Dealing with Anger

Since anger is a natural and adaptive learning behavior, it is sometimes manifested as an aggressive, powerful feeling and behavior, a necessary component to ensure our survival in some of the cases, where defensive mechanism plays the leading role. The direction of anger can be either external or internal or both. Externally directed anger may occur towards any environmental events, stimuli or individuals. On the other hand, internally directed anger may occur towards one's oneself such as recalling any traumatic events.

While dealing with anger, people usually take the advantage of a whole host of conscious and unconscious mechanisms. Essentially there are three major approaches which include expression, suppression and calming down. In fact, in an anger management program, you will be exposed to a wide variety of methodologies to express your anger in an assertive mode, however, not aggressive, since expressing anger in an assertive pattern is the healthiest pattern for expressing anger. In the first step of learning this quality, you should have a clear understanding about your needs and the crucial demarcation between 'needs' and 'wants'. You will be taught to improve your problem solving skills and decision making ability so that you will gain an understanding how to meet your needs, while not hurting others for the sake of it.

Since people sometimes mistake assertiveness with demanding attitude or being pushy in nature, yet not true, rather assertiveness is a way to show respect to oneself and to understand the value of own existence, while being empathic about others as well.

Anger can be dealt through the way of suppression as well, following which it can be converted and directed towards other direction. While practicing this technique, you will be facilitated to the learn holding your anger and be able to stop thinking about this particular triggers that set you into fire, while directing your attention towards something constructive and positive in character. The goal of this technique, undoubtedly, is to convert the energy occupied in the expression of anger to other positive and constructive direction, while inhibiting the feelings associated with anger. However, there is an acute danger associated with this type of expression. Since the feeling of anger is suppressed from getting into outwardly direction, it has all the possibility to turn inward direction, which implies that the consequence may directly hit you only and you could be the victim of your own feeling. This may result in hypertension, high pressure, frustration, anxiety or depression.

Several researches have shown that unexpressed form of anger may cause serious problem in an individual's life. In fact, it may lead to different pathological conditions. For example, if you have developed a pathological condition as a result of suppressing anger, known as passive-aggressive behavior, you may have shown some particular behavioral symptoms such as getting back to the offender indirectly, avoiding to speak out directly the cause of your anger, perpetual cynical and hostile without any strong reason. The irony is that many individuals around the world are actually suffering from passive-aggressive behavior, however undiagnosed. They typically react with other people in an attempt to put them down, offering criticism without any specific cause, giving distrustful and sarcastic opinions since they have not learned the way to express anger in a constructive and positive form. Quite obviously, they are experiencing social desolation and emotional anxiety many times in their lives.

Another technique for dealing with anger is to calming down. This method is not similar to suppression since when you take an attempt to calm down, it means you are not only trying to hold on your outward expression, but you are giving effort to control your internal response as well. While following this technique, you are about to send message to your own mind to become soothed, which results in lowering heart rate, calming down and subsiding the angry feelings. However, when none of these methodologies become useful, needless to say, someone or something in the environment will be subject to receive danger.

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