Ex-Mormon Anger, Part 1: All About Anger

Anger is probably the dominant emotion for most ex-Mormons during their faith transition. You probably feel betrayed upon learning things the Church hid, enraged about the harm the Church has done and is doing, and furious about the lies Church leaders have told.

But you also may feel like anger is bad and have no idea how to handle it. So let’s talk anger: what psychology says about it and some basic tips for managing anger.

As always, remember that I am a blogger, not a therapist. This information is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for therapy or medical treatment.

Anger As a Primary Emotion

Anger can be a primary or a secondary emotion. A primary emotion is a basic, instinctual one that serves an important purpose. That’s right: feeling anger isn’t a flaw. Anger is a signal, and you need it. A great portrayal of this concept is in the movie Inside Out, in which Anger is a core member of Riley’s emotions team. He’s introduced as an emotion that cares deeply about things being fair.

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Anger tells you when your brain thinks that you’re being harmed or treated unfairly. Is your brain always right about this? No. Feelings are information but not facts. But when you feel anger, it’s worth looking at whether you’re being harmed and what you can do about it.

Anger As a Secondary Emotion

Anger can also be a secondary emotion, which is an emotion you have in response to another emotion. So anger can cover up the emotion that is at the root of whatever issue you’re dealing with.

So it wouldn’t be unusual if, to avoid feeling helplessness, guilt, or fear, you just get really angry. This process can happen so fast and unconsciously that it’s hard to realize that that’s what you’re doing.

This is true for everyone, but with anger, this is particularly true for men and people who are AMAB. Men face a lot of cultural pressure (in most cultures in the world) to not feel emotions like fear, helplessness, or guilt, but anger is often considered more masculine and therefore more allowable.

The Importance of Feeling Anger

Anger can be hard to manage, and, if you’ve grown up thinking contention is of the devil, then you might have a hard time feeling it at all. Instead, you may have feelings such as guilt, anxiety, or shame that keep you from embracing your anger.

This is particularly true if you are a woman or a person who was AFAB. Anger is, in most cultures, not considered feminine, though feminists are working on helping women to use the power of their anger for good.

This is an even deeper issue if you’re a woman of color. When you’ve expressed anger, you’ve likely received more hostile responses and given a label such as the “angry Black woman.”

And if you’re a man of color, you might also be particularly careful around anger because, especially for Black and Indigenous men in the United States, you’re likely already deemed dangerous just for existing. Displaying anger can be dangerous for men of color.

If you have repressed anger, then learning to process anger can help your health, relationships, and happiness. Repressing anger can keep you from identifying harm and protecting yourself. Repressed anger can manifest as passive-aggression and self-righteousness, and it can impact your health, causing or contributing to depression, anxiety, paranoia, chronic pain, high blood pressure, and more.

Tips for Managing Anger: Self-Awareness

If you’re not used to being aware of and responsive to your feelings, then you may want to start by sitting and focusing inward. What you feel, how and where that feeling sits in your body, and what thoughts or experiences your feelings are stemming from. Deep breathing can be helpful here, both for focusing inward and for managing feelings of rage.

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When I first started being able to feel anger, I was like Giselle in Enchanted. I was so excited that I’d done it that I was no longer angry. Managing anger can take practice.

Tips for Managing Anger: Talking It Out

Venting your rage to a sympathetic ear can be very helpful. This is a big part of why ex-Mormon forums like r/exmormon (and the private Exmo women’s group), ex-Mormon Twitter and Threads, ex-Mormon Instagram, and communities around exmo podcasts and vlogs exist. We like to support each other!

Talking to a therapist can also be a huge help. A trained and licensed counselor can help you to process your anger in privacy with skill and context that we internet randos can’t. If you can find a therapist who specializes in religious trauma or used to belong to a fundamentalist religion, even better. (Sometimes therapists who don’t know much about fundamentalist religions come across as less than validating.)

If you have a significant other, friend, or family member who is also ex-Mormon or is willing to listen, then that’s great too!

Journaling (if Mormonism hasn’t turned you off of it) can also be very helpful.

As long as you’re in a space where you’re not freaking out children or verbally abusing anyone, then you can let loose. Curse, vent, rant, scream, and say whatever it is you need to say.

You can say every bad thing about the LDS Church and God that has ever come into your head. Rant about your family or your friends or your singles-ward bishop. (If they’re not there, then cursing them is not verbally abusing them. And if no one tells them what you said, then your words can’t hurt them. Say what makes you feel better.)

