How your parents expressed their own anger might have taught you that the emotion should be avoided, that it's bad, or that someone always gets hurt when it's expressed. In other words, your childhood experiences may have created lasting emotional wounds that alter your adult relationships today. When you're angry, stress hormones flood your body, shutting down the rational part of your brain. You may run and hide, or attack and deny, depending on your upbringing.
To change the way you interact with others is to identify problems and accept responsibility. Look at yourself honestly and do a review of the role that anger has played in your relationships. Then you can begin the process of learning how to access and process your feelings.
When you commit yourself to changing the way you think and behave, you take back power over your life. By using mindfulness to repair emotional wounds, you can move forward in a spirit of forgiveness and gratitude. Verbal wounds can be healed. By learning a few things about anger, you can find better ways of addressing the emotion. Here are five things to know about anger so that it will not control your life:
Anger is different from aggression-Anger is an emotion. It is the mild frustration to the rage someone feels when treated truly cruelly. Aggression is a behavior where the intention is to harm someone or something. Aggression can be physical like hitting, slapping, or pushing someone. It can also be verbal like name calling, using foul language, or other sorts of insults. The reason this distinction is important is because anger often results without an aggressive response.
Anger is fairly predictable under certain circumstances-People become angry when faced with situations that they see as unpleasant and unfair. They will get even angrier if they blame someone else for the situation or think that it could have been avoided. Why do some people get angry more often than others? It's not that they are faced with these sorts of circumstances more often than other people. It's that they are more likely to perceive situations as meeting these criteria than other people...
Anger is not inherently bad-One of the most common misconceptions about anger is that it is bad for you. It's not. In fact, anger is a valuable emotion as it helps people confront injustice. It alerts us to the fact that we have been wronged or treated unfairly and it energizes us to respond to that injustice. Much like hunger motivates us to eat, thirst motivates us to drink, and fear motivates us to avoid things that are dangerous, anger motivates us to respond to confrontation and unfairness.
Anger can be expressed in many different ways-Anger is your brain's way of telling you that something upsets you. If someone says or does something that angers you, and you ignore your feelings, you're also ignoring the trigger. If something is important enough to you that it causes the emotion, it's obviously too significant to be dismissed. Anger often develops so quickly and intensely that it's hard to recognize you're even feeling angered before you react.
By learning to recognize what anger does to your body—makes your face hot, creates pressure in your neck—you'll be able to create a space between the trigger and your reaction. Anger can be expressed in an infinite number of ways. Aggression is one of them, but so are assertiveness, problem solving, exercise, and suppression. In fact, while the appropriate response when angry depends on the context of the situation. The best approach to anger is usually to try and solve whatever problem caused it in the first place.
Anger can cause a variety of problems for people-Everyone knows that anger can be problematic for people. We have all read about cases of people who lost their temper and hurt someone or hurt themselves. However, people don't always recognize the scope of the types of problems that can emerge from anger. While arguments, damaged relationships, physical fights, and risky driving are fairly common, we see several other types of consequences that emerge from maladaptive anger. It's not uncommon for people to damage property, intentionally or unintentionally, while in a fit of rage.
It's also not uncommon for people to abuse substances, including nicotine and alcohol, when angry. Chronic anger has been known to lead to long-term health consequences. Anger can lead people to experience other uncomfortable emotions like sadness, fear, or guilt. Anger can make others uncomfortable, or frightened, so your parents may have encouraged you to bottle it up rather than let it out. The problem with suppression, though, is that it creates a mountain of explosive feelings that can eventually erupt in harmful ways, from physical illness and depression to self-defeating behaviors.
“It is wise
to direct your anger towards problems not people; to focus your energies on answers
not excuses.” (William Arthur Ward) [i]
[i] Sources used:
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“7 Things You Need to Learn About Your
Temper” by Andrea Brandt
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