionally abusive, disrespectful, or entitled, you’re supposed to feel angry- and speak up to stop the boundary violating behavior.

Your boundaries deserve to be protected, so if someone is all up in your business, intruding into your personal space without your consent, taking something that’s not theirs, trying to exploit or manipulate you, cheating on your monogamy agreement, betraying your trust, hitting you or touching you sexually when you don’t want it, penetrating your psychic boundaries by pointing out your core wounds without you asking for insight, trying to control or dominate you, or verbally or emotionally abusing you, it’s healthy to feel that rush of heat that lights you up and gives you a jolt of adrenaline that empowers you to say “Stop. That is not okay with me.” You do not have the right to beat the crap out of someone or behave abusively in response to your anger. That would match one boundary violation with another. But you do have a right to feel and express your healthy anger, leveraging the feeling as a reminder that your boundaries are being violated and you need to protect them.

Likewise, although boundary wounded parents and other people in positions of power or authority often use unhealthy shaming in toxic and boundary-violating ways to control and manipulate us, offloading their own shame onto us, making us feel ashamed when we did nothing wrong, healthy shame is the feeling we’re supposed to feel when we violate someone else’s boundaries. If you emotionally abuse someone, rape someone, hit someone, steal from someone, cheat on your partner, weaponize someone’s vulnerability or dig into their core wounds without their consent, say something racist, sexist, or homophobic, or violate their right to privacy, you’re supposed to feel bad. That.painful feeling that some might call guilt and some might call shame (semantics, perhaps) is supposed to signal to you that you’re out of line and violating someone else’s boundaries.

Shame researcher Brene Brown argues that guilt means “I did something bad” while shame means “I am bad.” But Karla McLaren disagrees. She says guilt is not a feeling; it a statement of fact. You’re either guilty of wrongdoing or you’re not, whereas shame is the feeling you’re supposed to feel when you’re guilty of wrongdoing. While Brene Brown argues that shame is always poisonous, Karla McLaren defends healthy shame as a pro-social emotion that protects us from becoming sociopathic and claims that a world full of shameless people would be terrifically damaging for society. As Monica Lewinsky pointed out in her documentary 15 Minutes of Shame, we have become a “survival of the shameless” culture, and that is not a good thing.

I don’t want to get caught up in semantics, so call it remorse, call it guilt, call it whatever you prefer, but we’re supposed to feel bad when we doing hurtful things that impact other people. That bad feelings, whatever you call it, is supposed to motivate us not to do it again. We’ll talk more about guilt, shame, and remorse in the next installation, but for now, let’s unpack the gifts anger has to share with us. Then we’ll talk about a healthy practice to mobilize angry parts so they can restore your healthy boundaries.