A wife becomes angry at her husband. A husband feels anger towards his wife. A child is angry at their friend. A classmate is angry at their peer. A student is angry about a teachers comment. Where is all the anger coming from?
As human beings we experience many emotions. Some people say that anger is not an emotion. Others say that anger is a product of the devil. Perhaps neither view is correct.
What is anger? Anger is a product of an emotion.
The wife had spent over an hour fixing a nice meal for her family. She had set the table and was waiting for her husband and children to return. Time passes and the meal grows cold. Finally the car pulls up in the driveway. The wife hurry’s out to greet her loved ones happy for their safe return. Then she sees them carrying their left over hamburger bags. Suddenly her happiness for their return turns to anger. In an instant she is overcome with feelings of anger towards her spouse. Did the sight of the almost empty hamburger bags cause her anger? No, nor did the view of her happy children with catsup on their faces cause her anger. What did lead to her anger was her feeling left out, forgotten about, and the fear that her husband had not given her any thought. These feelings led to the emotion of feeling hurt. Her husband had hurt her feelings by not calling her and letting her know that he was going to stop and get hamburgers with the children. Had he called her one of two things would have happened. Either he would have caught her before she had begun her task of cooking or she would have told him that she had dinner almost ready and he would have not stopped for the hamburgers. It is possible that she may have even chose to put the almost finished food in the fridge for the following day. Either way the emotion of hurt would not have occurred. If she had not had her feelings hurt she would not have had a wave of anger sweep over her.
Here is another example. A husband goes to get his favorite shirt out of the closet but he can not find it. He turns to his wife and asks her where his shirt is. She in return replies, “Oh that old thing, I threw it out.” The husband finds himself having to fight feelings of anger towards his wife. Why is he angry? Is he angry because his shirt is gone? No, he is feeling angry because he feels hurt and betrayed. His best friend (his wife) has shown that she does not see his feelings as being important. Her tossing out his favorite shirt shows him that she cares more about other matters than about what is important to him. In other words he is feeling hurt. It all comes down to his feelings having been hurt and so he now has to overcome feelings of anger.
If when someone gets angry we look into the root cause we will find that the anger is a product of hurt feelings. Not a product of the devil, nor of an event, but the product of the hurt feelings an event arouses. If we as humans will always think of the way something will cause some one to feel before committing an act of any kind, then anger can be avoided.
When a person finds themselves feeling angry often, then that person needs to assess what is going on in their life. Asking themselves what it is that is pushing them over the edge will help them come to a realization of what it is that is amiss in their lives. Once the root cause is determined it can be dealt with.