Why do people experience Anger so often? Where does it come from?
Anger is a natural emotion and people can be angry about anything or any activity.
People can get angry for issues that directly impact them, for example, minor issues like seeing a new scratch on their parked car, buses/trains getting late on a busy day, children dropping and breaking a glass or a plate while eating, or for major issues like government policies around income tax, school education or medical facilities.
Interestingly, people also get angry at things that do not affect them directly or immediately. For example, at the office annual meeting, when company leadership rewards a particular team, someone else gets angry. In a family get-together, when someone is highly praised, another person starts feeling the anger building up. When someone criticizes the policies of government on social media, often a storm builds up and there are scathing attacks between people who do not even know each other.
To understand the reason for such anger responses, let us understand what anger really is.
Anger is an involuntary response to unmet expectations. Since it is involuntary, we do not control the response.
Thus, in previous examples, people expect trains and buses to go as scheduled. When this does not happen, especially when they are running late, people get angry. Parents get angry when children do not meet their expectations of being careful while eating. Government increasing taxes when people are actually expecting tax relief, results in unmet expectations and therefore anger.
On similar lines, in office meeting the person feeling angry may be expecting an award, but another team gets it. In family get-together, the angry person may possibly be expecting that other person to be criticized or ignored, but that other person receives praise instead.
Knowing the reasons and sources of Anger, what can we do to overcome it or minimize it in our lives?
Before we discuss ways to overcome anger in our own life, it is important to understand our anger better. Whenever we are angry, we must consciously make an effort to observe three things about our anger:
· Trigger: Triggers are activities that instantly cause the anger to show up inside us. Some common triggers could be acts of injustice, disrespect or insult, abusive language or behaviour, labelling or shaming someone, physical threats, lying, or violation of our personal space.
· Intensity: The strength of our anger in response to a specific type of trigger.
· Duration: The time that our anger lasts once triggered.
On close observation, we may often find that the intensity and duration of anger is disproportionately high compared to the actual trigger. This means that our anger is not in response to that trigger alone.
It is actually in response to the emotional baggage that we carry with us all the time. The trigger only works as a matchstick to create an explosion. The actual bomb (emotional baggage) already exists inside us.
The emotional baggage results from one or more strong emotional anchors created in the unconscious mind due to some specific event or series of events in the past. As life progresses, those emotional anchors continue adding unreleased emotions to them.
Because of this, we experience constantly increasing intensity and duration of anger, in response to the same triggers. This isn’t just exhausting us, but may also sometimes land us into embarrassing situations due to the disproportionate anger response to triggers. If uncontrolled, even medical interventions may be needed sometimes.
So what is the way to overcome Anger?
Meditation, deep breathing, prayers, chanting and life coaching.
Benefits of Meditation, deep breathing and prayers are well known.
Let me explain about Life Coaching. In Life coaching, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Timeline Coaching and Hypnosis have many scientific techniques that take us to our past memories and release those anchors and associated strong emotions, thereby helping us in moving ahead of that old anger-filled life.
Constantly observing our anger responses and taking steps to remove the emotional anchors is the key.
