Anger is one of the most universal of human emotions, and perhaps one of the least welcome. Most of us as children learned that anger was a bad emotion and even as adults we often feel that anger is something negative. As a result many of us try not o express anger when we feel it, and our society also put strict limits on how angry we are allowed to be. Unfortunately, pent-up anger is toxic to our bodies, our relationships and our joy in living. Unexpressed anger has been associated with high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels that can predict potential heart attacks. Other studies have suggested that death rates from all causes are three times higher in those classed as having "long-term suppressed anger."
The reason most of us fail to express anger, why we keep it stored inside us can usually be found in childhood. I grew up in a home where anger wasn't "acceptable behavior." Many of us learned that when Mom or Dad got angry we got beaten, rejected, ridiculed or sent away. We learned that when Mom or Dad gets angry, somebody gets hurt. Some of us learned that our anger was unacceptable. When we got angry the immediate reaction was getting hit. Before we were five we learned that anger equals pain and we tried as hard as we could to avoid pain. If Dad's angry say you're sorry and try to do something to make him feel better. If you get angry you'd better hide it - count to ten before you speak, think before you open your mouth. When we got angry we got shamed and so we learned to shame ourselves first, before we got angry enough that someone would notice. Stuffing our anger became second nature, a life-saving defense that was totally automatic so you couldn't make a mistake.
So what's the answer to the problem? Am I saying that we need to express our anger more? With all the violence in our society that doesn't sound right. What we need to do first is to distinguish the feeling - anger- from our response to it - which can be aggression, violence, sarcasm, put -downs, behaviors designed to hurt and control. There is nothing wrong with being angry, It is probably an unavoidable result of living in a society. We become angry when someone invades our space, ignores our boundaries. We become angry when we feel we won't get what we need, when reality doesn't meet our expectations. Surprisingly, anger is not the first emotion in most of those situations. Anger is secondary, the primary emotion is fear. Fear that I will be hurt or that my needs won't be met. Anger is then the mechanism we use to try and control the situation. We use it because we learned at an early age that it worked. If Mom or Dad wanted us to do something they got angry, we got scared and we did what they wanted. We hope as adults that the same process will work for us. Unfortunately it often doesn't. Some of us learn to accept this and find other ways to meet our needs. Some of us don't and our anger escalates into aggression and violence. Others become "passive aggressive" - instead of our anger exploding it sneaks out to do it's dirty work. We find ways to hurt the person who has wronged us but in ways that can't be traced back to us. We get our end result but we can pretend to be innocent. Sometimes our injunctions against anger are so strong that we simply cannot let it out in any form. The anger gets turned around and directed at self. The ultimate form of self-directed anger is suicide.