500 Words a Week - Understanding Anger
Dr Ryan Martin, encourages us to think about anger as a healthy force in our life. We may just need to work on how we interpret the anger we experience and how we respond.
We often get mad after encountering some form of provocation. That may involve experiencing something unpleasant or unfair.
Anger doesn’t occur in a vacuum, we often experience it alongside other emotions such as feeling sad or scared.
The provocations on their own often do not make us angry, our pre-anger state has a significant impact on how we feel and manage anger. Are we hungry, tired, anxious or worried about something else? When we are feeling these other aspects, the provocations we encounter feel worse.
Martin states that when we experience a provocation, we make two appraisals of it. The first is whether what has occurred is good or bad? Is it unfair or fair? We evaluate the event itself and what it means in the context of our lives.
In our second appraisal of the event, we determine how bad it is. Whether we are able to cope with what has occurred or not. In this stage, we are often quick to catastrophize what has happened to us. We assume the worst of the situation. We assume there was an aspect of malicious intent behind what happened. We blame others or even inanimate objects for what has happened to us.
Martin states that these are sometimes referred to as irrational beliefs. For example, feeling like the chair we just kicked, purposefully moved itself in front of us, this is irrational. Yet in other cases, our beliefs about our anger may be rational. When we experience or witness others being treated poorly, we have a right to be angry.
Our anger alerts us to the injustices we experience in the world around us. It was once a defining surviving trait for us. Our anger was developed as a response to keep us safe in our former lives, as we fended off neighbouring tribes or large animals. It’s just now, not every provocation we encounter has malicious or harmful intent behind it.
We have developed the ability to regulate our emotions and so we must use it. When we feel anger building and we want to lash out, can we channel that into something more productive. Martin encourages us to think of anger as a motivator. It encourages us to respond to the injustice we witness or experience. There are very real things in this world that happen to us and others where we should get angry, and we should utilise our anger towards taking productive steps to rid ourselves of the injustice we see.
We need to regulate our anger and understand when we are making situations actively worse for ourselves by letting our anger dominate our response. For maybe we were just tired and hungry, and so the provocation we experienced that we could have normally brushed off, now caused us to see red.
Next time we experience anger or feeling it building, we should ask ourselves the following questions:
Why am I feeling angry?
Is it warranted or not?
What do I want the outcome of this situation to be?
How do I best arrive at that outcome?
Listen to what your anger is trying to tell you, if it is warranted, how do you channel that into something positive and productive? If it is not warranted, how do you diffuse the situation and get the outcome you want?
