Anger is part of the self-preservation instinct. He is our internal border guard, protects the territory, defends and defines borders. One of the most highly charged feelings. Do not confuse anger and aggression, anger is a feeling, aggression is a behavior, i.e. manifested feeling.
Anger, like any other feeling, has a functional attribute (a message to act for us) - “take action to stop attacks on our well-being.” Who violates a woman’s internal boundaries and her well-being?
Anger becomes a problem when it is inadequate to the situation and clearly excessive, when it gives rise to more and more new problems and affects a person’s health and well-being.
Consequences of excess anger: muscle strain, hypertension, stomach ulcers, eczema, psoriasis, headaches, asthma (psychosomatic symptoms), depression, endless conflicts, social isolation, anxiety, psychosis.
Let's now talk about the underlying causes and processes, about secondary feelings. When someone hurt you or made you feel unpleasant and you swore only about this, this is normal and natural, but when a child or a cat “mischieves” and you yell at him for twenty minutes “for everything in the world,” it’s time to figure it out reasons. Let's look at some models of anger.
Benefits of treating anger and conflict in our clinic
- We accept adults and children
. We make appointments for patients over 18 years of age, schoolchildren and preschoolers. We see children in the presence of their parents to reduce stress for young patients. - We record at the request of relatives
. We accept after a call from parents or relatives, if the patient does not want to see a doctor himself. - We select treatment individually
. We take into account age, disease or disorder that provoked anger and conflict, general health, and the presence of concomitant mental disorders. - We treat without medications
. We conduct a course of psychotherapy and do not prescribe medications if anger and conflict are provoked by deviations in behavior or education and can be corrected. - Make an appointment online
. We make an appointment at the clinic by phone or online using the feedback form.
To make an appointment with a doctor or get a consultation, call us or use the feedback form. The administrator will call you back, answer questions, and help you choose a convenient time for consultation.
A few recommendations
1. Anger can cause fatigue, so you need to take more time to rest. Take breaks throughout the day. Pick one day and take a complete break from everything.
2. Misunderstandings are the cause of most conflicts, which is why people start getting angry. If you have an argument with someone, then stand in that person’s shoes and show empathy.
3. During conversations with others, analyze in detail all incomprehensible situations and emotions that have arisen.
4. Anger is caused by accumulated troubles and problems, so try to solve all matters on time, learn to manage time.
5. To begin to manage anger, you need to learn self-control.
6. You can read books on anger management.
The path of enmity or the path of love?
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- Anger is always directed at some object (person, circumstances, action) ... It can be accepting, it can be rejecting. What does the quality of anger depend on?
- On the degree of self-esteem. From who is a man for himself? How does he experience himself? What is his attitude towards himself? And on the degree of self-esteem.
When a person respects himself, he does not need to defend himself and climb behind the wall every second.
Another thing is being proud. You can never predict what he will take as a personal insult and why he will fly into anger.
But, I repeat, there are people who are “angry” by nature—hot-tempered. They have such a temperament, such high energy. Hot temper is characteristic of choleric people. For example, our saint Fr. Sergiy Mechev was hot-tempered. He saw something and was indignant, indignant. This is how he expressed his attitude towards people’s actions, but not towards the people themselves whom he accepted and loved.
Hot temper becomes noticeable very early in children. For example, you see that a child gets angry for every reason, especially not understanding how it looks from the outside. He tears off his clothes, he’s small, but he’s still dissatisfied with something. This is a manifestation of natural protest anger, which is not yet directed towards a person, but can be harsh in action.
I can say one thing to hot-tempered people: calm down, gentlemen, everything goes away with age. With age, the temperament weakens, the severity softens. The older you get, the more you take care of yourself, the more obvious it becomes to you that getting irritated and rejecting another is sowing enmity. And at the same time I want to strengthen the love around me.
“It turns out it’s not a matter of fighting anger.” Do you just need to look inside yourself and become different?
- You see, we are not used to this. But the fact is that a person is always forced to choose for himself which path he will follow. Will it be the path of enmity or the path of love.
Life confronts us with this choice as soon as we start working with people: teaching, treating, raising children, when our parents begin to age.
And this is not an exaggeration. It is impossible to run back and forth all the time. Life requires certainty. Either you will follow the path of enmity, or you will choose patience and love for yourself.
You see, the Lord will always send us people, circumstances, situations, actions to which we will react less or more emotionally. But you need to understand that the reaction is normal, because we are living people, not robots. Fix your attitude towards the other. If you feel hostility, and this is a litmus test, then you have deviated from the path of love. And here sometimes you can’t say anything except pray to God, if you know this for yourself, in simple words: forgive and have mercy on me, Lord, cowardly, self-loving. Just pray and take care of yourself. What else remains?
Every time you feel hostility, you need to understand what is behind it for you and what it means to you.
There will always be things, actions, people that you do not accept. And what to do with them? Scream, fight... Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh said that you need to accept the world as it is.
