Anger
Anger is, used properly – a positive force with great survival value. With anger you create space, mark territory and keep distance. When you feel angry, the body prepares for defense by secreting the energizing hormones adrenaline and norepinephrine. Anger is thus a vital emotion that can save your life if you are exposed to a dangerous situation.
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An unexpressed feeling creates illness
You have probably heard that there is a connection between anger and high blood pressure. When anger is pushed away and swallowed, it accumulates in the body and creates disease. It can be compared to a pressure cooker. The longer you leave the lid on, the higher the pressure inside. This is not specific to just anger. All feelings need to be felt and expressed. Otherwise, they will give different symptoms when neglected. For example, anger does not only cause high blood pressure. Research shows that constant anger increases the risk of dying from cardiac arrest, that it weakens your immune system and can lead to depression.
Valuing emotions as positive and negative
Many people get scared when a person is really angry. It is probably about a fear that the anger will become uncontrolled and that the person who is angry will do something that he or she will later regret. It is also one of the reasons why many hold back their anger. Because what happens when you really let out everything you feel? Can you control the boiling rage inside you?
Dealing with anger
There are three main destructive ways of dealing with one's anger. The first thing I described above is when you put the lid on. It makes you extremely tired in the long run. The second is when, on the contrary, you scold everything and everyone and always let your anger out unhindered. It damages both you and your surroundings. The third way is called passive aggressiveness and involves holding back your response and becoming dismissive while denying that you are angry. Nor does it benefit your relationships.
Getting to know your anger, befriending it, and learning to express and direct it in the right way is incredibly liberating. It allows all parts of you to have a place and the anger can become the positive energy it originally was. It can fulfill its purpose and it feels incredibly liberating and empowering to be angry from time to time.
To always be angry
Are you often angry? There is probably another emotion hidden behind the anger. Sadness, shame, loneliness, frustration, disappointment or humiliation. Maybe you're angry because you don't stand up for yourself. It could also be that you are carrying around anger from your childhood or earlier in life that you have not been allowed to express or deal with. As long as you have not dealt with it, it is there inside you and every time you are exposed to a similar situation, the old memory is triggered, memories that you may not even remember. But the body remembers, and the same feeling occurs again and again.
Get to know yourself
By going back to your earlier years and looking inward, you can understand why you react the way you do in different situations and what feelings are your true ones. When you understand why you react the way you do, the feelings don't become as unpleasant. It will be easier for you to act in a constructive way. Being angry is, as I said, essential to life. Anger expressed in the right way makes you strong and takes you forward, it strengthens your self-esteem.
Anger expressed in the wrong way hurts those around you and even yourself because you become isolated and afraid of hurting others. Maybe you therefore try to avoid being angry, which only leads to the anger bubbling out in the wrong places instead. You cannot harbor any amount of anger. In addition, you will walk around and be angry most of the time, it will be a damn existence.
The volatility of emotions
Emotions usually referred to as fugitives. An emotion that is fully acknowledged and expressed is transitory, it lasts a maximum of 90 seconds before being replaced by another. A feeling that is, on the contrary, locked up and swallowed down will torment you in various ways until you deal with it, acknowledge it and give it space and expression.
Need
A feeling can always be linked to a need. What do you need when you are angry? Maybe it's the absence of feeling respected? Then you need respect. When you understand yourself and what it is you really feel, you can also connect your feelings to needs. Needs cannot be met without you becoming aware that they are there. As long as you don't meet their needs, they will signal using different emotions. It becomes a catch 22. In this way, a feeling is always a good feeling because it tells you something.
Act instead of react
When you understand why you react the way you do, you can more easily act constructively on the feeling. The difference between reacting and acting is that a reaction is an unconscious spontaneous response to stimuli while an action is a conscious deliberate decision about how best to deal with what comes up. The difference in what it results in is usually that a reaction is neither thoughtful nor constructive, while an action is both.
On our courses in self-awareness and inner leadership gives you the opportunity to explore your full range of emotions. Under safe conditions, you can open the lid and let out what you have closed inside and understand your baggage. You gain tools to manage and express your emotions so that you can be more true to yourself and others.