There are many people that suffer from anger management issues. Most of the time we are thinking of the person that acts with aggression and rage as the only person that suufers from anger management issues, but that is not the case.
The family of such an individual suufers from this just as much as the person themselves does. The reason being is because generally when a person with anger management issues gets angry or becomes enraged they direct that energy and force towards the very people that they love. Why is this so?
There are several reasons why this is the case and we will try to enlighten you about some of them. The first one is based on the fact that a person that has these emotions engulfed within them feels the necessity to show their love in a manner that makes them feel better about themselves. It is hard to show love for yourself when you are the one that needs to be loved. Therefore, showing love to others is almost out of the question.
People are out of control because they have low self-esteem, suggests Marilyn J. Sorensen, a psychologist in Portland, Ore., who wrote Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem. High taxes, lying politicians, traffic jams and exhausting schedules all are culprits, she says. “The demands are endless and people have no time to themselves or quality time with their families.” Some people feel powerless, she continues. “Many work all their lives and have little to show for it.” Those with no money to invest don’t benefit from the booming stock market; indeed, they “feel even more like they have missed out; they feel further behind and know they can never catch up.”
The Florida academic distinguishes between feeling anger and expressing anger. As bad as expressing anger is proving to be for the society at large, Speilberger’s studies show anger turned inward, which leads to depression, has deeply destructive physical consequences leading to elevated blood pressure and hypertension, heart attack and stroke.
If keeping your cool is so good for you, why do people lose it? Because, for one thing, “the promise of service never equals reality,” notes C. Leslie Charles, who recently wrote, Why Is Everyone so Cranky? and has made it a mission to stamp out anger with her “cranky buster” buttons and T-shirts. “We are overwhelmed, overworked, overscheduled and overspent,” she declares. “We are a nation living on the edge.”
“It’s what we do with our anger or how we express it that matters” Charles says. “There is a healthy way to express anger, such as Candy Lightner did when her daughter was killed by a drunk driver. She started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We should have a road-rage advocate group.” Instead, people dwell on what they don’t have, Charles says. Our “expectation machine” with its impossible-to-deliver promises insists that life is like sports: “There are winners and losers, and if you are not a winner guess what you are?”
Our crankiness, she writes, is the “natural by-product of our social compulsion to drive the right car, live in the right home in the right area with all the right furnishings, have the right job, send our kids to the right day care or school, wear the right clothes and accessories, belong to the right clubs and go to the right vacation spots.” Believing that having the best means we are the best leads to the anxiety that results from financial instability. “Many of us are so busy trying to create the right life that we’ve turned our existence into a nightmare of debt”
The Violence Institute uses Adlerian psychology, which presumes that people “overcompensate” for feelings of inferiority and inadequacy in childhood. “Not only do we feel inferior and inadequate to cope in childhood, but it turns out we blame ourselves. That will tie you up in knots,” says Messer, “and it will give us preexisting anger in our bloodstream so that all it will take is 2 ounces to spill us over.” The only people to escape this, he notes, “are American citizens with perfect parents.”
The young shooters, like everyone else, have been suppressing anger for years, says Messer. “When they cannot take the pressure any more, all of a sudden, 19 and behold, they turn it outward. What did you think they would do?”
Recent studies show it may not only be the angry child we need to be concerned about, but also coworkers. Take a look at the people in nearby cubicles and remember that while homicides committed during robberies declined during the nineties, killings by coworkers rose dramatically.
Donald Gibson, a professor at the Yale University School of Management, says the recent spate of workplace violence is not surprising. Coauthor of The Experience of Anger at Work: Lessons From the Chronically Angry, Gibson notes that nearly 25 percent of respondents to a 1996 Gallup telephone survey of 1,000 adults indicated that they were “generally at least somewhat angry at work.” Much of that discontent is coming from the East Coast, where 12 percent of the respondents called themselves quite angry, compared with 6 percent in the Midwest, 4 percent in the South and 3 percent in the West.
These are just a few of the problems that are noted in our society as we continue to struggle with anger management .
