There’s a lot of talk these days about anger, angry people and of course the buzzword “anger Issues”. It seems every day you turn on the TV there is another News report about someone loosing control and flying off the deep end. Why does this happen? Why does someone need to loose control in a fit of rage with violent, destructive and abusive results?

I understand anger and I understand rage. It’s something I’ve dealt with my whole life. When I was a child I had an extremely volatile temper which often resulted in screaming and slamming doors. Today it’s not something I am proud of, but at the time I didn’t know of any better way to deal with it and nor did any of the people around me.

Anger can be caused by a lot of things. Some are minor frustrations, while others stem much deeper into our psyches and are caused by things that can take a lifetime to uncover. Of course the ultimate way to free yourself from anger is to find the cause and heal it. That can be a lot harder than it seems, although is definitely a worthy cause.

But what about now? What can be done right now to deal with the anger? I for one, didn’t want to have those violent outbursts the whole time I was trying to figure out and heal what was causing them. After a series of particularly nasty outbursts back in high school, which resulted in school mates getting physically hurt, I decided something had to be done to take control.

For me, anger is a very physical emotion. When something irritates or frustrates me to the point of anger, I feel it in my stomach first. Like a boiling hot fluid that rises up through me, twisting and knotting my insides up. It can be such a build up of extreme energy that it just has to be let out some how.

The problem is that we are all told, from a young age, that anger is bad and we shouldn’t feel it. We are all told that we need to control it, and by “control” most people mean, force it down, bottle it up, hide it away and pretend you’re not angry at all. I don’t know what genius came up with that piece of wisdom, but I hope they suffered at the hands of an angry madman before dying.

Suppressing or bottling up any emotion is a bad idea. All that does is hold it in until the next dose comes along and then we hold that in too and the next one and the one after that… Then, when we are full to the brim with anger, someone may come along and do or say something that, any other time we’d dismiss, but because our anger bucket is full to busting, we explode into rage and everybody thinks we’re over-reacting to this one little thing, when in actual fact the rage is from the build up of everything.

So while I was still at school, I made a decision that would change my life for the better. It was a decision that was considered totally unacceptable within our societies structure, but I didn’t care. I decided to allow my anger it’s rightful place within my emotions. I let it out. Instead of letting it build up inside and then exploding out, whenever something irritated, frustrated or angered me, I spoke out about it right there and then. I let it be known that it irritated or frustrated or angered me. I vented.

As soon as I started doing this I felt an amazing sense of relief. To vent the anger at the moment it was created meant I was never hanging on to it. I found that to release the anger, all I had to do was verbalize it. Sometimes shout it, depending on the level of irritation. I have discovered over the years, that upon releasing the anger with each and every irritation, there is not one event that creates enough anger for me to have a physically violent reaction. No more slamming doors or punching walls or hurting other people or myself.

The best part is that the people who create the anger are the ones to receive the angry words, rather than the wrong people who don’t usually deserve it, like family or friends. This does a few different things. Firstly it tells the person straight away that they are doing something wrong to you and you wont tolerate it. More than likely they won’t do it again unless they are complete jerks. It also means that because you are not hanging onto the anger, you don’t build up a resentment about the person that caused it. This means that once the irritation has been vented, you can get on with your relationship with that person (whatever that relationship may be), or with whatever it was you were doing.

Of course there are also the health benefits of not holding onto the anger. I don’t know if there are any actually proven facts about this, but I would be very surprised if holding on to anger doesn’t have a negative effect on ones physical and mental health. I’m sure, in time, they will discover that many diseases, like cancer, may be caused by repressing emotions.

There are always going to be a lot of people in society who don’t get it, and tell you that anger is a bad thing and you just shouldn’t allow yourself to feel it. These are usually religious or spiritual people of some kind (the new age types are the worst for this.) It just isn’t realistic to expect someone to not feel anger if something is causing it. That kind of thinking just makes me angry… Arghhhhh!

Anger is not a bad thing. It is a valid emotion, just like happiness and love. We should never repress it, or any emotion. To do so, is to inevitably head for disaster. Let it out and free yourself from the burden. You may be surprised at how this one little step can affect your whole life in a positive way.

Now, who the hell do I yell at about having to pay these damn taxes….. ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!