Information sheet: Anger
Anger
Angry behaviour is on the increase
Research shows that city life has become six times noisier than it was twenty years ago. Life is immeasurably busier, faster and more stressful. In schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods, in the streets and on the roads, stresses multiply as warmth between people diminishes. Long working hours, fast deadlines, crushing workloads, harassed colleagues, few and ever-shorter breaks, exploitative employers, congested roads – all this sends many of us home frazzled and irate.
For most of us, relaxation from the turmoil involves an average of five hours TV-viewing per day. But we might ask ourselves, how relaxing is that? News coverage of the world's injustices can leave us feeling helplessly enraged. Tantalising commercial-break parades of desirable commo-dities can drive us into frustration if we're living on benefits or low incomes. Our failure to conform to the youth-and-beauty criterion of desirability imposed by the media can leave some of us fuming.
In our personal lives, those we are close to may discount us, walk all over us, cheat on us, steal from us, abuse us, push us away, freeze us out. We might display a "depresssive" reaction – becoming resigned and blaming ourselves, turning our rage inward for fear of the consequences of expressing it outwardly; or we may react "aggressively", unconsciously directing our anger away from the person who is causing us difficulties and then unleash it upon a safe substitute target; or we may bottle it up and discharge it later, when the accumulated pressure has become powerful enough to blow the lid off; or vent our feelings against the world-at-large, acting-out our fury, trying to get back at "the system". These "aggressive" reactions are, like the "depres-sive" reaction, alternatives to an expressive response.
Aggressive acting-out differs from expressed anger
Most of us have been conditioned to regard anger, like fear and sadness, as a "bad" feeling. But in reality there are no "good" or "bad" feelings: there are just feelings. A feeling is simply a natural response to an experience.
If I am habitually aggressive I might claim to be "in touch with my feelings" and believe I am "letting off steam" and spontaneously "expressing myself". But each outburst only brings temporary relief because it is not consciously connected to its cause. It is a reaction rather than a response. For example, road-raging on the way home, tyrannising my family, railing against "the system" and kicking the dog, perhaps amounts only to acting-out a feared desire to confront my boss about my workload and conditions of employment.
Aggressiveness is a learned behaviour
After the event I may be mystified by my eruptions; but if my fear of expressing anger directly is not explicable in terms of the present, then maybe it originated in the past. Perhaps, in my early years, those people who appeared big – parents, care-givers, school-teachers, etc. – made me angry, but they also made me fear the consequences of letting them see just how angry I was: I might have got a good hiding.
Over time, anger-holding processes can become firmly em-bedded in body and mind, especially when our needs have regularly not been met and our feelings have gone unexpressed.
Can counselling and therapy help with aggressive-ness?
In the medical model approach, aggressiveness is "treated" through "anger management" and/or the administration of tranquillisers. "Management", however, is just a polite term for suppression or control. Anger management and behaviour modification programmes seek to re-train the mental responses, but this approach neglects the underlying causes of anger in an individual's history. At StressAid we take a holistic view of a person that combines body and mind, past and present, and we aim to reduce anger through self-understanding and release.
Some aggressive people view counselling with suspicion, seeing it as a part of the very control-system they detest. However, it often happens that when their grievances are listened to without judgement they find they are getting things off their chest, identifying the real sources of their frustration and understanding how past experiences of unmet needs and unexpressed feelings have resulted in held anger and aggressive behaviour. At their own pace they come upon deeper, disallowed emotions such as sadness and fear and are encouraged to express and release them. In therapy, they begin to unravel the physiological patterns behind their aggressiveness, and as a result they may gain a sense of peacefulness. They may find they can then refuse what is not wanted and energetically make demands when needs are not met. They can become more honest in their relationships and show others where they stand.