Anger is a useful emotion and can help you in your life when it is used for a constructive purpose. Uncontrolled anger is when you have outbursts and hurt the people around you emotionally and physically. That causes them stress and anger in their own lives. Anger can be the downfall of any success you have in life. You need to learn to control your anger and may need help to do it.
Anger is part of a cycle of stress that is caused by physiological and psychological stimulants. You can’t control your body’s response but you can learn to control your anger response and release the stress so that it doesn’t build up later. There are many techniques to do this and you can also research more ways on your own.
By recognizing anger as a tool in our lives and using it constructively, and knowing that in the short term stress is also a tool, but it can build up and over time and can cause uncontrolled anger. You can see that you need to learn how to achieve this balance so that you can use these tools appropriately.
Your emotions can become habits with one leading to the other automatically. When the habit is stress into anger, and with the anger expressed uncontrollably, you need to stop and rethink your actions. With professional anger management classes, you can be in control of your emotions and live your own life again.
Sometimes anger is an easier emotion to have then the underlying emotions that cause us stress and feelings we would rather not address. These emotions can be too traumatic to deal with and may need the help of a professional to identify and rectify.
It is a hard decision but think of the costs to your life if you don’t face up to your emotions. They are causing you pain and need to be examined and dealt with.
Controlling your anger means letting the emotions you are bottling up inside out. They need to be recognized and the feelings expressed and released. Sometimes these emotions have their roots back in our childhood and we have been carrying them around for years. Is it worth a few weeks of emotional upheaval to you to get these repressed feelings out into the open so you can have control of your life back? Stop paying the price for something you need to do now.
RECOGNIZING WHEN ANGER IS BECOMING A PROBLEM
You may have a problem with your anger if you:
- Become angrier than appropriate for the level of frustration over little things.
- Repeat a familiar pattern in your buildup and outburst of anger, like it had a life of its own, regardless of how small or big the stimulus.
- Can’t remember all the hurtful things you said to people you work with, were friends with, or loved ones and can’t understand why saying sorry isn’t enough
- Are unable to control your anger and flying off the handle has everyone around you walking on eggshells.
You will want to seek professional help. When you lose control, you need to find the path back to controlling your emotions and a professional will guide you to the steps that will let you regain the control you seek.
Anger is a normal human emotion and most times it is used to propel us into action or to make a decision. Even when under control, it is a scary emotion but a powerful one. Sometimes when you are under stress, you can feel emotions that make you feel bad. When you feel emotions like fear, feeling worthless or ashamed, you can run away and hide. Or you can cover these bad feeling emotions with one that makes you feel a little better. With enough stress, real or imagined, we can let it grow into anger.
Anger is a powerful feeling and spurs us into action, though most times it is the wrong action, if we are letting the emotion rule us and we don’t stay in control of it. We can form a habit that when we feel weak or vulnerable, we go straight to anger to feel better about ourselves. This is how we start to lose control. This is when we need help. But most people don’t stop here.
Sometimes you are a different person when you get angry, and you feel powerful. You don’t want to face your real emotions and so you keep getting angry. If you start feeling the loss of control you may panic and that ups your emotion to rage.
Rage is a blinding anger and beyond controlling. This is when most people are driven to seek help, mainly when they are confronted with the loss of the job, or worse yet, their family and loved ones. Hopefully you will seek out help and it is not too late. Facing your emotions is not easy, but is necessary to save what you have and to getting yourself under control again.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN STRESS AND ANGER
Stress and anger are very similar in the physiological symptoms they cause. When your body perceives a stress situation, adrenalin pumps and the heart races. Your blood pressure goes up and you become tense. These are automatic responses and you have no control over these. Your brain chemistry is changed, making you prone to anxiety or depression, or both. You can either become withdrawn and repress your emotions, leading to an explosive episode later, or become angry and have an emotional outburst, breaking things and harming yourself or any others in your vicinity. You may say things in the heat of anger that you regret. Repressed stress over time can also turn into outward anger. These all lead to cardio vascular damage and possible heart attack in the future.
If stress and anger are a cycle that repeats in your life, you need to learn to calm down and take a time out so your body can recover from the physiological and psychological effects your body is going through. It is a way to break out of the buildup you are experiencing in your body from stress. If you can relieve the cause of the stress in your life, or remove yourself from its effects, you can break out of the stress cycle. But it may not be that easy if it is your job or a personal relationship or family member that is causing it.
