“The flocks fear the wolf, the crops the storm and the trees the wind.”
~Virgil
There are only two basic emotions – fear and love. All other emotions are degrees of these two. Let’s look at anger as an emotion that has its roots in fear.
Anger is an emotion that people express when they are: upset, frustrated, uncertain, anxious, hurt by another person or life in general or often just confused. Many people when expressing anger are really covering the deeper emotion of fear. In a relationship, when a person is angry, we have a choice of relating to their expressed emotion of anger or we can look behind the anger and attempt to discover what the person is afraid of that is being expressed as angry behavior. Most people find it difficult to see past the anger because it is so charged with negative words, feelings, emotions or actions.
Another way to look at anger is to see either its destructive quality in relationships and life or see its positives. Let’s take a brief look at both.
Anger can be an excellent way to eliminate stress, get hidden agendas out in the open, vent feelings of discouragement, pain, grief or just old-fashioned frustration. Suppressed negative feelings or anger can have both short and long term negative effects on a person’s emotional, as well as physical health. Most stress is related to withholding a variety of negative emotions. People often believe that they will avoid hurting the other person or avoid conflict by keeping these negative feelings beneath the surface. Over the long haul however, they can contribute to any number of emotional or physical ailments. Women are better at expressing anger than men. Women live, on the average, 10 years longer than men. I wonder if there is a relationship between these two issues?
This unexpressed anger can be the result of a variety of personal emotional traits: the need for approval, the need for love, insecurity, a fear of rejection, guilt, resentment – to mention just a few. There is a flip side to this issue, however, that we must discuss, and that is the impact of angry words spoken while in this fear state of mind.
Often people will say things that sting the other person when they were only trying to release these pent-up feelings. They say things that are really a reflection of their own internal unresolved issues rather than anger directed at the other person. Generally, most men are afraid of women’s anger and will do whatever necessary to protect themselves from it. This is unfortunate because angry women are not always angry at the man – but at some internal frustration. The same holds true for men.
The real culprit here is not the cause or source of the anger, but in its delivery. One other aspect of anger, or any emotion that we need to get into the open, is that when we are angry we are actually giving power over our own emotions to someone or something else, often to someone we don’t even like.
In His service, Tim