Anger, like all human emotions, is natural and has a purpose and place in life.\u00a0 An outburst of anger is the quickest way of communicating to your loved ones that you have been hurt.\u00a0 There is an old joke that says the best way to remember your wife’s birthday is to forget it once \u2013 her anger will effectively communicate that she has been hurt by your thoughtlessness.<\/p>\n
In today’s society though, many people have developed a very unhealthy lifestyle of anger \u2013 sometimes using it as a primary means of communicating. The reason for this is that we do not feel the sting of emotional pain as long as we are holding onto our anger.<\/p>\n
Anger is the morphine of emotions.<\/em><\/p>\n In our society, we have not been raised to handle anger in a healthy way and we often do not fully understand the source of our anger.<\/p>\n Anger is an outgrowth of frustration and, besides numbing our pain, serves as a means to gain control of a situation \u2013 often by attempting to bully those around us.\u00a0 Anger’s sister emotion is depression which is what we experience when we no longer have any hope of regaining control of our circumstances.<\/p>\n Allowing ourselves to unleash our anger is destructive to our relationships.\u00a0 Usually the targets of our anger are the few people in the world that actually know us well and love us the most: our husbands and wives, our children, our parents.\u00a0 These are the victims of our anger.<\/p>\n Allowing ourselves to suppress the anger is not healthy either.\u00a0 Suppressed anger can lead to high blood pressure, hypertension, and in the end, is rarely effective in improving our relationships and circumstances.<\/p>\n The first step in letting go of anger is to fully understand the root cause of the frustration.<\/em><\/p>\n We get frustrated when people or circumstances are not in line with our expectations. Therefore, it is imperative for us to understand what our expectations in life are and why we have them.\u00a0 Once we have done this, we need to educate ourselves to determine if these expectations are reasonable or if they are founded on an artificial and idealistic view of how we think the world should<\/em> be.<\/p>\n For example, if your four-year-old child has spilled fruit juice on your white carpet after you told them to be careful you might get angry.\u00a0 But was it reasonable to expect a four year old to obey your admonition?\u00a0 Of course not!\u00a0 That little bit of frontal lobe in their brain that controls their executive system is not really formed enough to be depended upon, their motor skills are undeveloped, a let’s face it, a four year old has the attention span of a gnat.\u00a0 A reasonable parent should expect the child to forget the warning the moment the child spots a toy in the room and a reasonable parent should expect to have to buy a new carpet once their children are grown.<\/p>\n Often, the person that we seem to have the most difficulty with in terms of false expectations is our spouse.\u00a0 Most of us have the ridiculous notion that our own experiences growing up can serve as a model and yardstick for our spouse.\u00a0 We fail to understand that the environment that they were forged in was very different then that in which we were forged.<\/p>\n You may have grown up in a home with a strong working mom who ran the whole show.\u00a0 Your spouse may have grown up in a traditional home where the father served as the family leader.\u00a0 Without educating yourselves, then in this situation it is likely that the husband will be continually frustrated with his wife’s lack of trust and support, and the wife will be continually frustrated by her husband’s lack of respect.<\/p>\n It is sad when two people like this that are good people who actually love each other can be doomed to a life of continued anger, depression, or both \u2013 all because of erroneous expectations of life.<\/p>\n There are a couple of keys to re-aligning your expectations with reality.\u00a0 These are:<\/p>\n Spent time with well-grounded people in similar family circumstances.<\/em><\/p>\n This can be a men’s or women’s small group in church or a group of ladies who get together at play dates with their kids.\u00a0 As you listen to the diversity of points of view, you can begin to learn that your own way of looking at the world isn’t as universal as you may have thought.\u00a0 It is vitally important to choose your small group of friends properly \u2013 if they do not seem to have a loving and caring spirit, then choose a different group.<\/p>\n