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Anger Management: What is it? Practically speaking, anger management is a marketing term used to promote training on how to functionally cope with one’s anger.  As such, Anger Management Training is the course work specific to gaining awareness, identifying triggers, and applying appropriate emotive skills necessary to relating prosocial responses in context to a situation of conflict.  The reason anger management is presented as training is quite simply because everyone experiences anger.  Anger is a feeling, and as such, there is nothing inherently negative in its experience.  Anger is reactionary to what one experiences as a threat.  Of course the word “threat” is a relative term, in that it is relative to what one perceives as threatening.  Some people react with anger when they receive a bill.  Others react with anger when someone says something or does something antagonistic to how the involved person thinks people should act.   Someone says something you don’t like, and you respond with anger.  You are cut off on the road, in a line, put down at work, whatever — you may respond with anger.  Regardless of the situation, when you experience anger, there is a perceived threat to how you want or need the world to be, and of course this is reflective of how you want the world to treat you.  In effect, anything outside of your expectations is a threat.  Another way of thinking about this is along the line of a contimuum, a range of feelings.

FEAR———————————-DESIRE

Annoyance————Rage                       Interest—————-Lust

There are basically two emotional reactions: fear and desire.  On the continuum of fear, at one end there may be mild annoyance for events that are not going the way you prefer.  At the other end, there maybe intense rage for such events.  The difference is a matter of perspective and the power of control you experiences over your emotional content, in effect, emotional intelligence.  The same outlay is the same for desire, but instead of annoyance there is interest, and for rage, lust.  Here too the difference is a matter of perspective.  In effect, one person’s annoyance is another person’s rage, or one person’s common interest is another person’s lust.  It is all a matter of perspective

Matter Of Perspective

We all have our own unique perspective of who we think we are, our sense of self in relation to the world we live; more, how the world should treat us in that relation.  This perspective is all ours; it is the human perspective, the human experience.  This perspective stems from the condition we all share, and that is a wanting condition.  Our wanting condition is never satisfied.  This human condition is motivated and mitigated by each of our own self-serving interests in mastering competency and independance.  Taken a step further, the human condition is born of our innate instincts as social interactionists.  We are all born into this world dependent upon our world and those in it.  Within the human experience, there are two forms of dependence; self and other.  For example: addiction.  Addiction is the experience, the mindset of being dependent on agents outside of one’s self in order to experience substance to one’s self.  The relationship between self and other that constitutes the “substanceless” necessitating for substance.  We all experience the mindset of addiction. The difference is functionality.  In fact, no person has or could survive if born and left alone.  We were born to need.

From birth, all of us experienced life through our interactions with conflict in the self-serving quest of comfort over discomfort. Of course, during these earlier times it was all physical.  Emotion is physical; it is the body’s ability to inform the experiencer of the opportunity to protect for and assure survival.  In the end, or more accurately put, where you are now in relationship to your personal self and social self will result in how you experience and express your anger.  So, what is anger?

Anger

The word anger describes an emotional response to a perceived or real threat to the person involved.   In the situations of real danger, without higher ordering or rational thought, we react.  In situations of perceived danger, alarm is triggered and filtered through the unique human capability of rational thought.  The result is mitigated by our perspective of competence and independence.  In either case, the triggered alarm and resultant physical response experienced as anger has as its objective to avoid or intimidate the threat.

Most equate anger as an emotion.  Anger is not an emotion.  As I stated earlier, there are only two emotional experiences and those are fear and desire.  Emotion is physical; it is the physical reaction born of the interplay between our human systems of communication.  The human body relies upon to two systems of communication to ensure personal and physical safety.  The two systems are the nervous system, which communicates between regions of our brains and spinal cords, and the endocrine system which communicates to the various muscles and glands in our bodies via hormones.  Without the efficiency of communication by these two systems, no one would survive.

