Shouting and screaming in anger pushes people away. When we take responsibility for our emotions, we can reach understanding and deepen our relationships.
Two women in a discussion. (Photo by SDI Productions/Getty Images Signature)
This article by student Rihab Smati was produced out of News Decoder’s school partnership program. Rihab is a student at African Leadership Academy in South Africa, a News Decoder partner institution. Learn more about how News Decoder can work with your school.
A friend was dancing around the room, excited, loud, unapologetically herself. I was stressed, suffocating in my own head, and instead of owning that, I exploded. I screamed at her and called her a “pick me” girl.
The words landed like a slap. She cried. The room froze. Every face turned toward me, heavy with disgust. In that silence, my anger stood naked, no longer inherited, no longer justified, just mine.
That moment made me truly aware of my anger, and from that day on, every relapse felt heavier.
I would replay conversations in my head, ashamed of the words I used and the people I hurt. Slowly, others began to define me by my anger. People used it as a counterargument to dismiss my opinions. They talked behind my back, saying I was always angry, that I could not control myself.
Instead of helping me change, this labeling made everything worse.
Managing my anger
One thought stayed louder than all the rest: I did not want to become another version of my father’s side of the family. I wanted to be better. I wanted to break the cycle.
That decision did not come from strength. It came from fear.
Anger feels like it has always had a pulse, one that never stops. It rushes through my veins, twists my chest, hammers my heart and turns my thoughts into storms. I grew up surrounded by angry people.
Anger felt like the only language available to express discomfort, frustration or hurt.
My father yelled when we made noise while he was sleeping. My mother got angry when we walked with our shoes on after she had just swept the floor. So, I screamed at my cousin when she broke my doll and I cursed my best friend when she used my pen without asking.
Anger hurts people.
I was a mirror of the family I grew up with. I did not know how to manage the amount of anger I carried, only how to release it. Every time I got angry, someone around me got hurt. The more anger grew in my head, the sharper my words became.
Psychologists often describe anger as a form of self-protection. In a 2025 study, researchers at Southeast University in Nanjing, China defined anger as “an emotional protest against derogatory behavior and a defense of one’s value and self-respect.”
Growing up, anger did not feel like a problem; it felt like the only way to survive. It was how boundaries were drawn, how authority was enforced, how frustration was released. When anger is normalized in a family, it stops feeling like an emotion and starts feeling like a rule that must exist.
For a long time, I believed I did not have anger issues; the idea of anger issues did not even cross my mind. When I was at home, I could not tell. I simply survived on anger. We all did. It justified my reactions. It explained my behavior. It was only when I made my own friends, developed my own life and physically left the house that I began to see myself more clearly.
Distance created contrast, and contrast created awareness.
Coming to terms with how I react
The realization that I struggle with managing my own anger did not come from one mistake, but from many. Too many raised voices, too many sharp replies, too many moments where anger arrived before thought.
When I asked my sister, Karima, how she remembered my anger growing up, her answer was honest and painful. She said I was always angry and yelling. She recalled moments from our childhood that felt small to me but heavy to her.
We used to play librarians together. I would carefully set up our books into a library, arranging everything just the way I wanted it. When she changed the setup or wanted to switch roles, we would argue until my anger exploded.
Anger did not just affect these moments, but it also created distance. Karima told me that we spent so much time angry at each other that the distance between us became normal. Hearing this forced me to confront something uncomfortable: my anger did not only protect me, it pushed people away.
The shift began slowly, and not at home. Living abroad with people from different nationalities and backgrounds forced me to communicate. Anger could no longer be my shortcut.
Misunderstandings required explanation. Conflict required conversation. Silence only made things worse. I also started learning more about psychology, especially emotional regulation, and for the first time, I began to understand my own patterns: what triggered me, how my body reacted and how quickly my thoughts escalated.
Translating anger into conversation
Karima noticed the change before I fully trusted it myself.
During a winter break, when I came back home, she said something that annoyed me. I felt the familiar rise in my chest, the urge to react. But instead of yelling, I calmly asked her not to say it again and initiated a deeper conversation, explaining what had annoyed me and why.
I communicated instead of withdrawing. That moment was the first moment I faced my anger with maturity. And from that time on, I started trying to replace anger with conversation.
My voice still rises sometimes, but now I notice it. I slow it down. I talk before anger grows too big in my head, because I learned that the longer I hold things in, the sharper my words become. I stopped treating anger as something to suppress and started treating it as something to translate.
Anger never really goes away. Relapse, for me, means moments when reaction comes before awareness. But anger is not the enemy. What matters is what we choose to do once anger appears.
The solution is not perfection. It is a process. It is self-awareness in the heat of the moment. It is communication before damage. It is taking responsibility for emotions, even when they were learned in childhood.
I am telling this story not because I am healed, but because I am still learning. And because sometimes, even broken people can help other broken people feel less alone.
Questions to consider:
1. How is anger learned from those around us?
2. What steps did the author take to control her anger?
3. How did you react the last time something mad you really angry?
Rihab Smati is a Tunisian writer in the making who draws heavily on personal experience. Having lived abroad since a young age, she reflects on identity, culture and the emotions that come with growing up between different worlds. She uses writing as a way to understand herself and connect with others.