Anger is an emotion that everyone can relate to, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who has never experienced it. Being that anger is in such bountiful supply, we tend, for some reason, to find more acceptable it rather than other emotions. Watch someone respond when they feel they have been wronged while driving, the conductor of a symphony like hand waving that follows is nothing unusual for us to see. On the other hand, if we witness someone crying in public out of sadness we generally make any attempt to avoid them as if they had the plague, what plague I am not certain but a plague of sorts indeed. Strangely, sad people are not the ones destroying property, screaming profanity, belittling others, cutting people off in traffic, or tossing people out windows.
Given how scary and destructive anger can be, there must be some sort of anger disorder or hulk syndrome or something. Alas, there is not. Excessive anger is named specifically in a number of mental health conditions but there is no specific “Anger Disorder.” Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder are just three of a number of conditions that have some form of anger involved (if you are about to google those to self diagnose yourself or someone else, stop, seriously, don’t do that). A trained mental health professional can be of assistance in finding out if a mental health condition is at the source of excessive anger. Besides being able to help explain why anger is happening, they are also pretty keen at helping make it less of a problem.
Anger just happens to be one of my favorite emotions, not that I love being angry, but I very much enjoy helping people become less angry! Over the next couple weeks I am going to spend some time talking about anger, when it is a problem, and discuss some helpful strategies to go about addressing it so that it is less of a problem. As always, if you or someone you know are being seriously impacted by someone’s anger, be sure to try and refer them to a professional. And if you are angry and reading this, that is pretty awesome that you have been able to sit here for about 5 minutes and read this! Good job managing your anger 🙂
Ronald Bristow is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt, and all around not so angry guy.