gruntledandhinged:

thing I have noticed in current workplace:

There seem to be significant class gaps in the use of “anger” vs. “frustration”. Specifically, it seems like using “anger” as a personal emotional descriptor is more common in lower-SES (American) conversations about emotion and that “frustrated” replaces that at higher SES.

People in both categories (in my limited experience) will describe a situation as making them “feel rage” in the moment, but when we talk about it more, one will say “I am still pretty frustrated” or “it makes sense for me to be frustrated because,” while the other will replace that with “anger/angry”.

Do you do this? Do you distinguish between frustration/anger? Regardless of the answer to the second question, how comfortable are you describing your emotional state as angry?

*This is interesting to me because I once had a therapist point out that I was using “frustrated” repeatedly and asked why I wasn’t angry.

**My SES measure is not fine-tuned here, I’m mostly using Has College Degree vs. Does Not Have College Degree.

I [in process of getting college degree] view frustration as a sub-type of anger, and mostly not a distinction worth making. When I do specify an instance of anger as being “frustration”, I mean that it was directed at an impersonal force rather than an agent. However, the sensation is the same, and the response is the same*, so I usually just refer to both sub-types as “anger”.

My mother [has college degree] thinks this is weird, as she experiences anger and frustration as being entirely separate things.

(I suppose that explains why she doesn’t snap at the first person to ask if she’s okay after she stubs her toe or accidentally causes a frozen food avalanche in the freezer. For me, the target-less frustration!anger tends to latch on to the first target that presents itself, if one presents itself quickly enough.)

As for describing my emotional state as angry, I think I’m fairly comfortable with that. (I had roughly the opposite experience as you: I was talking about my emotional reaction to something and Mom said that I was using “angry” a lot more than she would have. This is how I learned about her anger/frustration distinction.) I’m not angry as often as I was this time last year, but that’s not because of a change in my capacity or definition, but rather because I’ve put more work into avoiding things that make me angry when I don’t have reason to think it will be worth the unpleasantness. (I am not one of those people who enjoys anger.)

*Theoretically the responses are different in that I can punish an agent but not a force, but in practice punishing either is equally impossible.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see