Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could feel perfectly happy every moment of your life? But there’s a word for animals that cannot feel anger, fear, and pain—extinct.
Emotions have survival value. They may not make logical sense, but they’re an unavoidable part of life, and they’re part of being human.
When someone has problems with anger, it’s often because they’re putting either too much or too little emphasis on it. Putting too much emphasis on anger compounds it. Too much emphasis strengthens anger and makes it worse. But putting too little emphasis on anger often leads to suppression not just of anger, but of other emotions as well. This can end in numbness, since cutting off the “bad” emotions also means not being able to feel the “good” ones. You lose touch with an important part of yourself. And in the worst-case scenario, your anger builds up to the point where it becomes explosive and may even be directed at someone who has nothing at all to do with why you’re angry.
[For more of this story, written by Aaron Karmin, go to http://blogs.psychcentral.com/...-of-managing-anger//]
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