Anger is related to your learning story. The situations that make you angry are very often the echo of past events. Let’s look at some possibilities for anger management exploration.
Negative impact of anger on mental health
Chronic anger consumes significant psychological resources, decreases your ability to concentrate and think, as well as your ability to realize yourself. It can lead to stress, depression, and other mental illnesses.
Negative impact of anger on your career
Constructive criticism, differences in point of view, passionate debates are beneficial! Going after your colleagues, superiors, or clients can only alienate them and weaken the respect they have for you.
Negative impact of anger on your relationships
Anger puts knives in the relationship contract that links you to the people you love and often results in the estrangement of your loved ones. Intense, chronic anger can make people around you not trust you, speak to you frankly, feel uncomfortable – people around you just don’t know what will make you angry, or when you lose control. Explosive anger is particularly damaging for children.
Anger: a secondary emotion or when one emotion hides another
In the first case, it is more of a need that is not met. It is a question of determining it and of taking actions in its direction. The second is more emotional avoidance. It is then a matter of learning to make room for the feeling that we are fleeing.
Anger is also a primary emotion. However, if it occurs in many situations and you do not often express other negative emotions, it is likely to be a problem of emotional expression repertoire: Anger is the only way you have learned to communicate that something is wrong (we would even speak of instrumental emotion if the function of anger is communication). This type of learning is common in families where emotional expression is discouraged.
Here are some ways to find out what is behind the anger:
You are taking different opinions from yours for an assault. Do you consider yourself to be always right and find it difficult to imagine that someone may have a different opinion from yours? If you have a great need for control or a sense of personal fragility often activated, you may interpret a different opinion as a questioning of your authority, or simply of yourself, instead of a simple divergence from view.
If you are uncomfortable with the emotions that you “disconnect” frequently, that anger is your answer to everything… it is to your advantage to spend some time with your emotions. Being aware of your emotions is a key to knowing yourself and living in harmony with your values. Coming to terms with the very wide range of human emotions will allow you to see a little more clearly and not to isolate yourself socially. Emotion awareness is a skill.
- It is easier to get angry when you are stressed and / or when your body is weak (fatigue, hunger, thirst …).
- We are rarely angry for the reasons we believe.
- We are angry when we don’t have what we want.
- We are sometimes angry when we see a character trait in others that we do not support at home.
- People get angry when current events echo unresolved emotional situations that have been avoided for a long time.
- When a situation shares characteristics with a past situation where we have experienced strong anger, anger can be activated.