Q. I’m trying to learn all I can about this thing they call anger management. I get angry a bunch, though I think I hide it well and it really hasn’t affected that many people. Is it wrong to get angry? What should I be doing differently?
A. I’m willing to bet that you don’t hide your anger as well as you think because if we are feeling something, especially something as strong as anger, it is going to get expressed somehow.
This is because what we don’t talk about we act out.
You may not act it out in profoundly obvious ways, but it comes out. It may be in tone of voice, reacting instead of listening, or in a dozen other ways. It will come out.
Your anger effects others
You are thinking (perhaps hoping) that your anger has not had much of an effect on those around you. I’m going to ask you to do something that might be a little threatening. Ask those close to you your wife, kids, friends, co-workers how they believe your anger has affected them.
I bet you will be surprised, embarrassed, perhaps even chagrined by what you hear.
If you want to confront this stuff head on, also ask those who are closest to you how they have suffered in response to your anger.
For either question, strap yourself in; you could be in for a heck of a ride.
Your anger effects you
The surprising thing is that anger doesn’t just affect others in a negative way, it hurts us, too. According to Frederick Buechner:
“Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel of both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
Consider the result of this study:
Doctors from Coral Gables compared the efficiency of the heart’s pumping action in 18 men with coronary artery disease to nine healthy controls. Each of the study participants underwent one physical stress test (riding an exercise bicycle) and three mental stress tests (doing math problems in their heads, recalling a recent incident that had made them very angry, and giving a short speech to defend themselves against a hypothetical charge of shoplifting). Using sophisticated X-ray techniques, the doctors took pictures of the subjects’ hearts in action during these tests. For all the subjects, anger reduced the amount of blood that the heart pumped to body tissues more than the other tests.
Everyone gets angry. It’s what we do with our anger that matters. Once you become angry, you have three choices about what to do with it:
One is to feed the anger by running the perceived wrong over and over again in your mind.
Or you can find someone to blame and focus on how they should not have done what they did.
The more you blame, the more inflamed things get, and the more inflamed things get, the more you blame. Traffic is a great place to see this played out.
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