Project Description
What is anger?
Everyone gets angry from time to time. It is a normal feeling and not in itself a problem. In fact, in some situations anger empowers us to keep ourselves safe or to make necessary changes in our lives. Anger is part of the body’s natural fight-flight response, designed to protect us in times of threat or danger.
However, although anger is a normal emotion, it doesn’t mean it is easy to deal with and you might find it difficult to talk about. It might be negatively impacting your life or relationships. You could be turning the anger in on yourself or becoming aggressive towards others.
When is anger a problem?
However, although anger is a normal emotion, it doesn’t mean it is easy to deal with and you might find it difficult to talk about. It might be negatively impacting your life or relationships.
You could be turning the anger in on yourself or becoming aggressive towards others. Bottling up anger could also result in a big outburst of feelings, a bit like opening a bottle of coke that’s been shaken up several times.
For others, anger is present almost all the time, constantly re-enforced by their negative interpretation of the things that happen to them and always just beneath the surface ready to explode. Because of this, they very easily get themselves into conflict situations, which reinforces their negative interpretations. They are highly stressed and over time could face physical and mental health problems. As you can see from the two types of anger described, it is not having angry feelings that causes problems, but what you do about it and how you express it.
Anger and depression
Irritability and a short temper can also be symptoms that mask depression. Sometimes when we feel depressed, we feel angry that things are going so wrong for us. We may have been discouraged from showing the vulnerable sides of ourselves when we were younger, but we still need to express how we feel. Anger often feels a more acceptable way to us of expressing emotional pain than crying, or asking directly for help.
The problem is that angry expressions sometimes drive people away and put them off wanting to try to understand the problems we may be facing. We are then left feeling isolated, which increases our angry feelings and deepens our depression. If you think that you may be in a cycle like this, it is important to realise that being angry is not a helpful strategy for beating depression and that you need to find someone you can talk to.
If you lose your temper or get violent and angry easily, it’s important to get help to manage these feelings. It’s not always wrong to get angry but it is wrong to take out your anger on others.
How to deal with anger
There are some useful tips on controlling your anger here.
If you are at all worried by your anger, or some of the things that have happened because of it, please come and speak with us, we’ll be happy to help.