Do you ever stop and wonder why you sometimes get angry without logical reasons? When given the chance to cool down, do you sometimes feel remorseful and think that you may have overreacted? What triggers such emotion from you?
You may feel that it’s a natural human reaction and you do not need to know, but your spontaneous outbursts of anger or your “short fuse” clouds your judgement, makes you unhappy and depressed, and leads to series of emotional and mental health problems. With that said, awareness of why you have reacted angrily towards a co-worker, wife, or fellow classmate can lead to self-healing and eventually inner peace.
Anger stems from unexpressed emotion within. These undeclared feelings could be pride, guilt, injustice, embarrassment, or insecurity. And for whatever reason, expressing these undeclared feelings is more difficult than expressing anger. These emotions may be triggered by the ff:
Anger could be triggered by past traumatic incident. Something traumatic may have happened to you in the past to which the memory has been forever tattooed inside your mind. You may have forgiven the person who has wronged you but the memory does not fade. You may suddenly find yourself flaring up over some unsuspecting person just because he or she did something that may have prompted you to recall that traumatic incident even if that something was truly just an innocent joke or a grin. Your anger towards a certain action or words are associated with the old memories.
Anger could come from your idea of perfection. Your idea of perfection starts from childhood. Your parents may have demanded some things to go according to their wishes that it had stopped you from developing a healthy relationship with them, with yourself, and with other people. You may have developed the notion that to be accepted, your performance must absolutely be perfect. You could have easily brought it over to adulthood and demanded people, situations, and things to be just as perfect according to what you think is absolute perfection. And when it’s not, you alarm sets off and you are unable to go with the flow.
Anger could be a result of a belief or values. Your values could make you become critical and angry towards someone even if that someone is not doing anything. For example, having a belief that husbands should be the breadwinner of the family, you would expect your husband to bring in the money while you take care of the kids. However, if you are in a situation where your husband is unemployed and you always come home tired from work and still need to cook family dinner, this can easily lead to arguments solely because of your values.
Anger can be due to Attention Deficit Disorder. Most people with ADD – children and adults – have times of uncontrollable explosion of anger because they feel more deeply compared to others. They could have built up their defense mechanism wall against little things possibly due to negative feedback when they were young. Managing emotions is not their forte. People with ADD are more prone to anger but a person without it can react just as strongly if he or she had been deeply hurt during his or her early years.
Anger is difficult to control especially if you have already snapped. There seems to be no turning back. This is why awareness is the key to managing your emotions. If you know what sets you off, you can easily change your values, which thereby can change the way you react to things should it happen again. If you will allow yourself to go deeper and surface the unconscious beliefs, you will be able to change your behaviour.
