Anger is a universal experience. Everyone feels it, and everyone must deal with its repercussions at some point in life. Despite this, there are many misunderstandings about anger. False ideas about what anger is and how it affects people lead to many unhealthy relationships with anger.
Learning how to resolve anger is a major part of developing emotional resilience, emotional intelligence, maturity, mentalization techniques, and handling conflict or discord adaptively in your personal and professional life. To do this, you must understand the root cause of anger and underlying issues.
Anger Is Negative
It is easy to view anger as something inherently negative. After all, anger is an unpleasant experience both emotionally and physically. It is also related to many different problems in life; it causes arguments, worsens conflicts, and can harm your view of yourself and others.
While experiencing anger may be a common experience for most people, it is important to recognize how to resolve, repair, remedy, and rise above the feelings of anger that could be paralyzing your personal life and romantic relationships. The key is to avoid rehearsing, reenacting, or replicating the same traumatic patterns of your adult life and not dancing the same steps of your childhood traumas. Often times, many childhood wounds create maladaptive dynamics for you in your adult relationships.
Anger is an emotion, which means it is not good or bad; it just is. Anger is a natural response to stressful, frustrating, or dangerous situations. It is part of your mind and body’s defense against threats, both perceived and real. It can lead to negative consequences if you do not know how to manage it in a healthy and productive way. However, it is not negative in and of itself.
Destigmatizing anger and learning to view it as a neutral reaction helps you process it in a context of therapeutic relationship by cultivating therapeutic rapport and therapeutic alliance to enable you to address childhood insecure attachment patterns is the key to positive outcomes.
When you see anger as a natural response rather than an inherently negative experience, you can separate it from your thoughts and behaviors. This allows you to feel the anger or other overwhelming emotions without allowing the feelings to govern your actions, dictate your decisions, or control your outcomes.
Anger Can Be Destructive and Consuming Your Thoughts and Life
Many people believe anger and violence go hand in hand. After all, anger can increase aggression, and aggression can often lead to violent behavior. But violence is a symptom of poor anger management, not of anger itself.
In fact, there are some types of anger that are not physically violent at all. Passive aggressive anger is a form of anger issue that involves indirect or verbal behaviors such as sarcastic comments, disguised insults, betrayal, infidelity, and maladaptive behaviors. This form of anger avoids aggression and violence, but it is still a serious anger issue that can lead to even more cyclic problems and vicious patterns creating a slippery slope of downward spirals.
Even when anger is directly aggressive, it does not necessarily lead to physical violence. Passive aggressive displays of anger can manifest as verbal aggression, physical rebellion, lying, deceitful behaviors, negative thought patterns, self-loathing, poor self-esteem, or utilizing primitive defense mechanisms to alleviate temporary feelings of anxiety, shame, or guilt.
You Should Physically Express Your Anger
The problem with anger is not that you feel it; the problem is that you may not know how to express it through verbal communications that are based on profound values of integrity, honor, and doing the right thing by yourself and others. One of the most common misconceptions about anger—especially for men—is that you should “let off steam” by physically expressing the feeling. For example, you might try to let your anger out by punching a pillow or slamming your hands on a desk.
The idea behind this is well-intentioned. By taking your anger out on an inanimate object, you can release feelings of frustration and avoid starting conflicts with other people. However, this form of expression normalizes aggression and violence, which can lead to bad habits down the road.
If you rely on punching a pillow to get rid of anger, then you may develop the unhealthy urge to get physically violent as a result of the inability to regulate your overwhelming emotions, modulate your affect, lack of mentalization, lack of social causality, and difficulty with cognitive linguistic patterns.
Learn How to Communicate Your Anger and Other Emotions Adaptively
Expressing your anger through physical violence is unhealthy, but that does not mean you should try to ignore anger completely. Suppressing, repressing, compartmentalizing, or projecting your anger does not make it go away. It simply allows it to simmer and build more resentment and other maladaptive behaviors, including addictions, anxiety disorders, depression, and other mental health disorders.
Moreover, ignoring anger does not fix the underlying issue. Anger is an emotional response to a chronic problem and long-standing patterns of unhealthy dynamics in your life and relationships. Ignoring the emotion does not make that problem go away. It does not even make the emotion any easier to deal with. The anger will return, and when it does, it will be more overwhelming and more destructive, which will impair your life and create other comorbid conditions.
Remember, anger is not inherently negative. The key is to acknowledge that you are angry and to address the underlying issues and maladaptive dynamics in your relationships. This will help you separate your feelings of anger from your thoughts, emotions, feelings, impulses, urges, and behavioral patterns, allowing you to process your emotions in a healthy and productive way in the context of a therapeutic relationship based on cultivating a secure attachment.
Some People May Be Genetically Predisposed to Anger
Some people believe that certain genetic predispositions can create a fertile ground for maladaptive expressions of anger. This includes unresolved childhood traumas and insecure attachment styles. While anger is a natural response that everyone experiences, your inability to respond adaptively and being able to regulate your responses makes a profound difference in the quality of your relationships. Poor anger management can also be a learned behavior that can affect anyone regardless of gender, race, and socioeconomic background.
Anyone and everyone can get angry. How they deal with that anger, however, depends on their ability to regulate stress, communicate those negative emotions adaptively and effectively. This means that anyone who is committed to overcoming childhood traumas and insecure attachment styles can overcome anger to become emotionally resilient with the help of a Licensed Clinical Psychologist.
Anger Justifies Certain Behaviors
When you believe that anger automatically leads to aggressive behaviors, then it is easy to think that anger is the cause of certain conflicts and troubles in your life. It is tempting to say that you behaved the way you did because you were angry. However, that does not excuse aggression and other negative behaviors. Anger is not a justification for engaging in violent behaviors or passive aggression.
Anger Is Not Uncontrollable
Anger can often feel uncontrollable—especially in extremely tense, painful, or frustrating moments. But that does not mean anger has to control you. You cannot change whether you feel anger, but you can change how you respond to that anger. By learning how anger influences your thoughts and behaviors, you can rebuild thought patterns, change associations, and utilize neuroplasticity to address the childhood plights that have cut you deep in order to synthesize childhood struggles, pivot, and evolve.
Anger is an emotion, and emotions are a natural part of life—even when they are painful. Separating the feeling of anger from your resulting behaviors is what allows you to feel angry while remaining in control of your actions, decisions, patterns, and outcomes.
Anger Management at Blair Wellness Group
If you are looking for a Licensed Clinical Psychologist who offers anger management therapy in Los Angeles, Irvine, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, Bel Air, Century City, Brentwood, Westwood, Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Aliso Viejo, and the surrounding areas, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based treatment plans can help you.
