Anger Management Narrative Essay
It can stem from feelings of frustration, hurt, annoyance or even disappointment. Sometimes displeasure, hostility or antagonism towards someone or something, usually combined with an urge to harm. It is a complex emotion and when released improperly, it can have devastating effects on the party on the receiving end regardless if the party is a mere object, or person. Once someone is placed on that end, it is not unusual that they may want to escape the violent encounter. Not everyone is a natural born fighter. And then there are others… The ones who become defensive.
More often than not, these people stop listening or counter attack. Whether you run away or choose to fight, none of these results in any type of resolution whatsoever and most of the time sows more bad feelings that creep up behind us later on in life. Anger is a very natural emotion that is experienced by all people. Everyone with proper discipline could put anger in its place. Anger isn’t a bad thing. It becomes bad when released in a poor fashion. Today, I will be discussing anger. -Specifically, techniques that enhance interpersonal communication and in turn, possibly reducing and managing poorly expressed anger.
Now let’s define what is meant by “anger management”. The term anger management commonly refers to a system of psychological therapeutic techniques and exercises by which someone with excessive or uncontrollable anger can reduce the triggers, degrees, and effects in an angered emotional state. In the paragraphs to follow I will discuss what communication authors, scholars and experts had to say about anger management, including my findings and conclusions drawn from experiments and observations I have conducted and have noted utilizing these techniques.
Rationale: Admittedly, I wasn’t going to do my research paper on anger. I had to contemplate. I thought is this something that I have trouble dealing with at times as do the people that are around me. Every time I asked it, in any manner, the answer always remained the same. Why not? So it reeled me in like a fish on a hook. Through my experiments and research paper I hoped to encounter everyday methods to help me release my anger in a constructive way, as I do tend to bottle up feelings inside and then “blow my top”.
I am grateful that I don’t have what is described as an anger “problem” by any means –as it isn’t frequent- but I do release it improperly at times. Sometimes being referred to as a child since children hold their feelings in and then make the world pay after, I would like to correct that. Furthermore, I had previous knowledge that a lot of research has been done on anger management and I was curious to see what was to be said on this topic since we all deal with angry people every day.
Not only do I want to help myself, but I would rather like to help those that I know are less fortunate than I and spread the word to them so their lives could be a little less hectic then what it is. Research: When researching about this topic, I came across the following information by Henry Kellerman. He posted an article stating the following information: Anger all on its own is said to have its own personality. According to Henry Kellerman’s, Ph. D, Anger is the Key, he depicts anger as having, “six key characteristics. Those characteristics are described as the following: Anger is inborn so it has an aggressive drive. It makes itself expansive; wanting to get bigger and bigger. It wants to burst forth so it has explosive potential. Anger also constantly wants to attack. It has an entitled frame of mind feeling that it has the right to get tough. And lastly, it also sees itself as an empowerment so it eliminates feelings of helplessness. If one could keep in mind the six main things that anger manifests itself by, then you could begin to learn to how to begin to work with you emotions.
Meaning, we change how we see things. More so our perception. When we are angry or upset, we tend to view another’s behavior as, “controllable, characterological, and permanent. ” Saying how you feel, why and what you want and calming down are all ways to prevent unwanted anger. Sometimes we may not be able to control the situations that we’re placed in so we look for ways to change the reaction even when changing the situation may not be possible. Let’s face it. We get angry and sometimes there is nothing we could really do.
One way we can learn to lessen anger is by lessening the emotional impact so you would know how to express your anger in a manner that can promote resolution for the situation that triggered the anger in the first place. In my research I have found that anger is an expression of another emotion that lies underneath. In many situations, anger can be linked to intent to preserve personal worth to preserve essential needs, or to preserve basic convictions. Identifying these unmet needs is one of the goals of anger management counseling.
Once these needs are identified, you may need to determine how to address those situations and relationships that may lack boundaries, or healthy structure. In the article Anger Management, by Harry Mills, he states that, “People tend to go through a predictable set of several stages while working through life-changes. Progress through the stages is largely due to a combination of motivation, technique and dedication. Some people move quickly through the stages, while others move more slowly, perhaps even taking a step or two backward before continuing on to complete their change. Since we want to enhance our communication skills, we need to first be able to learn effective anger management techniques which in turn would allow us to recognize the situations that make us angry so that we may be able to change. The four steps he says that can bring you better interpersonal skills are, awareness, preparation, action and maintaining gains. In awareness, the angry person seeks information about anger management; what anger is, how anger affects health and relationships, and how anger can be controlled. In preparation, you make a decision to actually make a change in the way you will express anger.
In the Action stage you start making real changes and perform the way you prepared to do. And finally, in the management stage you learn to accept the fact that you are not perfect, that you will make mistakes and act inappropriately and that you can recover from lapses in your behavior when they do occur. Achieving sustained behavior change is a project. It may take multiple attempts and multiple failures before you will achieve this goal. Each time you do lapse into old behavior, you can use the tools and strategies you have learned along the way to help you pick yourself up and recover.
