The Psychology of Anger & Anger Management

[Rusty Zipper]

and dont put that dog, in the fight!

[Angel09]

Whenever I get angry today. It rocks my whole world and until I can make ammends or pray and give it to God..I don't feel at peace. The sooner I let it go the better.

[citychik]

I'm sooo with you on that one Angel.

I used to fly into rages in an instant, in fact that last years of my drinking was basically one long temper tantrum.

I don't do anger much anymore thanks to AA.

[citychik]

So the FIRST STEP in learning a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult is simply to acknowledge that you’re hurt.

This is not as easy as it sounds.

For example, when you get angry you don’t really allow yourself to feel your inner vulnerability and hurt. All you can think about in the moment is your desire to get revenge, to defend your pride, to do something—anything—to create the feeling that you have power and importance. In essence, your outbursts of rage paradoxically hide your inner feelings of vulnerability, so you never recognize the hurt you’re feeling that triggers your hostile reaction. All the bitterness and hostility is a big puff of smoke, an emotional fraud. It hardens your heart toward others so that you can seal off your own emotional pain.




Years ago I became a very good marksman with a pistol. As I was learning to shoot, I would be told things like, “You’re flinching your wrist just before you pull the trigger.” But did this stop me from flinching my wrist? No, of course not, because at the beginning I didn’t have the experience to discern the subtle muscle actions in my wrist. How could I learn not to do something unless I had learned how it felt to do it? So, in order to shoot well, I had to train myself to feel the various tiny muscles of my hand and arm; once I felt them, I could then direct them.

Well, that was all many years ago, and I no longer have much use for guns, but I learned a good psychological lesson from it. How can you learn not to do something unless you understand quite clearly how it does feel to do it? How can you learn not to respond defensively to a feeling of vulnerability unless you understand quite clearly how it does feel to be vulnerable? If you are always hiding your hurt feelings behind a protective show of bitter curses (or guns) you will never catch on to the concept of enlightened emotional restraint.




Or you might feel hurt by someone emotionally close to you, and, out of fear that your immediate impulse to hurt that person in return will cause you to lose that person’s “love,” you suppress the awareness of your honest inner experiences. If you do this often enough you can end up convincing yourself that everything is fine and peaceful. In this case the hurt becomes anger anyway, only it becomes unconscious anger: you remain hurt while the desire to hurt the other person gets pushed into your unconscious where it stews in bitter resentment. And so, in reality, you are just deceiving yourself and defiling your relationships when you deny that you have anything to feel hurt about. And before you know it you’re wondering why you’re so depressed. Depression, after all, is often “anger turned inwards”—that is, you end up despising yourself because you feel guilty for unconsciously wanting to hurt someone else.




In Western psychology, acceptance of every person’s unique emotional experiences is commonplace, but many non-Western cultures place a high value on social conformity. As a way to ensure a child’s survival in such a culture, families teach children that all expressions of anger are forbidden and shameful. And to accomplish this, parents, along with the rest of society in general, tend to suppress all recognition of individual emotions.

Hurt feelings in response to slight or insult, however, are universally human. If these feelings are suppressed in any culture to the point that they never become recognized or named, they can fuel the ugly cultural darknesses of prejudice, hatred, paranoia, child abuse, domestic violence, drug addictions—and all other dark psychological poisons that defile real love—as well as depression itself, which, sadly, can also feel shameful.




It’s ironic, then, that a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult actually leads to compassion and peace, while the suppression of emotions, in trying to protect the surface peace, only leads to a psychological undercurrent of suspicion and cruelty. That’s why people who become social “doormats” and let others walk all over them, rather than admit that they feel hurt about anything, usually have quite a lot of resentment and “dirt” underneath their appearance of welcome.

[kasia9752]

That indirect way of handling it is one of the reasons that a "D" added to it makes Danger and we are told that anger is not for us.

[Butterfly Woman]

Good stuff CC Thanx

[citychik]

So the SECOND STEP in learning a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult is to follow the hurt back into its roots in the past to all those times and circumstances when you felt the same way.

You need to do this because any insult in the present is magnified by similar insults from the past. Failure to recognize old insults only makes the current insult seem far larger than it really is.




This entire process is a bit like what happens when an insect stings you and you feel a pain way out of proportion to the size of the stinger. First you simply recognize that it hurts. Then you have to explore the wound to find the stinger. The stinger represents the insult that hurts you, digging out the stinger represents the psychological task of realizing how this one insult pierces deep into your self-esteem, and the venom which spreads into the surrounding tissues represents the way unconscious resentment about all sorts of old emotional injuries from the past continues to poison you even in the present.




Having acknowledged the wound and explored it, you will be ready for the healing process to begin. But, for healing to take place, you must be careful to avoid anything that irritates, rather than soothes, the wound.

[Butterfly Woman]

and forgiveness helps with that healing
Thanx CC

[citychik]

I wonder if anger management incorporates a Step 9.

[Butterfly Woman]

for me it does