Once you have learned to identify anger and understand its meaning, you can then learn to distinguish right and wrong ways of managing it. Although you may not always like the presence of your anger, you can make choices about how you handle it.
At this point, most people will respond to their anger by attempting to change the environment (for example, convincing others of their errors, moving to a different part of the house, or plunging into a project to let off some steam). This is not always wrong, but it can be risky because it does not guarantee anger relief. Instead, it can lead to increased friction in personal relationships, which increases the angry person's emotional confusion. This takes him or her back to the beginning of the cycle of creating an ongoing tendency toward painful intrusions.
By choosing to manage your anger, though, you can break this endless cycle. Sometimes you may, indeed, determine that changing your environment will be helpful. But other times you may decide that emotional stability will have to come from internally sifting through your emotional options.
Five Ways to Handle Anger
- Suppressing Anger
- Open Aggression
- Passive Aggression
- Assertive Anger
- Dropping Anger
Continue to step 3:
Step 3. Let go of excessive dependencies so your anger management is inwardly directed rather than externally determined.
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