DEALING WITH ANGER

DEFINING ANGER:

Anger is not always what we think it is. It is not always what we feel when we react. It is a secondary emotion that happens when the primary emotion is too painful to experience. I will explain this better below. Anger is expressed in many ways including quiet verbal attacks, yelling, physical attacks, and many sorts of passive aggressive behaviors. Passive aggressive actions could be described as not meeting someone’s needs or desires in ways you normally would have if you weren’t angry. See (Passive Aggressive below) Anger of all sorts is very destructive to relationships.

So where does this anger come from and what can we do about it? Lets look at what leads up to the anger.

First we have UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS:

For example, we can expect people to never drive below the speed limit, to always be on time, and we can expect things to never break down. What if we expected that a portion of our lives we will get stuck in traffic, people will be late and occasionally something will break down? Then when it happens, we can say to ourselves, “This is one of those times.” There usually won’t be a strong emotional reaction when the expected happens.

I’m not talking here about being negative. We don’t want to be in a place where there is self-fulfilled prophecy because we are walking around expecting problems; rather be realistic. I have heard that it is best not to have any expectations. I’m not there yet. So reset your expectations to be realistic based on your experience over your lifetime. Think through the things that make you angry and consider what expectation you had that was not met. Was it realistic? If not, visualize what is realistic and expect that the next time. The next time you start to get angry, STOP, consider whether or not your expectations are realistic. Many times just making that mental switch will immediately stop the anger.

Example: Your car breaks down when you needed to go someplace. It has been 3 years since the last time that happened. You are upset! STOP! Is it realistic to expect a mechanical device to always work? Is it realistic to expect it to stop working at a convenient time? If not, then say, “This is one of those times.” Flipping this mental switch will be a tremendous help for dissipating “unneeded” strong emotional reactions.

If changing our expectations doesn’t work, we will have an EMOTIONAL REACTION:

When life does not go the way we expected it, we will feel upset in some way. In a particular area of our life, things just didn’t turn out as planned. We experience a feeling. That could be feeling taken advantage of, abused, unfairly treated, sad, etc. Those are ugly feelings to experience. They are a lot more painful for us to feel than feeling angry. Anger is a powerful feeling. Most men were taught not to experience those other feelings as children. Dad and other kids would “teach” us to stuff them, don’t cry, shake it off, and hit back harder. Many of us have been trained to skip over our real feelings and go directly to anger. Anger is an easy place to go to because we’ve been trained to get angry and because anger feels so much better than our primary emotions.

So the solution at this point is to STOP as soon as we feel the anger coming on. We must determine what we are really feeling. This is harder for some than others. If you have a hard time feeling certain emotions, such as feeling put down, feeling sad, feeling overwhelmed, etc., I would encourage working at learning those feelings. Being able to experience a broad range of feelings rounds us out as people and is a needed tool in this step of winning the battle against anger. For a list of feelings see (Feeling List links) below. Experiencing my true feelings is the step that gave me the greatest victory. Once we determine our real feeling, we need to experience it. If we are with a “safe person”, who is one who won’t use our feelings against us, we can share how what they did “made” us feel. We can say, “When you _________, I felt _________.” That is not blaming the other person for our feelings. At the same time, no one can argue with our feelings. They are ours. Even if our feelings come from childhood pain (see below), they are our feelings, and we need to experience them.

If the person we are with is not safe, then we should keep the feelings to ourselves. That does not mean that we can’t experience them. We can do so quietly within us. I have been taught and have found that every time I STOP and experience my real feeling, the anger does not come.

If the feelings are so ugly, and we can’t seem to stay there and deal with them, bring them to God. He understands. He has been through the pain we are dealing with. Tell Him how you feel. Then listen. Read in the Psalms how David cried out to God with his painful feelings. Read the blessings of those described in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). Also know that Jesus understands.

