Understanding Anger

Understanding Anger and its Impact on Your Life

Many times we can get angry, yet have no idea how it is impacting the people we love or our relationships with them. Anger, no matter how justified is destructive. It hurts the people around us, and pushes them away. This can be good if you are at risk and need to protect yourself, but not so good when it comes to relationships and the people you care about.

Looking back, I now believe that I had anger issues until I was in my mid 30’s. Interestingly, up until that time I had no idea that my anger was a problem. The difference now, is that I understand the many faces of anger and its impact on my life. I realize that anger can be quietly destroying your life, even if you are not someone who explodes. My wakeup call, was the day someone I cared about told me that my anger scared them. It had never occurred to me that my anger could make someone else feel afraid. And the fact that it did, made me sad and very motivated to change.

Anger is about control and has many faces. It occurs when events happen that push our buttons. Anger gives us a sense of power in situations we feel powerless to change. It can be loud and explosive, passively silent, or quietly brewing. Anger can be recognized by a strong sense of tension in the body when you think of the situation or person who triggered it. If you look at your feelings underneath, it can often be accompanied by a sense of being right, or thoughts of ‘I don’t care how this impacts them or how they feel’.

Here are a few symptoms of using anger to control your life, or the lives of others. Are you great at winning verbal arguments, and do you perhaps even take pride in being right? If you get hurt, do you feel justified in being cold or angry towards the person who ‘did you wrong?’ Do you hold high ideals and require others to live up to them? When you believe you are right and someone else is wrong, do you stop being kind, compassionate or understanding? If you or someone you care about gets betrayed, are you mean to the betrayer? In all of these cases, you are hurting other people – and pushing them out of your life. There are times this might be exactly what you want. However, if you treat people you care about this way, you are destroying your relationship with them.

The loss of important relationships doesn’t happen overnight, it happens over time. And then one day, you wake up and wonder why they stopped being your friend, or decided they no longer wanted to be married to you. If you want to change your life, begin by changing you.