Expressing your anger: pros and cons

ANGER VERSUS RAGE

Anger is a natural human emotion that everyone is bound to experience throughout the course of their life. However, there is a distinction to be made between healthfully expressing your anger and letting your expression of anger turn into rage. Think about road rage, for example. It is understandable that you would be irritated if someone cut you off on the highway; however, you are putting yourself and other drivers at risk if you begin screaming and flailing your arms and speeding up to the offending car to express your anger. Many people allow their anger to elevate to the level of rage when they are driving, and in doing so, they are demonstrating very dangerous behavior. Other examples of anger transforming into rage include such things as spousal and domestic abuse. If you get into an argument with your wife, and you let your anger reach the point of violence, then you are not expressing your anger in a healthy way. Rage is the point where we lose control; anger is merely a part of rage, not a determinant. If you are expressing anger in an unhealthy manner, then you should seek professional help so that you can keep your emotions in control, and learn to process anger in a healthy way.

ARE YOU REALLY ANGRY?

Sometimes expressing anger can actually help you to realize that you are actually masking your feelings of another nature, such as anxiety, hurt, or frustration. Your anger is merely a side effect of your true feelings – it is a secondary emotion. One of the stages of grief is anger, in fact. Experiencing anger during the grieving process is natural, and it can help you to get through the mourning period. Sometimes it can feel much easier to express your feelings of sadness through anger – the anger works as a buffer zone until you are ready to handle your real emotions. When you break up with a girlfriend or boyfriend, or when you are going through a divorce, it is also common to conceal your true feelings of sadness with a veil of anger. Eventually, you will be ready to grapple with the real loss that you are experiencing. Similarly, when you are feeling very nervous about something, such as a job interview or an important sales pitch, you might describe your mood as “on edge.” Your nervousness and anxiety is being expressed through anger, and you might be more likely to get frustrated and snap at people in an attempt to process your nerves. While it is normal to express anger as a side effect of another emotion, it is still unacceptable to take that anger to the point of rage. You have to harness some control over your emotions.

DISPLACING YOUR ANGER

When you are feeling angry, it can be easy to take out your frustrations on someone else. Often times, you vent your anger on someone who you are close with, such as your friends, your spouse or significant other, or family members. This tendency gives credence to the expression, “you only hurt the ones you love.” Many people are much kinder to strangers than they are to their loved ones during times of duress. It is unfair to use your friends and family as human punching bags. You have to learn how to properly process and deal with whatever is igniting your anger. If you make a habit of unloading on your loved ones, then you will eventually have to deal with the ramifications, which could be that they will not want you to be a part of their lives anymore. Friends forgive friends, but only to a point. You cannot constantly screw up, and expect your friends to forgive you time and time again for the disrespectful way you continuously behave. For one, you will only wind up feeling worse after you displace your anger because you will feel guilty that you have now let your anger infiltrate your relationship with a loved one. Secondly, you will not yet have dealt with the anger that you were experiencing to begin with.

SAVE YOURSELF THE EXPLOSION

If you do not allow yourself to express anger, and you just keep bottling up your emotions and hiding them behind a happy face, then you are eventually going to reach your breaking point. This type of suppressive behavior often leads to displacing your anger on a loved one. You let people who you don’t have a close relationship get away with bad behavior that causes you to feel angry, and then you purge out that suppressed anger once it has built up to the point that you cannot hold it back any longer. The problem is that you release a burst of anger that is not directly proportionate to the anger that is reasonable at the time that you are expressing it. For example, your spouse forgets to pick up milk and bread on the way home from work, and you explode into a rage when you find out. Your anger is not proportionate to the situation, but you are unleashing all of your pent up aggression because your husband’s forgetfulness triggered it. If you explode on someone without just because you have been bottling-up your anger, then you have to apologize. It happens to the best of us sometimes, but the important thing is identifying the behavior so that you can try to avoid repeating it in the future. The key to expressing anger is processing your anger in a healthy and effective way.