Anger is an Energy: Coaching for Predicaments

Challenges. Moments of despair. Times when we feel stuck,  pushed and pulled in different directions and can’t figure our what’s wrong. Good coaches help their clients navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of working life and make decisions in complex situations. But what if the challenge is deeper than deciding between competing job offers or figuring out how to prepare for an important board meeting? Sometimes our clients face struggles that go deeper than simple decision-making. Ones that touch on their identity and core beliefs, triggering powerful emotions like anger. This post explores these predicaments, the energy that emotions like anger creates, and how coaches can help clients navigate these challenges and harness that energy. 

In her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016a,b), Arlie Russell Hochschild tells the stories of groups and individuals who have decided to align themselves with the Tea Party movement. In many of these cases, these people were facing deep predicaments. These people are caught between their understanding of how the world should work, and their perceived reality of how it is working. Freund (1998) describes dramaturgical stress as the tension between our social roles and our internal sense of self, and it is in these moments where we can feel caught in deeper predicaments. That feeling of being caught then often leads to strong emotions and sometimes causes us to make radical and dangerous decisions. 

Predicaments often come about during times of shifting cultural norms, when our existing frameworks of understanding of right and wrong no longer align with what we see happening around us. We are caught in an old system and yet forced to adapt to a new one. One example of a situation that causes a sense of predicament is the rise of a new moral culture. Campbell and Manning (2018) explore the discomfort that arises with a new understanding of what constitutes moral right and wrong. Referencing the rise of victimhood culture, and how that is replacing moral cultures of honour and dignity, they show how these changes are causing challenges to understandings of morally correct behaviour. Whether the terminology that they use is exactly right or not, we can see in our current political landscape the result of an angry backlash against a broader sense of fairness and equality in our societies. This backlash is in some part caused by the feelings of confusion and displacement that many feel when the rules they were taught no longer apply. Similarly, Gould (2001) identifies the feelings that arose during the beginnings of the ACT UP movement and the growth of militant AIDS activism, where anger emerged as a powerful response to the marginalization of the lesbian and gay community. 

Not only are these emotions sometimes useful tools to spur us to action, but they can also be early warning signs that we are in a time of predicament. Margaret Archer (2004) talks about how emotions are commentaries on our concerns. Negative emotions like anger, hate, rage, are particularly useful as the strength of these as indicators lies in their transgressive nature. As I write this post, the main news item is the shooting of a health insurance CEO by a lone gunman who had written a manifesto against the healthcare industry. Relevant here is the fact that most online commenters have applauded the gunman’s actions. This anger that many feel is a good indicator of our being in a predicament. That so many people would publicly celebrate a murder speaks to a generalized predicament in our culture around the dissonance between the profit maximizing goals of businesses and the fundamental need for us to care for each other in times of need.  

Anger is often pushed aside by a cultural tendency to privilege calmness, composure, and control. By dismissing anger as purely destructive, we overlook its capacity to signal injustice, catalyze change, and even foster a sense of agency in those experiencing it. This marginalization of anger echoes a broader trend identified by Williams and Bendelow (1996), who argue that emotions, particularly those perceived as irrational or disruptive, have long been treated as peripheral in fields like medical sociology. In their view, the sidelining of emotions stems from a preference for rational, measurable, and biomedical explanations of health and illness, leaving less room for the nuanced ways that emotions like anger contribute to well-being and resilience. Building on this, Williams (2001) argues that emotions are not irrational reactions to external circumstances but experiences that can be tied to our societal structures and histories. By ignoring or surpressing emotions like anger, we lose an opportunity to address the social and structural forces that generate them. Anger is an energy, and coaches who work with clients struggling with anger might do well to validate its presence and explore its roots, rather than rushing to suppress or reframe it.

Drawing on writings on depression from authors like Hewitt, Fraser, and Berger (2000), and Fee (2000), we can see that in the context of more serious psychological challenges, the prescription of pharmaceuticals like Prozac can be seen as a means to alleviate the pain caused by predicaments. Fee in particular discusses how the subject of his chapter, Elizabeth Wurzel, wanted the definitional strength of a diagnosis to help her understand the dissonance she experienced between how she felt and how she was expected to act. 

Coaching is not (and should not be) a replacement for trained psychological and psychotherapeutic support, but we are often called upon by clients in moments of distress and confusion to help them navigate through these challenges. In less clinical contexts, coaching can help clients navigate simpler predicaments than depression. To do so effectively, coaches need to help clients be aware of these predicaments and help them put in place the early warning systems necessary to see them arising and address them before they become problematic. In his discussion of the socialization of fear, Stearns (2006) shows how acknowledging and tapping into deeper emotions like fear can be helpful in guiding our behaviours and in shifting broader societal norms. For example, he describes how parental concern for their children has shifted from a fear of physical injury to one of psychological injury. This shift is still going on, and we can see the dissonance in people’s reactions to overly safe playground equipment or a growing movement against full contact football. 

How do we use this knowledge of predicaments and the emotions that they cause as coaches? The first thing is that coaches should be mindful of the potential presence of predicaments. When clients are experiencing strong emotions, we should work with them to identify the roots of those feelings. We should also help our clients harness and use the energy that predicaments create. Whether from so-called negative emotions like anger, or desires to flee and hide, these emotions tell us that changes are happening. Coaches can help clients harness strong emotions by asking reflective questions like, “What is your anger telling you?” or “What would need to change for you to feel at peace?” These explorations transform anger into actionable insights. By helping our clients notice and acknowledge the roots of the reactions to predicaments, we can also help them find their way through them. The goal is not to avoid or try to cure predicaments, but rather to harness and learn from the emotions and energy that they create.

Archer, M. S. (2004). Emotions as commentaries on human concerns. Theory and Research on Human Emotions, 21(Advances in Group Processes), 327–356.

Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2018). Microaggression and the culture of victimhood. In The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (pp. 1–36). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fee, D. (2000). The project of pathology: Reflexivity and depression in Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. In D. Fee (Ed.), Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience (pp. 74–99). London: Sage.

Freund, P. E. S. (1998). Social performances and their discontents: The biospsychosocial aspects of dramaturgical stress. In G. Bendelow & S. J. Williams (Eds.), Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues (pp. 268–294). New York: Routledge.

Gould, D. (2001). Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby: Ambivalence and the emergence of militant AIDS activism. In J. Goodwin, J. M. Jasper, & F. Polletta (Eds.), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (pp. 135–157). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hewitt, J. P., Fraser, M. R., & Berger, L. B. (2000). Is it me or is it Prozac? Antidepressants and the construction of the self. In D. Fee (Ed.), Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience (pp. 163–185). London: Sage Publications.

Hochschild, A. R. (2016a). The deep story. In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (pp. 135–151). New York: The New Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (2016b). Team player. In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (pp. 153–167). New York: The New Press.

Stearns, P. N. (2006). Fearing fear: A new socialization. In American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (pp. 93–114). New York: Routledge.

Williams, S. J., & Bendelow, G. (1996). Emotions, health and illness: The “missing link” in medical sociology? In V. James & J. Gabe (Eds.), Health and the Sociology of Emotions (pp. 24–43). Oxford: Blackwell.

Williams, S. J. (2001). Introduction: Why emotions, why now? In Emotion and Social Theory: Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir)rational (pp. 1–16). London: Sage.