Have you, your partner, your children, or a loved one been struggling with anger in your relationship, at work, at school, or in any other social setting?  Do you – or they – have a hard time dealing with anger, or handling someone else’s anger?  Is it making it really difficult for you to be close, at ease, connected, relaxed, intimate, productive, or even just to have a ‘normal’ conversation with others?  Is it creating feelings of blame, resentment, shame, guilt, fear, or even hatred that you’d rather not have?

Other than hatred – which most people would rather never feel, or acknowledge feeling – anger is the number one ‘negative’ emotion we judge and fear the most.  We judge people who get angry and we judge ourselves for getting angry.  The main reason why we judge anger is because we, personally and collectively, have many recordings and memories of pain and hurt as a result of being angry, or being around someone who was angry.  With each new experience new anger, the past memories of pain that we hold onto tend to trigger, and further reinforce, our fears of emotional abandonment by others and potential for being hurt, or even dying, as a result of anger.   Until all these personal and collective memories of anger, and the hurt that it caused, are released, we can’t release our fears and judgments around anger.  Without releasing our fears and judgments of anger, we can’t permanently resolve anger at the root.

Anger is not ‘wrong’. And people who get angry are not ‘bad.’  A dualistic perspective and the judgment of anger as ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘unacceptable’, etc., do not allow us to look at anger for what it is, and thus to resolve.  Have you heard of the expression, ‘you can’t get there from here’?  Well, you can’t resolve your anger by judging it, and thus distracting away from it into your judgment of it.  Anger is no different than sadness, or any other negative emotion, that gets triggered in us from time to time.  All negative emotions arise in us as result of some fear getting triggered.  All of that said, just like any other negative emotion, anger is not a useful or constructive emotion to act upon and make decision from.

Anger creates a reactive cycle, in the person who feels in and the recipients of the anger, that leads to more pain, more judgment, and more problems in our relationships and life.  Have you ever thought about the level of pain you, your partner, your children, etc. were in when you, or they, were angry?  As odd as it may seem when you first look at it in this way, underneath all the anger what you find is pain.  A pain that many people have learnt to deal with through the reactive cycle of anger.  Of course, this reactive cycle of anger doesn’t work.

Do you ever feel better after you get angry?  Maybe for a moment, it distracts you away from your pain.  Maybe for an instant, you feel some sort of relief from all the emotions you’ve been suppressing, and then what?   You feel ‘bad’.   You feel shame and guilt for getting angry.  You feel ‘wrong’ and emotionally abandoned by the recipients of your anger.  You feel uncomfortable, and you get right back into the cycle of suppressing your emotions again, including your shame and guilt… until you can no longer hold it in comfortably and, once again, you explode into anger.  Does getting angry actually deal with the ‘problem’ you’re trying to resolve?  Does it help you feel more in control and less fearful of not being in control?

Maybe the pressure of fear that comes about as a result of anger leads you, your partner, your children, or the recipient of anger to comply and change.  Still, that doesn’t mean that it was either necessary, or useful, in order to achieve the intended results.  You don’t need to use fear, or negative emotion, in order to effect positive and constructive change in yourself, your partner, your children, your relationship, or your life.  Anger just makes things worse, while giving you the illusion of being in control.  But what about all the additional pain and resentment that gets created as a result?  Eventually, all of the negative emotions that come as a result of anger need to be resolved somewhere down the line.  Anger just makes things worse for the one who feels it, for the recipient, and for whoever carries it forward with them in the form of resentment, or worse hatred, in the relationship.

What if you learnt a new way to deal with your pain that actually helped you feel better, while enhancing your relationships?  What if instead of trying to control your anger – which is a futile task that only leads to suppression – you focused on the underlying feeling or fear that you gets triggered when you get angry and resolved that?  What if you stopped trying to control yourself out of anger, and instead got to the root of your anger, and dissolved it at the core, so that you’d never have to feel anger ever again?  What if you released all of the accumulated pain and misunderstandings that trigger your anger, and started having healthy, open, and vulnerable communication in your relationships as a result?  You can’t control your anger.  It’s not healthy.  It’s not useful.  And, it doesn’t work.  Attempting to control your anger leads to suppression, emotional imbalances, and more problems to be resolved down the road.

Managing your anger requires some practice, tools, and skills, as does understanding the root cause of your anger.  It’s not easy to do because of the nature of anger – it’s an emotion which – in and of itself – clouds your ability to be clear and objective about any situation that you’re in.   As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the anger that you feel in a situation, or around a person, doesn’t necessarily relate to that situation or person.  It can actually have a much deeper cause that has been buried from your conscious mind for a very long time, as early as in childhood.  The anger you feel can be the result of the accumulation of a lot of pain and misunderstandings across many different aspects of your life, sometimes for a very long time.  It can take some introspection and down time getting in touch with your emotions and painful memories to get to the root of your anger and find out what’s buried underneath it all.