Search Results for: anger

Unlocking Repressed Anger: What To Do If You “Never Get Angry”

Hey, it’s Graham here, and I’m feeling cranky today so let’s talk about anger. Now, there are two mistakes you can make with anger. The first one is to suppress it, pretending you don’t feel angry and just push that emotion down. And the second one is to just spew your anger out so that you express it destructively. Now, today I want to talk about the first one of those, which is suppressing your anger, and why we do that and why it’s not a good idea and what you can do about it.

http://youtu.be/5nRQUWOPoRw

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How (Not) To Manage Anger: Lessons From My Parents

When we are young, we learn to manage our emotions through the interactions with our immediate caregivers, principally our mother and father. The way our parents manage their emotions leaves a dramatic imprint on our developing nervous system that can last long into adulthood. This is particularly true of strong emotions like anger.

Two common adult reactions to poor emotional management by our parents are to submit or to rebel. We either live the rest of our lives managing our emotions they way they taught us out of fear and submission, or doing the opposite out of anger and rebellion. Neither of these two reactions represent true freedom. A better approach is to make our own choice in each situation but this takes insight and practice, especially if we choose to do things differently from the default programming we got from our parents. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Express Anger Constructively

Hey, it’s Graham here, and today you’re going to learn about how to express anger constructively. So anger is an emotion that’s perfectly normal and natural thing for a human being to have, and like any emotion it can be expressed in a way that’s constructive for you and the people around you and it can also be expressed in a way that is destructive for you and the people around you, or it can be suppressed which is another destructive way of handling anger.

So let’s have a talk about how to express anger constructively. And the first obvious way to do this is verbally, to actually say that you’re angry. Now, if you don’t do this, you can end up repressing your anger and that can lead to a whole heap of problems in your life, in your relationships, your health can suffer. It’s just bad shit to start repressing your anger.

http://youtu.be/xU3N7ujUB-g

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By Graham Stoney, ago

3 Steps to Manage Anger and Other Emotions More Effectively

This is a guest post from Anger Management Coach Igomene Joseph.

Anger is one emotion that we have all felt at some point in our lives. However, the way we express and manage it can vary from person to person. For many around the world, anger is just a common emotion. Most have not felt it to an overwhelming amount in their lives.

For me, the story is different. Anger was a fierce emotion and it would consume me. I eventually realized that anger was not just an emotion in my case but a problem that needed to be resolved.

Why I Needed the Control?

Using FPS Can Help You Take Your Anger Less Seriously

When you let an emotion overwhelm or consume you, it can become a weakness. Emotions should be expressed but they say excess of everything is bad. Too many emotions make us vulnerable to the harsh world. But in case of anger, the situation is slightly different. Anger is not just something that affects you but the people around you.

Consider it as a metaphorical force of nature that leaves you wrecked as it leaves your body and then damages all other people in its way. It is ironic that subduing anger can also be a problem. In an attempt to save people, we often let the anger fester inside ourselves. And that is so much worse. The anger that festers rots us from the inside and erupts ferociously at some point. That explosion can cause lots of destruction in one’s life. (more…)

By Igomene Joseph, ago

How To Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

I’ve noticed a consistent pattern among myself and my coaching clients: we all have a history of not standing up for ourselves when other people behave in ways that we don’t feel good to us. Most of us had parents who weren’t willing or able to teach us how to deal with our emotions, to self-soothe our nervous system when we were in distress, or to stand up for ourselves when our emotional or physical boundaries were being violated. Often the person we most needed to stand up to was one or both of our parents themselves, and that rarely goes well when you’re a distressed child trying to stand up to an adult who is being unreasonable because their wounded inner child is running the show.

Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

All of this is a recipe for ever-increasing anger, resentment and frustration. We end up overcompensating in a desperate attempt to get our needs met. Internalise that toxic cocktail and it’s no wonder we end up anxious, depressed and lacking self-confidence.

Behavior patterns learned as a child tend to stick even if they never really worked well, and coping strategies learned as a child rarely work well in the adult world. If nobody shows us a better way, we tend to continue behaving in ways that increase our internal store of resentment and frustration long into adulthood with no way of releasing the emotional pressure cooker.

After a while we end up bitter and resentful towards a hostile world that just won’t seem to give us what we need or want.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Manage Anger Constructively

I grew up in a home where anger wasn’t handled well. Let me take you back there:

Do Other People Push Your Anger Button?

Do Other People Push Your Anger Button?

Now, don’t get me wrong. My mother lets her anger flow freely, but she rarely uses the actual words “I am angry”. Instead, her anger comes out as hurtful criticism, put-downs and emotional bullying.

My dad isn’t any better. He bottles his anger up so badly that he often seethes with resentment so loud that I can hear him muttering under his breath when I’m playing in the next room. It’s frightening.

