Enraged, affronted, furious, seething, annoyed, resentful, indignant, irate, irritated, irked, spiteful, and ticked off. There are many flavors of anger.

Anger is complicated, especially when it comes to teens. The overactive emotional center in the teen brain (amygdala) plus the immature thinking part (pre-frontal cortex) that helps to regulate self-control make teens immature and inartful emotional expressers. Anger has important functions that serve to get needs met. Anger signals when a boundary has been crossed physically, emotionally, or morally. Anger elicits urges people to fight, lash out verbally, protect, assert, protest, or otherwise take needed action.

As teens learn what feels meaningful, morally right, and authentic for them, they will feel and will need to express anger. Anger is also often what is called a secondary emotion. It is a safer, more protective emotion than whatever vulnerable emotion may lie underneath, such as hurt, embarrassment, sadness, rejection, guilt, shame, or fear. Supportive adults play an important role in shaping how teens understand and learn to express themselves as an adaptive means for getting their needs met.

I often work in therapy with teens to be more in touch with and skillfully express their anger, as in this example:

Jeremiah came into our session with arms crossed and an angry expression. “What’s going on? You seem…angry?”

“I am! My dad can be such an asshole.”

“What happened?”

“He picked me up from practice and instead of just waiting in the car, he met me over at the field and made some stupid comments to my coach about how maybe we could have had a better game last week if he put me in. I was so pissed. Now,........

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