Do you ‘suffer’ from anger? Are you one of those searching for ways and means to deal with your anger?

You are not alone. There is a sizeable chunk of human population that finds anger to be a serious challenge in life. Before we look for solutions, I suggest let us first understand anger. Why exactly do you get angry? What can be understood from your anger?

One of the primary causes for anger is fear or threat. When there is an imminent threat in our environment, we respond to that fear or threat as anger. We can see this in action, when a driver cuts us at a signal. Almost everyone responds with anger in this situation. Why do we get annoyed with the other driver? He is travelling on the same road and he is got his own style of driving his bike. But when he cuts you, there is a fraction of a second of fear and panic that, it may lead to accident.

Whenever we feel fear, our brain automatically gets into fight, flight or freeze mode. Depending on our life experiences and conditioning from parents, we tend to instinctively pick up one of the three, in face of any threats. When we pick fight as our reaction, we need the energy of Anger to fight. So we can say, Anger and Fear are best friends :) We shout, we yell, we get into rage, or get into physical violence. Anger here is an energy or fuel that helps us to protect or defend ourselves from hurt or harm.

Another strong reason behind anger is some threat to our personality, ego or self image. When there is some threat to our point of view, our identity, our self interest or someone blaming us. In this case, anger is more like standing up for ourselves or our rights. For example, you feel your mother is trying to control you or dictate your behaviour, she is taking away your right of freedom. So you respond with anger. Or you are in middle of some meeting and a colleague keeps interrupting or ignoring you when you are speaking, you feel you are not being heard or made less important than others. So you get angry.

We also get angry, whenever we feel helpless or powerless. Here, anger covers up that vulnerability or insecurity. Let us say there is a personal emergency and you need some permission from government or some other authority, or a process and procedure to be followed that delays the urgent action that you need in emergency. How does it make you feel? Helpless, powerless. What do you exhibit? Anger.

Lastly, we come to the most important reason for anger. When our personal boundaries are weak, we allow other people to get into our space. As this feels vulnerable, we cover up this insecurity using anger. Many people who have an issue with anger in adult life, had faced some form of abuse in their childhood (physical, emotional, sexual). This abuse makes their personal boundaries weak. Because they feel so insecure and vulnerable, they feel a need to protect their boundaries now, so they are always on that "angry young man" mode. Something like, “Unless I bite you first, you may bite me”.

Anger is giving you a message. Just by giving your feelings your loving attention, you can understand the message behind anger. Once you understand why you got angry in a situation, you will not need any other anger management strategies. You can just respond to the situation with appropriate action.

Ramakrishna Maguluri

Engaging with life

ELAI

engagingwithlife@yahoo.com