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. Hebrews 4:15-16

SUMMARY

Notice one helpful word in this entire process is STOP. When we are dealing with anger, we need to slow things down and look at what is going on. We need to let our mind rather than our emotions rule during those times. If changing our expectations does not work, then we need to experience our true feelings. If that doesn’t work, we still need to slow things down so we are not ruled by our reactions. Anger can be dealt with. The bible says, “Man’s anger does not bring about the kind of righteous life that God desires.” He has given us appropriate outlets for our emotions and He will show us how to utilize them.

I want skeptics to know how much I would have considered this all a bunch of rubbish fifteen years ago. After all, we are adults now and that childhood stuff is in the past. Experiencing all those feelings is for women after all. If someone doesn’t want me to get mad then just don’t do things that would make me mad for heavens sake. Now I wasn’t quite there but I was much closer to what I just wrote than all that I wrote above. So from a true skeptic, give it a try. Don’t be controlled by your anger. Don’t let your anger ruin your relationships. Don’t pass it on to your children. Rule your anger by having realistic expectations and experiencing what you are really feeling.

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CHILDHOOD PAIN.

Many times our anger comes from strong emotions that come from childhood pain. Sometimes our feelings are not proportional to the situation or not even directly related to the situation but rather an issue from our childhood. If our feelings seem disproportionate to the situation, it is most often a childhood issue. It is helpful if we know how what we suffered as children is affecting our current feelings. If we don’t, we need to look at it. Determining the source of our pain and dealing with it may take time.

When we are aware of the source of some particular pain we suffered from our caregivers we are able to take another step in dealing with our strong feelings. If dad always complained to you about mom not doing the dishes, you will normally react with much stronger emotion to a sink full of dishes that what someone else would have. The same thing happens with any area where one of our parents complained to us about the other one. If our dad told us we were stupid, we will react strongly to any implications of our lack of intelligence with vigor. None of our parents were perfect. They all “abused” us in one way or another many times simply out of ignorance. They may not have known how their actions or words would hurt a small child. In whatever area we were hurt by our caregivers as children, we will react with stronger than normal emotions when similar things happen to us as adults. Those emotions may quickly turn to anger. So what can we do?

We can either get counseling or do some self-help dealing with the pain that we remember from our childhood. We need to “rerecord the tapes” that play within us so we aren’t victims anymore. I may go into how that is done at a later time. I was taught to “separate” the emotions when an event happened. For example using the stupid example above, when someone insinuates that we are less than intelligent and we experience an emotion that would be stronger than what the situation would merit, we can say to ourselves, “Part of my feelings are from this person in front of me attacking me verbally. Part of my feelings are from my inner self hurting from my dad calling me stupid.” This mental exercise can help to immediately reduce the intensity of the emotion.

Many times something that happens reminds us subconsciously of pain we suffered from our caregivers. The child within us can’t bear to re-experience those feelings. We cover them over with anger. We need healing. The deeper the pain, the more work we need to do. We may be able to do it on our own, through books, or we may need a professional counselor to help us through. No matter what, if we are going to go through the rest of our lives without having our emotions control us, we need to deal with that pain and move on. God desires to heal us.

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE ANGER

This type of anger could be not talking, “accidentally” forgetting to do something important for another person, feeling sick so you withhold sex or not doing your share of the work. It is really doing just about anything that the people around you wouldn’t like. It could even be something that they would never find out about. Passive aggressive anger really needs to be looked at because it is subtler than the other expressions of anger.

For those of you who seldom feel angry, consider how often you withhold love from those close to you. If you really have victory over anger, good for you. Otherwise consider how often you don’t meet needs those close to you have just because you don’t feel like it. Aren’t you many times reacting in anger to something someone did to you or something that happened? When you withhold love out of “anger” it hurts relationships. Your anger is subtle and many times unseen and so easily explained away. Deep inside, you know if you really have a grip on your anger. The solution is the same as for the overtly angry person. Change your expectations and experience your real feelings.

FEELING LIST LINKS

http://www.ascasupport.org/3005a-i-mt-feel.htm

http://www.cyberis.net/~innercom/TxDocs/feelingwordsalt.html