For example, the emotional response of fear: In response to a threat, when  fear is triggered, the involved person physically protects him or her self.  Once initiated, if the threat is real, he or she will react instantaniously.   If the threat is perceived, in other words, evaluated on its merits, the involved will incorporate his or her reflective and projective capababilities to the situation at hand.  This is such an automated process that few are aware of their reflection and projection.  To make better sense of this, let’s divide the human brain into three layers:

The first most basic layer is the instinctual layer or lower primitive brain.  This layer of the brain is responsible for regulating life.  This region automatically regulates the heart and lungs, for example.  Somatically, or total body-wise this layer also prepares us to defend our fears or open our selves to desires.

The second layer regulates, acts as a filter to what is or isn’t important.  This midbrain houses the limbic system which is often referred to a the seat of emotion.   In various regions, sensory information passes and the limbic system alerts us to that which we should pay attention and that which bears no meaning.  Of course much of this becomes anticipated through prior conditioning.

The third layer, the human layer, that part of the brain that sets us apart from all other creatures on this planet, is the brain of problem solving or influence.  Taken together, these three lays communicate top down and bottom up.

How these three layers produce action is quite unique.  Unlike all other creatures on this planet motivated by fight or flight, our human brains introduce maybe to fight or flight whereby we can actually dictate the response by what we think.  You stand at a door of a plane at 1,500 feet above the ground, your brain insists on flight: “No way are you jumping!” And yet you jump.  In practice, I often refer to this layer of the brain as the seat of mental masturbation, for something has to get you off in order for you to overcome your physical instincts and jump out that door.   In other words, depending upon the situation, when this part of the brain is involved, the person interjects wants, needs, likes and dislikes.  If you were sensitive of your weight, for example, and someone made a comment about your weight, you would first filter the comment through your mid-brain.  Your limbic system would then perform an instantaneous frontline evaluation.  If perceived as a threat (recall a threat is relative) you may or may not trigger alarm in your lower brain.  This then would be communicated to your higher brain as a mild threat and you would act according to your perspectives of problem solving or conflict resolution.  The result is dependent upon your conditioned interpersonal style; what you know.  In order for you to “feel hurt” you think about what you are experiencing emotionally and, in turn, realize your hurt.  How you physically respond is warranted by your conditioned intra/interpersonal style.  You may suppress your hurt, involve yourself in self-denigration, mentally beat yourself up over what was said and avoid action.  You may go through the same process and later let the air out of the person’s tires, let the person immediately know of your disappointment, or scream into his or her face.  Either way, you were motivated to process that which you were feeling.

What is management?

Generally speaking, management is the art or getting things done through people.  As human interactionists, people define and play out their human experience through others. With this point made, management is indeed the art of getting things done through people. This is a functional perspective; it is the process of self- and other regulation with an objective in mind.  Put into context, as pointed out, we all have a perspective of who we think we are; our personal self.  We also have a perspective of how we want the world to be, and in that order how we are treated.  This latter perspective is our social self.  Together the personal and social self constitute our primary relationship.  As human interactionists, we then manage our primary relationship with an interest in forming a more secondary relationship with others.  This interest in forming secondary relationships is instigated through the uniqueness we admire and desire in others.  In order for this secondary relationship to be functional, constant validation, negotiation, and compromise is necessitated.  When one’s uniqueness is not validated, the involved perceives a threat, and in so many cases, anger is triggered whereby the involved seeks to intimidate, coerce, or make known his or her discrepancy.  In and of itself, this is not a problem; however, when another imposes his or her need for validation on others, anger then is expressed through aggression.  Anger management seeks to instruct upon the skill necessary to be aware of, identify, and cope with the experience and expression to invalidation.

Beyond the experience of anger

As pointed out, anger is a reactive to what a person thinks is invalid to his or her perspective of how the world should treat him or her.  In effect, this perspective is impression management.  The key here is to manage one’s perspective of self in relation to the world lived.  Mismanagement of one’s perspectives results in low frustration tolerance, and in keeping with the degree of validity to which one holds one’s self, dysfunctional impulse control can be an issue.  As I have said before, I have never met a person who does not have the skill to manage anger; rather, under certain situations of social interaction, the involved person’s impression management, frustration tolerance, and impulse control are contingent upon the involved person’s zone of comfort.  In other words, the risk of corrective consequences.  Very few people will yell and scream at a judge in court versus a partner at home.  Of course this is not the whole story, but it is a start.