Anger

Wester's tells us that anger is hostile feelings because of opposition or hurt or a strong feeling of displeasure. Anger is both a physical and emotional response that we have to our environment. It is no respector of persons, places, or times. We are told that it can be very useful for us and that a certain amount of it is necessary.

Anger is needed to complete a grief process, set goals, make necessary changes and if handled inappropriately, it can be used to damage or sever relationships and cause much pain and grief. Uncontrollable anger sees people committ murder or other egregious acts. Bottling up anger can see serious ramifications that can be quite costly in many ways. We get angry for a variety of reasons. It is seen when we lose a job, home, spouse, or have our feelings hurt, personal property tampered with or we might become angry when we see this happen to people we love. When boundaries are crossed without approval and when one is humilated, assaulted or threatened, then anger many times surfaces.

One of the best examples of anger that appears to affect far to many people is road rage. I know some people when they hear these words think of the lunatics driving the highways that go off and do something violent. But I believe there are many people who get mad far to easy at other drivers and display anger by shouting, cursing, finger jestering and threatening the other driver simply because they are going to slow, pulling out in front of them or other actions that just aggravate them. We seem to have way to many people that are under a lot of stress and as soon as they get behind the wheel of an automobile, they want to take it out on someone else.

Now I am not trying to justity what I have just described in some of these rude drivers. But we do need to learn to ignore much of this on the highway. Don't let there actions make us loose control of our own emotions. When we first engage in anger, the fight or flight syndrome kicks in.

The blood pressure and heart rate esculate. You notice a certain tenseness. These things happen to everyone. You will either attack verbally, physically or swallow it, which is very dangerous in itself. Invidual personalities have a lot to do with how we handle it.

There is much research that suggests that not dealing with anger in the right way can cause sickness,disease and even death. Interestingly enough, it is easy to think rationally on what to do in these situations when you are calm. But being in the moment doesn't afford us that luxury. Males will handle anger usually in aggressive ways, while females tend to deal with anger in emotional ways that usually don't lead to aggression. They are more apt to cry, scream, yell and back stab.

The education level doesn't make a lot of difference usually in how we handle anger. It has more to do with the modeling process from our parents. Respressed anger can be quite dangerous. A person simmers and steams and as a result you can only imagine that eventually an explosion will come to be. Anger can be a close friend or our worse enemy. I am just naive enough to believe we can control it to the extent it doesn't paralize or weaken our lives.

Anger if used appropriately can help us to meet goals that otherwise would not be reached. A few techniques that can be helpful in dealing with anger are: 1) use of low-keyed confrontation tactics in dealing with someone who has angered us. 2) doing therapy on ourselves before we become angry doing a walk through of how we should handle this without blowing a fuse 3) talking about our anger with a friend in order to diffuse the situation 4) physical exercise 5) asking ourselves if our anger is legitimate

The worse thing we can do about anger is nothing. I liken anger to a lit stick of dynamite. It will explode if you hold on to it. You must let it go. Hopefully the above suggestions, which are not meant to be inclusive, will give some insight into what to do about anger.