Archive for the 'Anger Management' Category

Managing anger is very essential in order to stay away from all kinds of miseries in your life.

There are certain strategies which can significantly help you to bring your anger under control.

Anger is considered as basic human emotion and feeling.

It is neither a disease nor any adverse health condition. It is quite common for every one to get angry when we feel defenseless or hurt.

Anger can become a problem for you, if you act in a way that causes destruction to others. This anger is not a comfortable emotion and it becomes very difficult for you to live with this disgusting anger.

So, managing anger is very essential for you in order to lead a healthy and happy life. Here are certain simple yet effective strategies for managing anger.

Understand and recognize the triggers of anger!

Managing anger is much similar like controlling a car scrolling down a hill. If you try to stop it as quickly as possible, it becomes relatively easy for you to bring it down under control. If you wait till it goes 80kms speed, it will obviously become much harder for you to stop.

Emotional pain and hurt will show up in many areas of your life.

The suggestions below will help you when faced with pain and hurt.

All take you into your pain and discomfort, and help you develop comfort in your own skin.

The payoff is this: Your emotional pain will no longer be fertile soil for your anger. These suggestions will help you choose to open up to and embrace these painful experiences when they show up and learn to bring compassion and forgiveness to them.

Facing Your Fear

Start by making contact with the dangerous or painful thing you are afraid of. What is the nightmare or worst-case scenario? Notice the bodily sensations that accompany these thoughts.

Be specific. You may fear being exposed as incompetent or being embarrassed, humiliated, criticized, or devalued. Or perhaps you fear the emotion of fear itself. [Fear: Main Cause of Anger]

The problem here is not the emotion, but what you do about it and how that action gets in the way of doing things you value.

Adopt an observer perspective and watch your fear-related thoughts, worries, bodily sensations, and images. Don’t try to resolve or fix them. Simply watch as you’ve been practicing.

Obstacles to healthy communication are a direct outgrowth of the mind’s tendencies to judge, blame, and assume intent - collectively, the compulsion to evaluate.

These tendencies put up walls and turn people who are simply different from us, or who disagree with us, into adversaries.

The mind wants to label them as wrong and/or bad. The mind tells you they are misguided, stupid, and sinful.

You may feel the need to show them their errors.

Whether the issue is sexual behavior or something as trivial as washing the dishes, the outcome is the same: people who are different, who do things differently, or who disagree arouse anger and must be defeated or punished.

The compulsion to evaluate involves wearing emotional blinders. These blinders leave you so consumed with defending yourself that you likely miss what’s really going on.

You don’t see when others are hurt or needing validation or are trying desperately to connect with you. You ignore vital information, including your own deeply felt pains and hurts, because it has nothing to do with winning.

Evaluation also hurts your relationships because it prevents you from seeing life through another person’s eyes. Your sense of perspective is greatly diminished or distorted.

One of the keys to becoming less ruled by what your mind tells you is to learn the skill of watching your mind.

You can do it, but it takes time and practice. Your mind didn’t start throwing evaluations at you overnight. It’s been going on for a long lifetime.

The skill of watching your mind will take practice and commitment, but it’s a powerful tool for changing your experience of anger.

To get started, try completing the exercises as described below.

Each exercise will help you detach from the compulsion to evaluate and believe those evaluations. Do one exercise at a time to see which ones work best for you.

It’s important to give yourself enough time with each exercise. These exercises are not magic bullets. They require practice.

A good starting point is to set aside at least ten to fifteen minutes each day to practice an exercise. Give each of them a few days of practice before moving on to the next.

Exercise: Mind Watching

Mind watching requires you to be a true observer of your consciousness. Here’s how you do it:

Like an observer you know that how anger affects you. It’s time to map how your anger really works - the process of your anger.

Use the techniques of mental DVD to remain a here-and-now observer of your experience.

Either adopt the house perspective or use the mental DVD to recapture an anger event that was too overwhelming to track as it unfolded.

What have you learned? On a separate piece of paper, record as much detail as you can in the following anger map exercise.

Exercise: Your Anger Map

Pre-Anger Feelings:

Describe the emotions and physical sensations you noticed this week preceding your anger episode. Is there typically one feeling, or are there several that may show up at the beginning of your anger process?

How do these feelings affect your sense of self-worth? Do you find yourself wanting to escape or suppress them? Are there physical sensations preceding anger that are painful or uncomfortable? Does anger help to push them out of your awareness?

Trigger Thoughts:

Write down as much as you can remember about any painful images or memories that come up in anger situations. What judgments do you typically make about other people?

Anger is an unavoidable part of being human. Anger is especially based on myths.

All myths of anger give good reasons for anger and aggressive behavior.

Myth 1: Anger and aggression are natural for humans

The idea that humans are born with a basic instinct for anger and aggression has been used to explain just about everything from marital arguments to global warfare.

The thinking here is that instinctual biological pressures can push people past some built-in anger threshold. Even the APA - the American Psychological Association - contributes to this point of view:

• The instinctive, natural way to express anger is to respond aggressively.
• Anger is a natural adaptive response to threats; it inspires powerful, often aggressive, feelings and behaviors, which allow us to fight and defend ourselves when we are attacked.
• A certain amount of anger, therefore, is necessary to our survival.

Although this way of thinking makes some sense, it has one major flaw.

Successful evolution has been based on cooperation, not destructive conflict and aggression. Even primates fight in an organized manner.

Letting go of the struggle for control is not as hard as it may seem.

It begins with you making a decision to do so. The hardest part is putting your decision into action.

One of the main obstacles to action is failing to recognize the difference between what you can control and what you cannot control.

Falling back into the old control agenda where control is not possible is a surefire way to stay stuck and to allow anger to sidetrack you from what you want your life to be about.

To get unstuck and stay that way, you’ll need to develop greater ease in the early detection of situations where control is possible in your life; those are the places where you need to spend your time and effort working.

The exercise below is designed to help you to do just that. Think of it as a sort of review and preparation for the hard work to come.

Exercise: Differentiate between what you can and can’t control

Read each statement and then, without giving much thought, note the numbers which you believe and can be controlled by you. Don’t note the numbers where you think the situation is outside your control.

You may know that the cost of your affects your anger affects you in many ways.

Many of these costs probably led you to do one thing or another to avoid doing them in the future.

For example, you may have blamed yourself or others for your hurt. You may have insisted on you being right and others being wrong.

You may have blown up and yelled at people. Have these strategies made you less angry and happier with your life?

Have they moved you in directions you want your life to take? Now, we would like you to reflect on what you have done about your anger and how well these past strategies have worked for you.

The reason for doing this kind of reflection is that we don’t want you to go on doing more of the same, especially when old anger management strategies have not worked for you.

Successful anger transformation begins with facing - openly and honestly - each attempt at anger management, each past strategy, and seeing how it has worked.

Exercise: Taking a look at your anger management history

For this exercise, you will look at your past attempts to manage and control anger.