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Anger is an emotion that motivates us to stand up for ourselves. If you never get angry, it's time to learn how to express anger constructively.
Hey, it’s Graham here, and I’m feeling cranky today so let’s talk about anger. Now, there are two mistakes you can make with anger. The first one is to suppress it, pretending you don’t feel angry and just push that emotion down. And the second one is to just spew your anger out so that you express it destructively. Now, today I want to talk about the first one of those, which is suppressing your anger, and why we do that and why it’s not a good idea and what you can do about it.
So if you’re anything like me, you grew up in a household and a family and a situation where anger was expressed very destructively. Essentially, I had a mother that was verbally abusive when she was angry and would just spew vitriol at people in a very hurtful manner and a father that would respond with violence sometimes when he was angry. And so living in the family where I grew up felt like walking around on eggshells a lot of the time because I never knew when the next explosion and the next stupid argument was going to flare up.
Now, as a result of this, I made a decision in my head that anger was just a bad and evil thing and that I would never get angry because I didn’t want to ever be like my parents. The problem with this is that when you go out into the world having made a decision that you’re never going to be angry, it causes you a whole lot of problems. One of the problems is that you lack the defense that anger gives you. Anger is a defense mechanism that notifies you that somebody is doing something that violates your values or is dangerous to you or is potentially harmful in some way that you don’t like. And anger motivates you to stand up for yourself, to tell them what you think, to put your fists up, to do whatever you need to do in order to protect yourself in that situation.
If you had decided that anger is just a bad and evil thing that you are never going to experience and that you’re going to suppress, then it’s a little like flying out into the world like the Starship Enterprise with the shields down going into battle. Obviously with no defense mechanism there, you’re going to feel very anxious any time anybody threatens you.
We know when we don’t feel angry, when we don’t feel our anger, that we’re lacking this defense mechanism, and therefore it makes us feel tremendously anxious just out in the world generally. So if you have some kind of anxiety problem or you’re feeling threatened, you feel unsafe in the world generally, have a look at maybe whether you’ve got some anger that you’ve been suppressing.
The obvious telltale signs of this are typical people that I meet and myself included, they walk around saying, “Look, I just don’t get angry,” and often we’ll rationalize this to ourselves by saying, “Well, you know, I’m a nice person. I don’t like being angry. You know, I’m a good person so I don’t normally feel angry.” And often we’ll even be proud of this when in fact it’s a massive problem. It’s a big character deficit.
And now when I meet people that say, “I just don’t get angry,” I often find myself getting very irritated with them because I can see deep down there’s something going on inside. I can often see them starting to get angry and instead of actually saying “I’m angry” will start putting a smile on their face or they’ll start to doing a nice person thing, and it’s just completely inauthentic. It’s fake, and frankly, yeah, it pisses me off. And it’s part of the reason why I’m in a bad mood this morning.
So if you have been repressing your anger, it’s going to cause you a whole heap of problems in your interactions with other people. You’re more likely to suffer from anxiety. You’re not likely to stand up for yourself. You may end up with physical ailments from suppressing emotion. And what tends to happen when we suppress an emotion is one of two things.
One of them is that if we try to suppress one emotion, we end up suppressing all of them. So if you try and squash your anger down, chances are you’re going to end up repressing your happiness, your joy, your peace and your love as well, and you’re just not going to have a very enjoyable life.
The second thing that can happen if we repress and emotion is that it comes out in some other way. So in my case, when I repressed anger, it came out as sadness. I didn’t ever really see a whole lot of sadness in my family growing up, but I figured that it’s at least a less destructive emotion because sadness only really affects me and yet anger I saw hurting other people.
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