Anger Management
Anger is a natural emotion and it can be a very useful one. It can help us to identify when something is wrong, when we are being treated unfairly or when our boundaries are being crossed. It can also help us to take action and make changes in our lives.
Sometimes anger is treated as a ‘bad’ emotion and something to either shy away from or to suporesss. We get worried about admitting to anger, exhibiting it and addressing it. When anger becomes repressed, it can lead to self-sabotaging behaviours and ‘over-reactions’ to others and in seemigly unrelated situations. On the other hand, struggle with containing anger can lead to fear and ‘freak outs’ by those around us and those we love. This is also not useful.
It is important to remember that anger is not the same as aggression. We can express our anger in a healthy way without being aggressive or intimidating. This means learning how to communicate our feelings and needs in a respectful way.
Learning how to understand, manage and express anger healthily is a very important component of building and nurturing our emotional intelligence. We can learn to develop a healthy relationship with our anger rather than letting it turn into quiet resentment or an intimidating charade towards others. Some of the important parts of this process are learning to notice and acknowledge the feeling of anger, developing an understanding of how anger shows up for us and finding ways to honour this feeling fully but without damage to others. Finally, it is about learning to use anger as fuel towards something useful and purposeful.