Many times, you are in a situation and can’t see a way out. It may help to talk to someone outside of your situation, whether professional or just a friend, so that they can see what you are saying objectively. Sometimes you are too involved to be able to see things for what they are. Stress is a situation where you feel out of control or dominated by someone, or you just feel you are in a hopeless situation. But outside help can often see more than you can.
There are various types of anger management classes that will help you determine what is setting you off and how you can manage these situations. Realizing that underlying stress leads to anger also helps you control your response when you know it is a cycle of physiological and psychological stimulants that lead to your behavioral response. When you learn the techniques to controlling your behavior you will feel more in control and that is the first step to breaking the stress cycle that was controlling you.
HELPING CHILDREN DEAL WITH ANGER
As parents we need to help our children cope with anger and learn a healthy way to resolve problems and feelings of anger. Children will come across situations they have never had before, and first time feelings will be hard for them to express. We can help by giving them the words for these feelings and show them appropriate responses to them. When it comes to anger, we must first make sure we have the appropriate response and understanding ourselves.
Children are at the mercy of their physiological and psychological automatic responses. They do not yet understand that they can mentally control themselves and take steps to quell the outbursts of frustration they feel at times. That is why we, as their parents, can have a great influence on how they deal with this and other emotions they will feel in their lives. We can help them make sense of and control their responses. We can help them see frustration as a useful stimulus and not let it get out of control and turn into rage.
We can ask the child to express what they are feeling. We can help identify feelings that are new and help them name them. We can help them release tension and see some of it as self-created to make them take the next step in an action or decision. An unwritten book report, for example, may seem small to us, but may be a life destroying situation to them. They may feel embarrassed, unconfident, stupid, disappointed in themselves, and stressed, among other emotions. The number of different emotions in response to one event can overwhelm and defeat a child and render them an emotional wreck. It can leave them unable to act or can make them angry and destructive. We must intervene and help them make sense of it all.
By sitting down with the child and offering to show them how to deal with this situation, we show them it is not a big a deal as they envisioned it was. We show them that such problems are ok and can be dealt with. We can help them outline the steps to resolve the problem and show them that action will relieve the tension and anger. Sitting down and planning out the steps to take will hand them back the control which they thought they lost. It will give them the confidence to fix the situation and help them grow emotionally.
ANGER & YOUR FAMILY DYNAMICS
When you have an anger management problem, so does your family. Anger is something that becomes part of your personality and it colors all your relationships, especially with your spouse and with your children. How you, and your family, handle anger becomes a family pattern of behavior and can spread to the other’s relationships outside the home before you know it. This is why controlling your anger response is so important.
Where the parents argue you find confused kids. Children may not realize the relationship of their parents and when they hear them arguing they are confused. Aren’t mommies and daddies supposed to love each other? Maybe they are angry because of me, maybe I have failed them. They might act out this fear and frustration in school, and start failing in school, not completing assignments or skipping classes. It could also be expressed by bullying, picking fights and being suspended.
If left unresolved, anger can result in one or more family members developing physical symptoms such as gastrointestinal ulcers or IBS, high blood pressure and anxiety disorders. And one or more will develop an out of control anger habit as well. It is common for anger to continue into the next generation and so on until it is very hard to irradiate. Do you really want to be responsible for promoting this anger pattern onto your kids and their kids? It will take someone, perhaps yourself, standing up and saying “no more!”
Marriage and family therapy, whether together or separate, will help tremendously in these situations. Sometimes hearing how your parents treated you will help your family see why you react a certain way and realize how the anger pattern started. Together you can work towards ending the anger response and really communicate as a family. It is possible to regain the love and support again.
Couples seek out help when they want to resolve family issues calmly and respectively, without resorting to divorce. Restoring the trust, intimacy and love that the anger destroyed is utmost in their minds. Getting the relationship back to where they started is the goal they are working towards. It is possible but it will take work.
Learning anger management skills is a journey back to what started it all. Feeling the emotions you have tried so long to avoid will be painful but ultimately will give you control again and that is what the anger was trying to do, give you control.