And this is not only a spiritual question, but also a spiritual one. The world lies in evil, but if you do not accept this world lying in evil, then you can simply fall apart into small pieces - find yourself outside of reality.
Christ speaks of the only struggle - in man himself, with that in himself that separates you from love, God, from others. I am convinced that personality grows primarily in the internal dialogue that a person conducts with himself before God.
- But is there any safety technique for dealing with anger?
- Of all the irons, we are taught to control ourselves. But I am concerned about the flow of unprofessional and accessible literature. It is dangerous because it profanes the complexities of psychological knowledge about a person. You see, people want to take a pill and not have depression. But depression can also indicate that a person has lost the meaning of life. And with the loss of the meaning of life, not a single pill will help. But searching for this meaning will help.
“Rub your soul and it will warm you up,” says Saint Theophan the Recluse. The task of psychologists is to “rub the soul” so that it warms up for love, and not to give false prescriptions in the form of a “pill.”
Saint John Chrysostom said important words: “If you want to get rid of anger, get rid of addiction to yourself.” But what is self-addiction? The passion of a proud person or a selfish person is different. A proud person constantly defends himself, not allowing himself to be humiliated. And the selfish person is above everything. He will not learn to master anger, because he is sure that he is always right in everything.
Most people constantly fluctuate between self-respect and selfishness. But there is no need to demonize such people and think that this is something fatal.
Just don’t think that now I’ll erase it with an eraser and it will be a clean slate. No, all this is work, all this is the path to entering the fullness of humanity, the path to one’s own integrity. But the path to integrity is also very difficult for mental work. And he is the path of love. And if love, then what kind of anger?
You know, as one priest once answered, to whom a lady came to confession with complaints, they say, I always take offense at my loved ones. “Darling, we don’t live in paradise,” he said. We actually do not live in paradise and live very difficultly: in big cities in the 21st century, in difficult historical periods. To achieve an even and stable relationship of love towards loved ones - oh, how difficult it is. It’s easier for your neighbors.
Receiving anger
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But there is another anger. Remember the Gospel story about how Christ wanted to treat a withered arm. It was on Saturday. The Savior came to the synagogue and the Pharisees also appeared there, wanting to catch him violating the Sabbath rule. What does the Apostle Mark tell us about this? “And he looked at them with anger, grieving over the hardness of their hearts, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” (Mark 3:5). The Apostle Mark speaks of another type of anger—the receiving one. Here the indignation and indignation of Christ (sorrowing with anger) is the receiving form of anger, because He grieves for them, He wants good for them.
Or another example.
I see that my grandson is doing something that I cannot tolerate. Then I say: “Well, what are you doing? You offended grandma! Apologize now!”
Please note that I can speak very intensely, harshly and even passionately. And he will not be offended by me, because he sees that I want the best for him. I want to help him be better and not harm others. And this will be a form of accepting anger, because what is meant here is not the dissolution of the relationship, but, on the contrary, the desire for its improvement, and therefore this is in no way a sin.
Anger as a defense
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- Will raising a child by turning him towards another person and towards God give him leverage for "anger management"?
“He will understand that this is not pleasing to God, that this is not how relationships with people are built.”
But there are situations when a person does not control his protest feelings. He may realize that getting angry and going into a rage is not nice, but there is something in him that is stronger than himself.
Anger can be a form of psychological defense. If a person has lived since childhood in an atmosphere where he is not accepted, offended, criticized and ridiculed, his pride and sense of value are hurt, then he may well react with anger. He is not accepted, and he does not accept in return. He defends himself with anger and irritation.
Psychological defense can be not only anger, but also resentment. Such a person will be touchy and will be offended not only by those who really offend him, he will attribute to others that he is being offended.
Just as an angry person will be angry both at those who offend him and at those who do not think to offend him. This is why communication with neurotics is so difficult: you do not understand what the person is reacting to, the situation now, or how his defense mechanism works; or why in the same situation one is angry and the other is offended.
But anger can also be a habit. If in families with difficult relationships it is common to become openly irritated and angry, then the child perceives anger as the norm of relationships. He is learning this. Anger becomes his emotional habit. However, so does resentment. When a mother uses her resentment as a way to control the family, her daughter will also behave in her own family, demonstrating resentment as a way to manipulate the relationship.
In both the first and second cases, anger and resentment become a character trait and a sin characteristic of these people, which is very difficult to get rid of on your own.
Here's something else that's important to understand: the conditions in which a child grows up determine the form that his innate emotions will take. If a child is humiliated or insulted, then “anger” becomes his inherent defense. And this does not mean that the person is bad, he just defends himself that way. Therefore, he can show aggressive actions: kick the cat, swing at the grandmother...
But if a child grows up in love, then he develops accepting anger. John Chrysostom speaks about this absolutely brilliantly when he calls anger a natural human ability: “anger can shine on another, or it can burn your soul.”
Receptive anger is the ability to grieve in your heart for another, for what separates us from him.
