.png)
ANGER
What is Anger?
“According to the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, Anger is a strong feeling of displeasure, dissatisfaction, or annoyance, generally combined with antagonism or hostility towards a particular cause or object; the state of experiencing such feelings; wrath, rage, fury.” (“anger”)
Anger is a complex emotion with many underlying emotions.
This is what I call an emotional wheel or a ‘mental prison of emotions.’ The topic of this paper is anger, but we will be going over 5 underlying emotions and 1 overlapping emotion to better understand why we experience anger.
We all have some idea of what anger is, our hands start to sweat, we feel a surge of hot energy in our chest, this hot energy can even be felt in the spine. Some people are unable to control their anger, going so far as to blacking out for part of the situation they are experiencing.
When this happens, the individual normally feels a large amount of anxiety. The anxiety is pushing so hard on their emotional energy field the body and mind lose all control and is forced to react in a fight or flight mode. But what caused the anxiety in the first place? Fear is what causes anxiety, normally it is an emotion pushed so far down that the individual is unaware of the fear, which turns into anxiety, which then manifests itself into anger.
But what causes us to be fearful? What could be the underlying emotion to cause someone to be so scared that they feel such a huge surge of anxiety it bursts out of them as pure rage?
The lowest type of vibrational energy one can experience is shame, guilt, and sadness. Most times when we have these emotions programed into us at a young age, the conscious mind becomes so used to them being there it forgets they even exist. Eventually burying itself into the person's subconscious mind and even the physical body. The circumstances that caused these emotions in us in the first place are normally pretty horrific, so much that we don’t want to believe the truth that lies just behind our mental view. When we don’t want to see the truth, we experience fear, when we experience fear it creates anxiety, and after so long of experiencing anxiety, it turns into anger/pure rage.
If these emotions are left untreated and unhealed, then an individual will normally create an ego around these emotions. Pride will start to grow and try to cover up the angry pain that has manifested in the individual. This is where one will normally find cockiness, pure crudeness, and a person that... well, to be frank; Nobody wants to be around.
I used to be the person I am describing above. I had gone through a life situation that forced me to push all these emotions down so deep I was unaware that they even existed as emotions. I walked around every day so confused as to why people treated me the way they did. I sat for hours with myself so distraught at the disconnect I was experiencing that eventually my body and mind started to fail me. I got sick and ended up almost dying if I had allowed the emotions to continue to take me over for even another month.
Then a very odd life experience happened, I started to take care of myself in a different way. I had a life situation that forced my thinking from an outward point of view to be instantly switched to an inward point of view. Realizing the pride I was experiencing was due to my anger, the hurt I was experiencing and refusing to deal with was being feared to the point it caused me crippling anxiety; all the confusion finally made sense.
The anger that everyone else was perceiving was merely pain spilling out of my body in a very negative way. Once I finally realized this concept, I started to thank my anger for protecting me. I thanked the negative emotions for showing me where I had been hurt, where my boundaries had been crossed, and where I wasn’t disrespecting myself.
Anger is not always hate, anger is not always a negative thing to experience. Although anger can cause pain, sometimes anger can cause awareness and peace.
Awareness of Anger is a personal self-conceptualization journey one may go through that can be painful starting out; but also enlightening once conceptualized and understood.
“anger, n., sense 2.a”. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, September 2023, <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2956369641>