What Is the Best Way to Deal With Anger?

Levels of anger and stress has increased hugely in recent times, especially in large urban areas and cities, resulting in increased tension and instability in many people's lives. The effects of anger can be seen very clearly in many domestic or work situation you care to imagine.

Anger as an emotion has always been with people. What perhaps is new is a perception that it needs to be dealt with, and that often dealing with a level of anger is acutely necessary for people to have any type of internal stability or peace of mind.

Part of the problem is that anger is often seen as a healthy emotion. It is seen as a good thing to be angry about injustice and poverty etc. This type of anger is not really what is meant when we talk about dealing with the emotional destructiveness of anger.

When a person gets really angry in their own personal lives, there can be many reasons for it, both internal and external, adult and inner child. The most common reaction is to automatically blame some other person, institution, bank, God or the universe. The important thing is that the person is blaming something outside of themselves for the cause of the anger.

Some people will also be willing to look internally, to look at themselves and see what it is within them that is generating a sense of anger.

Perhaps the best example of how this works is to look at the recovery process of people who get sober and stay sober by way of using the 12 step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Alcoholism is often described as a disease of anger, and it is probably true to say that alcoholics can be amongst the most angry people you can meet, both drunk and sober. This is somewhat of a generalisation, but like all generalisations is to a large extent true.

Whatever the causes of a person's anger, the 12 step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous puts huge emphasis on the need to process this anger and move forward from it. There is a sense of understanding that the causes of someone's anger can be both internal and external.

The process of healing it is to realise that what happens externally is largely a trigger, although often a hugely powerful trigger. The real cause of the anger is largely internal, normally seen as a threat to a person's sense of security or status. Often the root cause of someone's anger is in its simplest terms that they did not get their own way about something.

This may seem very simplistic, but in many ways is the real meaning of self-will. It is often seen much more clearly in children, but is equally often true in adults, just hidden more deeply under other motivations and reasons. Dealing with anger is not a simple process.

Many people have a number of underlying emotional drives from childhood and adult life that distort their perception of both themselves and the world.

A sense of anger can often give a sense of purpose or a sense of direction to someone's life. It can often seem to make sense of their life. It often takes enormous courage or understanding to realise that actually a sense of anger destroys the person who is feeling angry, not the person or the institution that the anger is directed against.

It is this self-destructive effect of anger that is perhaps the most important aspect of understanding the need to change. If someone understands the need to process the anger, without feeling the need to validate or condone the causes of it, then most of the time it is achievable. It is an internal sense for a need of stability and safety that will motivate or drive a person to find ways of reconciling themselves, even in a world that they find unsafe.