When we are outraged by the terrible actions of another, when we are outraged by something because the Christian in us speaks.
Causes of irritability
The causes of irritability may include both psychosomatic conditions and existing health problems, as well as unusual everyday situations that lead to troubles. Today, a number of conditions can be attributed to the causes of irritability:
- Overwork associated with the need to work for a long period of time, without days off.
- Overwork based on everyday factors.
- Frequent and prolonged stress.
- Individual characteristics of a person with a tendency to manic reactions (touchiness, tearfulness, etc.).
- Irrational use of personal time, inability to prioritize between home and work needs.
- Metabolic disorders, hormonal imbalance.
- Depressive states.
- Diseases of the musculoskeletal system, accompanied by muscle pain.
- High blood pressure.
- Premenstrual syndrome in women, as well as menopause.
- Mental disorders (psychosis, schizophrenia, neuroses).
- History of strokes.
This list of listed reasons is not limited, since it can be replenished under the influence of both external and internal factors. The human body is individual, so reactions to certain situations can also be very different.
Definition
Since ancient times, human emotions have been of particular interest to scientists.
It's amazing how different feelings people can experience and how they relate to them. Anger is considered one of the most striking emotional outbursts. It is similar to indignation, although experts distinguish between the two concepts. In dictionaries, anger is interpreted as an emotion that has a negative connotation. It manifests itself as a result of the actions of some subject or situation. Anger is accompanied by feelings of ongoing injustice and a desire to correct it. Usually this emotion manifests itself very clearly, like a flash, a temporary clouding of the mind . A person in such a state ceases to control himself and can cause pain and destruction to himself or someone else.
Psychologists tend to believe that anger leads to negative affect. This term is very common in professional circles and means a strong emotional outburst. It doesn't last long, but it's very intense. In this case, blood pressure most often increases, the functioning of internal organs changes, and erratic motor activity appears.
After all of the above, it becomes clear that in anger a person does not just get emotional; destructive or creative consequences arise. Sometimes, with the help of anger, it is easier for a person to solve a problem, but more often than not, the situation, on the contrary, becomes more complicated. Scientists have even identified a separate direction in science - the psychology of anger . According to this teaching, a given emotion is not only correctly characterized, but its classification is also determined.
Stages and methods of diagnosis and treatment
In children.
We establish the cause of anger and conflict - rejection by adults, problems and emotions that the child cannot cope with on his own, misunderstanding on the part of the family and others. We organize a consultation with a child psychologist who establishes contact with the child, helps reduce anxiety, increase self-esteem, and teaches how to manage anger and aggression. We conduct consultations in a playful way that is understandable to the child. If necessary, we accept with parents.
In adults.
We establish the cause of anger and conflict. We identify psychological problems - dissatisfaction with life, low self-esteem, unfavorable family environment in childhood. We diagnose senile dementia, hormonal imbalances, and schizophrenia. Depending on the cause of the problem, we select a course of psychotherapy or drug treatment. We prescribe tranquilizers, antidepressants, hormonal agents, drugs that improve brain activity, and other medications.
Treatment
Group behavioral psychotherapy
The main goal of group trainings is to change the patient’s behavior, get rid of feelings of dissatisfaction, and teach constructive ways of expressing grievances, claims, and comments. During classes, participants recreate conflict situations, try to use techniques for switching emotions, and take the position of an interlocutor. After the main training, there is a collective discussion of experiences, including irritation.
Individual consultations with a psychotherapist
In addition to behavioral methods, sessions are conducted aimed at mastering relaxation and distraction skills. The psychotherapist discusses with the patient possible causes of irritability - stress, nervous exhaustion, problems in family life and at work. Of the practical skills that help relieve tension, the most effective are breathing techniques and auto-training.
Types of Anger
- Silent hatred. A situation where a person does not show his anger in any way. He may smile at an individual whom he hates; in fact, such behavior is hypocritical.
- Offense to the whole world. A person hates everything that surrounds him, he believes that everyone owes him, and the world is against him, people are against him. He is lonely, no one needs him.
- Competition. For example, we may be talking about a situation where two women compete for one man, and accordingly they hate each other.
- A game. One individual deliberately provokes another into attacks of aggression, thereby receiving pleasure from it.
- Despair. The attack of anger is demonstrative in nature. In this way a person attracts attention to himself.
Symptoms of irritability
Symptoms of irritability include the following:
- A person feels depressed all the time; he almost does not see a positive connotation in current events.
- Painful sensations may appear in the head, neck, and upper back areas.
- Lack of such a quality as patience. A person breaks down at every shortcoming, not trying to restrain himself either with colleagues or with family members.
- Inability to concentrate on performing one action.
- Claims to oneself and others without good reasons for this.
- Aggressive mood.
- Hot flashes to the face, palms. As a result, the person blushes or sweats.
- Aggressive reactions to being near a specific person.
- Inattention.
- Apathetic states, silence, stiffness, etc. are possible.
- Biased assessment of ongoing events or negotiations.
