Managing Anger in Relationships

Are you an angry person? Do you feel that your anger and mood swings are destroying your relationship with your partner? Is your anger controlling you so much that it’s also destroying your happy moments?  Anger can be a destructive emotion that can rear its head anytime. Anger can make you lose your mind, your temper, respect, relationships and also a whole lot of other things including your well-being and your self. In extreme cases, it can even make you lose your freedom and in the worst-case scenario, your life.

Anger is one of the most difficult emotions to come to terms with. Everyone gets angry sometimes as it’s a natural feeling. It’s important to handle anger and manage it so that your relationships are healthy and lead to a better and happier life. Most importantly, we mustn’t allow anger to control us.

Expressing Anger

Mental health experts advise us that we should express our anger immediately rather than keeping it inside of ourselves. They believe that sounding out our anger will help relieve built up emotions. It’s the pressure cooker effect, you have to let out steam or the pressure will build up. But what if you turn off the flame to begin with?

Latest research, however,  has gone a few steps further to reveal that expressing anger can be very harmful, making you prone to hypertension, strokes and even heart attacks. In fact, most often anger stems from an attitude or belief, which might be insecurity or condemnation. Strongly expressing our anger only serves to strengthen the feeling and make the situation worse.

Intimidation might be just one of the milder outcomes when one resorts to expressing anger. It is harder to escape the anger cycle. The momentary relief gained by expressing oneself is short-term and is followed by remorse, then by resentment, irritation and from there, one is just a step away from anger. Physical or verbal abuse follows. Fear and hostility or fury might build up in the person at the receiving end who could be suppressing anger toward you.

Suppressing Anger

Reacting to anger by either suppressing anger or repressing anger has its own dangers.

Continuous suppression of anger leads to resentment. Resentment is like poison. Suppressing anger can also take a severe toll on emotional, mental and physical health, just like repression, which refers to the act of immediately putting the event out of the mind.

People who generally suppress anger tend to find release and relief through unhealthy methods that could eventually lead to destructive habits like smoking, alcohol or drugs. Some others seek recourse through junk food or become couch potatoes. These superficial and unhealthy remedies come with dangerous side effects. They might help you forget but they don’t make the problems go away.

Another side effect of suppressing anger would be that it would make itself felt in other negative behaviors like cynicism, backbiting, revenge, faultfinding, etc. or detrimental conditions like depression, self-hatred or persecution complex.

Research has conclusively proved that suppressing anger can cause feelings of tiredness, can lower immunity levels and bring on colds, headaches, ulcers, backaches, bowel troubles, skin problems and also lead to other major health problems like tumors, cancer or heart attacks.

Managing Anger

Managing anger is about adopting techniques that will help you handle yourself better and control your reactions by reducing the escalation of emotional feelings and also the physiological arousal that anger causes.

It’s important to remember that only you have the power to change yourself for the better and that you can’t change others. You have to stand up and take responsibility for yourself and your actions.

Seek Help:

Anger starts first with having angry thoughts while depression comes from anger that has been suppressed inside of you. If you have trouble resolving issues, a therapist could help. A psychologist could provide you with techniques that work for you that can transform your thinking. Dealing with anger also involves giving people the chance  to put their side of the story, so they not only feel valued but get to vent their anger in a healthy way.