Get a Grip on Anger

[The following article written by me was published in the Deccan Herald Living Supplement on March 5, 2011]

STRESS BUSTING
Anger can devastate lives and destroy relationships. Maullika Sharma tells you how to stop yourself from flying off the handle

Anger is often said to be one letter short of ‘danger’; it is something we have learnt to fear. Yet, everyone gets angry. While trying to understand and dissect anger, it is important to tame this emotion, rather than have it control us.

To put it very simply, anger is a feeling — just one of the many emotions that we face in our day. But, sometimes, it can be a frightening emotion. It can devastate lives, destroy relationships, harm others, disrupt work, cloud effective thinking, affect physical health, and ruin the future.

Anger is a secondary emotion. When you have primary feelings like jealousy, agitation, loneliness, helplessness, bitterness, fear, defeat, embarrassment, hurt, confusion, shame, frustration, powerlessness, disappointment or insecurity, you end up with the secondary feeling of anger.

If you are not able to identify your primary feelings and deal with them, your anger doesn’t ever get resolved.

Let’s consider what happens when, for instance, your six-year-old son goes to a party and attacks the cake and chips like he has never seen food before!

He keeps drinking glass after glass of cola, and eating piece after piece of cake, till, much to your embarrassment, it actually runs short for the other kids around.

You get angry because he always does that, and this time you had specifically coached him not to.

You shout at him, maybe even slap him, and threaten to take him home. But, do you ever step back and think about why this makes you angry?

Anger is the result of thinking, and, most of the time, too much thinking. It is not something that simply happens to you. When situations don’t go the way you want them to, and people don’t behave the way you expect them to, you get frustrated and engage in a familiar angry response.

You probably get angry because you think your son is not listening to you (you feel ignored and disrespected); you think the others at the party will question your ability to control as a parent (you feel helpless and powerless); you think others will tease your son and in some ways tease you as well (you feel embarrassed); you think others will say you are not a good enough parent (you feel invalidated and judged); you think your son will fall sick (you feel anxious and worried); you may even think that you would love to be able to eat that much too (you feel jealous).

So, a simple act of overeating by your child results in lots of thinking, and therefore, lots of different feelings, and eventually in the feeling of anger and the resultant behaviour of anger — shouting, hitting or threatening your child.

How many of us think about our anger at this level of detail?

We just let the external stimuli (in this case the behaviour of the child) cause our angry response (shouting, hitting, threatening). And, we allow anger to simmer within.

Anger is often described as a volcano. In many volcanoes the lava simmers within for years, gradually building up pressure. When the pressure becomes too much to be contained, the volcano erupts and the lava flows, destroying everything in its wake.

When our primary underlying emotions are not expressed or resolved, they keep simmering within till we can hold them no longer. And, then one day, often quite unexpectedly for the people around us, we explode — destroying things and relationships.

We end up feeling calmer, but by then the damage has already been permanently done to our environment.

There are, however, other types of volcanoes that have several steam vents through which the lava keeps flowing out gently. The pressure within never builds up enough to cause the big explosion, because every time there is a build up, there is a built-in system to release the pressure.

Similarly, if we resolve our underlying primary emotions, there is no danger of a big explosion and the resultant damage.

Let’s go back to the previous example. It is clear that the mother needs to feel validated, in control and confident about her ability to be a good parent.

If she is able to identify these needs and meet them in some other way, she will be able to interpret her child’s behaviour just for what it is (his love for food) rather than for what she makes it out to be (a threat to her parenting capabilities).

Becoming aware of our unmet needs, and making a conscious attempt to satisfy them becomes an important tool in understanding and managing anger.

This is not to say that children don’t need to be taught socially appropriate behaviour. But take a minute to think about whether in the process of teaching we need to feel inadequate, invalidated, and therefore, angry, or happy at being able to guide our children onto the right path even if we encounter some pitfalls along that path.

Self-awareness, they say, is the most important tool to manage anger. Thankfully, that’s completely within our power and our control.