What is Anger? And Anger Management?

Anger is a universal experience; we all get angry from time to time.  It doesn't matter if you are a child or an adult. Anger is there. Some people view anger an an emotion , some view it as a behavior. 

You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that managing our anger is something we need to do well. The goal of anger management is to reduce your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger provokes. You can’t get rid of, or avoid, things or people who anger you, but you can learn to control what you do about it. 

To manage anger, what we really want to do is to have a new type of relationship with our emotions; a relationship where we manage them rather than letting them manage us.

The most instinctive way to express anger is to respond aggressively. It is a natural way to respond to a threat, and it inspires powerful feelings and behaviors which help us fight back and defend ourselves if we are under attack. A certain amount of anger, then, is necessary for survival. In addition, sometimes we resist saying what needs to be said because we do not want to upset the status quo. However, without some degree of conflict, there may be no change or growth whatsoever, and that isn’t good either. 

Self-awareness is a key element for managing your own anger. The use of anger management skills presupposes that you know when you are angry and recognize that anger as a cue that something is wrong. Expressing your anger in an assertive, but not aggressive, way is safe and healthy. 

 The Five Dimensions of Anger

To understand and develop the skills associated with anger management, think of anger as five interrelated dimensions, all operating simultaneously. 

For example, what you think when you are angry influences how you feel, how you feel when you are angry influences how you communicate, how you communicate affects how you think, and how you think affects how you behave.

Anger Costs

In addition to its cost to your relationships, anger can also be bad for your health. Think of a garden hose. Let’s say you have two sizes: a ¼ inch and a ½ inch hose. If you hook the ½ inch hose up to the outside water faucet, you get a stream of water. However, if you hook up the ¼ inch hose, you get a much stronger stream of water because the pressure has been raised. When we get angry, our blood vessels constrict and it’s just like we switched from a ½ inch to a ¼ inch hose.

It’s clear that we need an outlet for anger. Some of us keep our anger locked up inside us and deal with it by not thinking about it. Other people tend to explode when they are angry. Neither outlet is very constructive, so we want to find other ways to deal with this powerful emotion. 

At least in part, our anger is learned. We’ve learned how to cope with our frustrations and our hurts this way, and it has worked, at some level. In some cases, we’ve learned that being angry and aggressive is not appropriate, and we’ve learned that expressing anxiety or depression are more acceptable. Either way, we’re not managing our anger or channeling it in a healthy way. Sometimes we learn angry reactions, too. If our families are disruptive, chaotic, rude, or troubled, we can have a difficult time learning how to communicate our emotions. 

We used to say that letting our anger out was a good idea. This is no longer considered safe, however. When people act out in anger, they can actually escalate anger and aggression, and are not doing anything to resolve the situation. Consider the costs and pay-offs to anger, and then learn strategies to handle your anger well. 

  There once was a little girl who had a very bad temper. Her mother was a wise woman. One day she gave her daughter a bag of nails and told her that every time she lost her temper, she must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.    

The first day the girl drove 37 nails into that fence. It was hard work and over the next few weeks, as she learned to control her anger, the number of nails that she hammered daily gradually dwindled down. She discovered that it was easier to hold her temper than to drive those nails into the fence.   

Finally the day came when the girl didn't lose her temper at all. She told her mother about it and the mother suggested that the girl now pull out one nail for each day that she was able to hold her temper.    

The days passed and the young girl was finally able to tell her mother that all the nails were gone. The mother took her daughter by the hand and led her to the fence.    

She said, "You have done well, my daughter, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. It won't matter how many times you say ‘I'm sorry;’ the wound is still there. A verbal wound is just as bad as a physical one.”   

Family and friends are very rare jewels, indeed. They make you smile and encourage you to succeed. They lend an ear, they share words of praise, and they always want to open their hearts to us. At the end of today, ask your friends and family to forgive you if you ever left a hole in their fence.