Why Can't Anger Simply Be Held Inside?

I was watching a broadcast yesterday of a very open and honest couple who described some of the marriage problems they had overcome. Determined to be the 'good little wife' and not to repeat the mistakes of her aggressive father, the wife, who we shall call Sally had taken to holding all her anger inside. Sally never contradicted her husband, never nagged and never did anything to disturb the peace. However, many issues arose which were left unresolved and Sally's anger eventually erupted into violence - the very thing Sally had been so desperately trying to avoid!

Why is it then that Sally could not merely suppress her anger allowing for the perfect marriage she desired so much? Let's look a little at the mechanics of anger and why suppression does not work:

Anger out of all the emotions is probably the one most likely to be suppressed because it's one emotion we feel deeply embarrassed about. We are even taught that it's an emotion we 'shouldn't' feel. But the idea that any emotion can be somehow not be felt is erroneous thinking and will only lead to that emotion being expressed or manifest within another context. In the case of Sally, her 'good little wife' act later erupted into outbursts of violent anger - the exact behaviour she had gone out of her way not control. 

'But surely' you may think anger is always bad? Well, anger itself is merely an emotion. An emotion comes from what we think about or a response to external stimuli. Each emotion in itself exists for a reason. For example, without the emotion of anger the human justice system wouldn't exist because no-one would be angry enough about crimes that occurred in order to want to enforce rules! So the emotion of anger is not in itself at fault but the way we express it might be.

What Can We Do With The Emotion Of Anger?

What can we do with an emotion once we experience it? What purpose does it serve? We can use an emotion to inform us. What does that mean? It means that an emotion is merely a manifestation of our thinking process and can be used to inform us about what we are currently thinking, which in turn can be used to work out a solution! Isn't that amazing? Our emotions can be used to create solutions!

How We Can Use Our Emotions To Create Solutions

OK. So in the case of anger we are going to have to work very quickly with the process because the emotion of anger tends to cause chemical changes which are hard to dissipate once they have been triggered. Indeed, the physiological reaction in anger can become 'set' into the neurology of a person that they can appear to respond almost without 'reason' to their anger.

So, lets imagine we feel angry about something. We recognise that we feel angry and we want to use the emotion positively. What steps are needed next?

• Stop

• Remove

• Listen

• Respond

Stop

Because the emotion of anger produces sudden and intense chemical responses in the body the most important thing we can do when we start to experience it is just to stop dead in our tracks. It is said that the chemical effects of anger can take between two hours and two weeks to disappear from our bodies, it's therefore important that we stop and take stock as soon as we become aware of the emotion rising. We may also need to remove the situation or remove ourselves from the situation at hand.

Remove

Because anger is such an intense emotion and the chemical change can outlast the trigger we may need to remove ourselves from the situation so that we can use the next step.

Listen

Emotions are always there to tell us something so listen to what your anger is telling you. Remember to own your feelings, so your anger isn't about the other persons behaviour but about how you are feeling about it. In most cases we are experiencing our own unique response to something which the other people in the room are not aware of. It can take time to untangle the issues that are tied up with your anger and consulting a trained specialist can help you to move forward quickly in working with this step.

Respond

Once we become aware of what our emotions are telling us we are better able to make appropriate choices about how to respond. The previous article in this blog talks about boundary setting so you may find this useful. However, because setting boundaries is a difficult life skill, most people will benefit greatly from using a professional life-coach or anger management coach to help them understand themselves more fully and avoid further frustration. Boundary setting helps us to know what course of action to take because we know what outcome we want for the situation. Life coaching or anger management coaching helps people to learn pro-active ways of effecting vital change in their lives

How do we find the information our anger is feeding us?

So we learn to slow down our response to anger but during the 'listening' stage we find it hard to ascertain what the anger is telling us - why?

Very little of our anger is actually about what is happening in the now. Most of what we feel angry about is actually attached to our past experiences and how we interpret them.

What we are responding to in the now is often mostly about the past. Most of us have acquired a viewpoint about ourselves and a set of beliefs that have been taught and re-unforced through our experiences. It takes time to untangle our thought patterns and see how they are contributing to our anger. A trained anger management coach can work with a number of methods to help you identify patters of thought. Once you can see patterns of unhelpful thinking you will find this stage much easier to deal with.

Working with a trained proffessional can help us to speed up our emotional progress thus allowing us to enjoy life.

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http://www.toddlercalming.com