Anger Management

Anger Management

Anger Management Education, founded in 1994, provided education and psychotherapy to individuals to help make sense of and manage anger in their everyday lives (Anger Management 1). Anger remains a healthy emotion when expressed appropriately, although devastating effects may still exist. Anger lies at the root of many personal and social problems, such as child abuse, domestic and community violence, physical and verbal abuse. Anger also affects our physical health, by contributing to headaches, migraines, severe gastrointestinal symptoms, hypertension, and coronary artery disease. Many of us do not have the knowledge or abilities required to express our anger as a healthy emotion. As a result, some of us store and suppress our anger, while others may express it, but in negative and unhealthy ways.

Doctors knew for a long time that adults who dealt with anger poorly, stand a higher chance to develop heart disease and high blood pressure problems (Leopold 2). About 20 percent of us express angry personalities, 20 percent fairly easygoing, and the remaining 60 percent of the population fall somewhere in the middle (Foltz-Gray 132). Harvard researchers found that those with higher levels of anger stood at an increased risk of heart attack (133). In a study published in Health Psychology in 1999, heart-attack patients in Canada who received anger management training made significant reduction in blood pressure levels and needed less follow up care compared with the control group (134). According to Jerry Deftenbacher, “some people really are more ‘hotheaded’ than other’s are, they get angry more easily and more intensely than the average person does” (Controlling Anger 2). Research also found that family background tends to play an important role. Typically, easily angered people come from disruptive and chaotic families, not skilled in emotional communications (2). Psychologists found that “letting it rip” with anger actually escalates frustration and aggression and does nothing to help you resolve the situation (2). Anger is often described as “an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation to intense fury and rage” (1).

These days we’re taught to express anxiety, depression, or other emotions but not to express actual anger (Controlling Anger 2). Newborn children showing signs of irritability and touchiness clearly exhibit angry emotions. The child’s genetic makeup, theoretically, contributes to these characteristics (2). Pain, fatigue, poor sleep, emotional stress, alcohol and drug use, and mood disorders, all sociacultural problems, lower your threshold for angry feelings and behavior (Scheingold 1). Anger can destroy relationships too. When we live in close contact with someone, our personalities, priorities, interests, and ways of doing things tend to clash (Anger Management Techniques 1). Facial expressions, tone of voice, body postures and gestures not only communicate information about the emotion someone experiences, they also influence others behaviors and can make that person even more frustrated and upset (Bernstein 377). Angry people tend to distrust other people’s motives. Sometimes our anger, highly appropriate and protective, helps us to assert boundaries with others. At other times our anger, out of proportion to the event or experience, triggers an outburst of negative emotions (Saltarelli 1).

Healthy and unhealthy ways exist to express your angry feelings; anger