Every human is capable of anger, in which you feel and/or express frustration or disappointment for something that you expected to happen differently. Your team loses and you thought you could win. You drop the glass and don't have time to clean up the mess. There is no moral value to the observation that you are capable of anger, it's neither good nor bad.  

What happens inside of each of us after we experience anger is where anger becomes charged with either a positive or a negative moral value.

There are two kinds of anger based upon the kind of internal response we have to it:

Flexible anger is the result when we give our anger a channel in which it can flow freely and resolve back into some other form. This kind of anger motivates and energizes us to do better and feels mostly positive. It feels like electricity sometimes because it can cause us to narrow our focus in healthy ways when we know how to access it at the right time. It doesn't overwhelm us when we are familiar with it, aren't scared of it, and know how it likes to be used.

Burdened anger is what some people might refer to as problem anger and is viewed as bad 99.9% of the time. Burdened anger is the same physiologically as flexible anger in terms of physical arousal or feelings but it is recognized mostly by its wake of damage: to relationships, opportunities, objects, and people.

Burdened anger occurs when the spontaneous surge of anger or frustration triggers an internal drop in self-value. Your team loses, you feel defeated, you believe you're defeated, then you act defeated. Then the cycle repeats and intensifies each time. The burden is the middle part of the cycle, the belief, which is usually about feeling doomed, hopeless, or inadequate. The belief of worthlessness acts to pull toward it all of the energy generated by the frustration in an inward avalanche. Like an electrical short-circuit, the energy has no place to go inside the person (unless it were to literally destroy or harm him/herself), so most people naturally self-protect and explode the energy outward toward anyone or anything nearby.

 The Limits of Anger Management Approaches 

According to the American Psychological Association, anger management teaches techniques to manage the emotional feelings and physiological arousal of anger. This does work and is useful to the extent that some portion of your anger is flexible and does not trigger a critical mass of internal feelings of worthlessness or self-devaluing. If you feel unlovable when your spouse forgets something important to you, inadequate when you make the wrong turn on the highway, or devalued when your co-worker succeeds, then trying to manage your physiological arousal will feel like trying to hold back a fire hydrant with a wine-bottle cork.  

Transforming, Not Just Managing, Anger

  "If we become angry at our anger, we will have two angers at the same time."
               -Thich Nhact Hahn 

Here are some of the areas that deal with anger that are particularly responsive to the Internal Family Systems Model and my approach to understanding anger:

If you want to stop anger from controlling your life I can help you do that. It is possible to do this in a way that respects you, goes at the best pace for you, and is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Call or email me today and we can discuss if your situation is a good fit with my approach.