People who were never allowed to be angry as kids do 8 things with their anger as adults — and none of them look like anger

Nobody sets out to raise an angry kid.

So a parent says we don’t scream in this house. Or use your words. Or the gentler versions, which are the more common ones: there’s no reason to be that upset, you’re fine, let’s take a breath and start over.

All of that comes from somewhere good. Stephanie Samar, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, points out that parents often play down a child’s difficult feelings because they want them to be happy.

Plenty of kids grow up believing anger and sadness are bad emotions rather than ordinary ones.

The trouble is the gap between two different lessons. Don’t hit your sister is a rule about behavior, and a child can learn it. Don’t be angry is an instruction about a feeling, and nobody can follow it.

What a child does instead is learn to do something else with it. Fast, and without being taught.

A seven-year-old sent upstairs to calm down works out within about ten minutes that the way back to dinner is to come down with a smile.

That’s the price of dinner, and it has very little to do with feeling any better. Nobody explains this. Everyone figures it out.

Do that a few hundred times and nobody can tell it apart from a calm nature. Including them.

Thirty years later that person will tell you, sincerely, that they don’t really get angry. They’re not lying. They just aren’t looking in the places the anger went.

1. They talk themselves out of it

Something happens, a comment at dinner, a decision made without them, and there’s a flash of something. Half a second.

Then the case for the other person starts building itself, fast. He’s under a lot of pressure at work. She probably didn’t mean it like that. I’m being sensitive.

By the time anyone could have noticed, the anger has been tried, judged, and dismissed by its own owner.

It’s why these people get called understanding, and they are. They’ve had thirty years of practice at coming up with reasons the person who upset them shouldn’t have to hear about it.

Gracious is the wrong word for it, though. Nothing ever got as far as a decision.

2. They cover it up with a joke

“Oh, I’m used to it.” Big laugh. Everyone moves on.

The thing got said out loud, in full, in front of everybody. And because it arrived as a joke, it stays a joke.

Most people who do this worked it out as teenagers. A joke was the one way to complain that didn’t count as back-talk, and nobody gets punished for something they weren’t serious about.

The catch is that it works. The relief arrives, everyone stays comfortable, and the complaint is spent. They already had their turn, so the version they meant to say is not getting said.

3. They aim it at themselves

Anger needs a direction, and this person was given exactly one.

So the driver who cut them off produces nothing, and the email they sent with a typo produces two days of running commentary nobody else can hear.

The standards are the tell. Endless patience for other people’s mistakes, none at all for their own. Somebody else forgets a birthday, and it’s fine, life is busy. They forget one, and it means something about their character.

4. They spend it on small annoyances

The person chewing. The one walking slowly in a doorway. The colleague who takes four sentences to say a thing that needed one.

None of it is a fair reaction, and they usually know that while it’s happening.

It’s also the right size to go unnoticed. Shouting at a stranger would get seen for what it is. Being mildly annoyed at forty things a day just makes somebody seem fussy, or hard to please.

Nobody watching thinks that person is furious about something that happened in 1997.

5. They slowly cut people off instead of confronting them

A friend does something that hurts. There’s no conversation about it, because a conversation about it would require saying the sentence.

What happens instead is a series of very small decisions. The next invitation gets a no without a reason attached. The reply takes a day, then three. The birthday message gets shorter. Nothing is announced.

Eighteen months later, they’re not in touch, and if you asked either of them what happened, one would say they drifted apart, and the other would agree.

Two people who have a fight can be in the same room afterward. The friend who gets dropped this way never gets that, because nobody told them there was anything to answer.

6. They cry at the moment they least want to

Something unfair is happening, in a meeting, in an argument, at a kitchen table, and what arrives is tears.

The feeling underneath is closer to how dare you, but the body sends up the version that was allowed.

Then the whole conversation changes. Someone gets them a glass of water. Someone says I didn’t mean to upset you, and means it kindly, and the subject becomes their distress rather than the thing that caused it.

They end up being comforted about a situation they were trying to object to. Which is why so many of them dread crying more than the argument.

7. They work it off

The kitchen gets deep-cleaned at eleven at night. The garage gets sorted on a Sunday. Six miles are run and input into Strava, in the rain.

The feeling goes somewhere, the house ends up cleaner, and nobody asks about it.

It even gets praised. They’re described as driven, or as someone who can’t sit still, or as being incredibly on top of things, and the person doing it will usually agree, because the alternative explanation has never occurred to them.

The timing is the giveaway. The cupboards get reorganized the night after the phone call with their mother, not the night before.

A review of more than 150 studies found that activities winding the body up don’t bring anger down, and that running came out worst of all.

So it doesn’t settle anything. The garage is tidy, the thing that started it is exactly where it was, and next time there’s another shelf waiting.

8. They go quiet

The voice gets even. The sentences get shorter and more correct. Nothing is slammed, nobody is interrupted, and the answers are all perfectly polite.

People who know them well can read it from across a room, and they’ll tell you it’s worse than shouting. There’s nothing to respond to.

There’s a name for the trouble of putting your own feelings into words. Alexithymia. The research turns up something you wouldn’t guess.

The body isn’t quiet at all. If anything, the signals come in louder than usual. The chest goes tight right on schedule. It’s the word that doesn’t come.

Which is why you can’t apologize to someone who has said it’s fine in a level voice and then asked whether you wanted tea.

The move is the same

The anger gets spent instead of said.

It goes into a joke, a clean garage, a friendship that quietly ends, a remark about somebody chewing. It leaves. It just never arrives anywhere near the person it was about.

And none of it is visible, which is what keeps it running. Nobody watches a withdrawal being made. They see somebody easygoing, and they say so.

The seven-year-old on the stairs wasn’t being unreasonable, by the way. Coming downstairs with a smile plastered on worked. It ended the standoff, got dinner back, and cost nothing anybody could see.

The only problem is that it kept working, for another thirty years, in rooms where more was at stake than dinner.