Anger Management

•Anger is ‘an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation to intense fury and rage.’

•Anger is a secondary emotion.

•Another emotion, such as fear, frustration, anxiety, sorrow, or feeling diminished, inevitably precedes the experience of anger.

•Generally, anger replaces these primary emotions so quickly that we never notice them. Beneath the primary emotions lie unmet needs.

Anger management is all about learning to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.  Anger is not the problem. Out of control anger is the problem. When a person gets angry, it is often a result of threatened emotions, such as hurt of our self-importance, rejections, difficulty to deal with prospects, and antagonistic flight of the imaginations.

If you do not deal with anger correctly, it has a way of building-up over time. Before you know it, you can be in a position where anger is controlling you and becoming a negative influence in your life. Being proactive with anger management will help to ensure it remains a healthy emotion that protects you from unnecessary hurt or threat.

The purpose of your anger is to protect you. If you couldn’t feel anger, you would be at a big disadvantage. But like any powerful tool, you need to know how to use it.  Explosion is basically reacting while the angry energy passing through you is too hot to allow you to think. The part of your brain that can think, the cerebral cortex is kept out of the loop. You are actually operating from the early warning part of your brain, the limbic system, which is fast but not very smart about what’s actually going on.

That part of your brain is meant to give you a jump on things. It is not meant to handle anything complex. Hence, it is important that by anger management you get the cerebral cortex back in charge. Your first priority however, needs to be damage control by avoiding the explosion. Try a deep breath or two to avoid reacting before you regain control.

Suppression is where you are so unwilling to admit that you are angry, that you stuff your feelings deep inside yourself. When you do that, the anger does not go away, but only goes underground. You do not lose the anger, you only lose track of it. Even though you may have told yourself that what happened doesn’t matter, your unconscious knows better.

Suppressed anger can go several ways. It can cause you to turn off, to shut down as far as your feelings towards the people around you. It can also form into landmines which are prone to be triggered and to ambush the people around you. Chronic unresolved anger is to be blamed for numerous serious physical health problems. Even though it can be very unpleasant to admit to yourself just how angry you are, identifying the depth of your feelings can be a major step towards getting rid of your anger.