Men’s Anger Might Mask Fear

Psychotherapists like to reduce the complexity of human emotional experience to four categories: mad, sad, glad, or scared. Of the four, mad is the emotion that men are most familiar and comfortable with. Ask men how they feel and you are likely to get a puzzled expression, unless of course, they are angry, in which case they are often quite clear about how they feel.

Of course, men do have emotions other than anger. Men feel sad, glad, and scared; but anger is the only emotion that is socially acceptable. There are a lot of social prohibitions against men expressing emotions other…