If something so dramatic doesn’t feel good to you, then experiment with what does feel helpful. For example, when I’m angry with someone, what makes me feel better doesn’t tend to be cursing or calling them a monster or a fascist. Instead, I like to think up the most devastating insult I can that is still definitely true. When I was still a believer, I liked to pick scriptures that insulted the person for me.

Tips for Managing Anger: Physical Acts

Many people need to express their anger physically. If this is you (or you’re not sure whether this could help you), then just make sure that you’re safe and not hurting anyone. Don’t assault anyone, physically or sexually, and don’t destroy property that isn’t yours.

You may find it helpful to run, punch and kick a punching bag, or hit a pillow against a wall. You can use your imagination; just remember safety standards. For example, I read that breaking glass helps some people, so I once tried breaking glass jars with a hammer, with those jars being inside a box to contain the glass, and I wore safety goggles.

Again, be careful who you’re around when you do this. Your toddler doesn’t need to see you throwing darts at a picture of the apostles.

Managing Anger With Children Around

Privacy can be very helpful for being able to process new emotions, especially if you fear them. And your privacy can be very helpful to your children, since young children especially are prone to assuming that whatever you’re angry about is their fault. You don’t want to freak kids out or make them feel like they’re in danger or that you’re out of control.

Still, you might feel out of control, and depending on your childcare situation and state of emotional overwhelm, you may have little choice but to process your emotions in front of small children to some degree.

Also important to remember is that if your kids are older (pre-teens, teens, or adults) and/or have had traumatic experiences, then seeing that you have anger too can also be helpful to them in their own faith transition and recovery. We want to model healthy anger management, not pretend like we never experience human emotions.

A good general rule is that the younger the child is, the more you should be careful about trauma-dumping on them. Older kids might like to know that you are also struggling with patriarchy, racism, etc., but how much detail they want is going to vary. You’ll have to judge how much is too much for your kid. Fortunately, if your kid is old enough for that, they’re also old enough that you can ask them to tell you if you’ve gone from trying to not hide your humanity to burdening them.

Things You Can Do With Kids

Fortunately, kids today have a lot more resources for social-emotional development. If you have littles, then you could watch shows like Ms. Rachel’s Songs for Littles (choosing episode titles that reference emotions and/or anger) and Bluey (specifically, “Stickbird” and “Sheepdog”) with them and use these episodes to help you explain what you’re going through.

Ms. Rachel teaches kids that emotions are normal and don’t last forever, and she shows kids how to take belly breaths to help them when they’re angry. This is a good strategy for adults too. You can tell your child something like, “[Mommy] feels upset right now. I’m not mad at you, and you don’t need to worry about it. [Mommy] loves you and will feel better later. But right now, Mommy needs to [take a lot of belly breaths / journal / exercise / take a break].”

For vocal venting, you can show your child how to scream into a pillow. They will probably love that. Older children may appreciate being able to curse in front of or vent to you. In this case, you may be able to demonstrate a bit; that can help your child feel safe to vent. Just don’t make your kid your therapist.

For physical coping skills, exercise, including punching and kicking a punching bag, is probably a solid choice. Beyond that, you’ll have to judge based on how much your kid needs to find ways to vent and how much they understand about what you’re going through. Communicate with your kid, make sure they are safe and feel safe, and help them get what they need to vent their own anger.

Boundaries

A lot of ex-Mormon anger just needs to be let out, and you kind of just have to let it burn until it burns out. However, if you keep having new anger come up, then it’s time to look at your boundaries.

We will talk about boundaries (what they are and how to set them) another time, but for now, we’ll say that boundaries are personal policies that protect you. When you don’t have adequate boundaries, you keep being harmed, and so new anger is born. If the same things keep angering you, then boundaries may be able to help.

For example, if your parents keep sending you conference talks, then you can decide that you’re going to delete those emails without reading them. You can’t stop your parents from sending the emails, but you can tell them that if they don’t stop, you will delete their emails and thus not see or respond to any personal messages that might be included. If Church-related emails are not clearly marked, then all their emails might get deleted.

Anger As Energy

Of course, boundaries cannot prevent all problems. For example, you can’t use boundaries to totally escape patriarchy or white supremacy. You will probably still hear about the Church through family and because the LDS community might still be your community. Sometimes, things are going to make you angry.

This is normal, but this is also where we can use anger as empowering energy. Anger can drive us toward greater justice in the world. We can do something with our anger and help to make the world better.

In Ex-Mormon Anger, Part 2, we’ll talk about Mormon teachings about anger and how you can deconstruct them and keep only what makes sense. In Part 3, we’ll do the same for teachings about contention.

In the meantime—how do you manage your anger? What are your go-to strategies?