All it takes is for mum to walk in and say, “What’s wrong with you, you stupid creature?” and, bang, next round of World War III is back on again.

What I learned from all this was the idea that anger was somehow a bad thing, that it was a bad emotion that I should never feel, because it always seemed to be expressed destructively around me.

As a result, I learned to push down my anger very hard, to suppress it. In fact, I pushed it down so hard that in the end I barely even felt it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Benefits Of The FPS Technique For Anger Management

This is a guest post from Anger Management Coach Igomene Joseph.

Anger as an emotion is neutral, it is neither bad nor good. It is a normal reaction of man to situations and circumstances of life and it may either be productive or counterproductive. It is productive when you use it to make some self-assertion and demonstrate how passionate you are about something. However, it becomes counterproductive when it regularly spirals out of control or flares up too often. Chronic fits of anger emotion may have negative impacts on one’s health, relationships and state of mind.

FPS is a Method of Communicating Feelings that helps Manage Anger Effectively

However, the fact is managing and transforming anger emotion into positive vibes is one of the easiest and most natural things you can ever do, but that is only if you apply a practical, workable technique to deal with it and that is where our heuristically developed technique, FPS (Feelings + Problem = Solutions), comes in handy.

FPS is not one of those scratch-at-the-surface, superficial and hence, ineffective techniques of managing anger, rather it is a down-to-the-root approach of managing and transforming the negative emotion of anger into a constructive emotion that could enhance your health, self-esteem, communication skills and emotional mastery. (more…)

By Igomene Joseph, ago

Using Music To Express Anger and Rage

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been studying Music Performance full-time at a local tertiary college, and the experience has been extremely healing for me. The interactions with teachers and other students have brought a lot of my unresolved adolescent insecurities to the surface: in some ways, going to college is like going back to high school. My fears about whether I would fit in brought up a lot of anxiety for me, coupled with a very strong desire to try hard to make other students like me. I often had to take a deep breath and remind myself to focus on what I was learning and just have fun participating instead.

“Full-time” at the college I’m attending is only 2.5 days per week; although I spend pretty much all the rest of the week doing homework of various forms: learning to play new instruments, practising songs for our performance night, writing my own songs and getting them recorded.

In the process I’ve found music an excellent way to express anger and rage. A lot of the songs I’ve been writing have a great deal of anger in them, inspired primarily by life circumstances and/or other people’s behaviour. Writing, performing, recording and releasing these songs has been extremely cathartic for me and the feedback from the other students has been very positive and accepting. Over half my fellow students are straight out of high school and also have a lot of anger and rage to express. Although I’m more than twice their age, they get where I’m coming from.

Finally, my inner teenager is beginning to feel accepted.

The Song To Play When You’re Having A Bad Day

After six months hard work, I’ve even released my first single: a song titled Everything Is Fucked that I wrote in a yin yoga class in North Bondi at 6:37pm on 17th February 2017 while in Frog pose for seven agonising minutes.

At the time, I had been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for nine years and after five months pushing myself through three excruciating yoga sessions a week, wasn’t getting the results that I had hoped for: I had totally failed to pick-up at a yoga studio full of gorgeous young women, I was rapidly going broke because my Life Coaching business had failed to take off (who wants a sick Life Coach?!?), both my elderly parents had been diagnosed with cancer, a sweet hot girl I met online and completely fell for had started going out with a musician who lived 12,000 km closer to her than me; and I was still chronically ill. When the dishwasher in my apartment appeared to have stopped working properly, that was the last straw for me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Do You Feel Guilty About Being Angry With Your Parents?

I grew up in a family where emotions weren’t expressed cleanly; especially challenging emotions like anger. Everyone feels angry from time to time, but growing up I got the sense that there was something wrong with this basic human emotion because nobody talked about it. My parents never seemed to say directly that they felt angry; but it was obvious when they were and their anger came out in ways that I found very frightening and destructive.

It's OK To Be Angry With Your Parents

It’s OK To Be Angry With Your Parents

Everyone around me seemed ashamed of their anger. Over time, I learned to feel ashamed of my anger too. I denied, suppressed and internalized it as though I was doing something righteous and noble. But the repressed rage built up inside me until eventually as an adult I developed overwhelming anxiety, panic attacks, depression and even a physical illness.

This forced me to wise up and realize that there was nothing noble about denying my anger. But with poor role models for expressing anger constructively in my family of origin and in society at large, who was I to turn to for help?

My answer came in the form of enlightened therapists who understood that anger is a perfectly normal emotion whose purpose is to motivate us when our needs aren’t getting met. A powerful energy that needs to be channeled and expressed constructively; not internalized, denied, suppressed or misdirected.

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By Graham Stoney, ago