Translating a World on the Edge

There’s an old song–I think from the 1940’s– that says we always hurt the ones we love. I think that’s pretty much true.

What I don’t think is true is the lyric that we hurt them–“because we love them most of all.” There’s something very wrong with that.

Intentional hurt and love don’t go together. There may be many reasons for the hurt, but one of the most frequent is anger. Anger causes us to lose control, to say and do things we might not ordinarily do.

Anger is described as an emotional response related to one’s psychological interpretation of having been threatened. Often it indicates when one’s basic boundaries are violated. Some have a learned tendency to react to anger through retaliation. And some use displays of anger as a manipulation strategy–think of a threatened lion showing his prowess. But we are not animals.

Anger is a valid human emotion, still we shouldn’t let it get out of hand. We need to recognize the psychological or emotional factors that could predispose a person to intermittent explosive anger so that we can be onguard— growing up in an unstable family environment, marked by severe frustration, lack of a positive role model, physical and emotional abuse, alcoholism, violence and/or life-threatening situations.

We know unrestrained anger can lead to misery for its victims–even victims the perpetrator professes to love . And that kind of anger is one of the Cardinal Sins.

If our first response in many situations is anger, it is very likely that our temper is covering up our true feelings and needs. This is especially likely if we grew up in a family where expressing feelings was strongly discouraged. Explosive anger is especially destructive to children. As a result, an adult who experienced that sort of anger as a child may have a hard time acknowledging feelings other than anger.

If your anger seems to be spiraling out of control, remove yourself from the situation for a few minutes or for as long as it takes you to cool down. Here are some of the dynamics of Explosive Anger:

• We become more angry when we are stressed and body resources are down.
• We are rarely ever angry for the reasons we think.
• We are often angry when we didn’t get what we needed as a child.
• We often become angry when we see a trait in others we can’t stand in ourselves.
• Underneath many current angers are old disappointments, traumas, and triggers.
• Sometimes we get angry because we were hurt as a child.
• We get angry when a current event brings up an old unresolved situation from the past.
• We often feel strong emotion when a situation has a similar content, words or energy that we have felt before. Source: Get Your Angries Out

Let’s try to put our sincere love for a person in the forefront of our thoughts the next time we feel explosive anger rising within us.