Anger.

The first thing to realise about anger is that it’s always a secondary response, never a primary root issue. Anger typically is an emotional energy summoned for the sole purpose of self-preservation.

What does this mean? People use anger, or angry responses, in order to present them from feeling something. The main reason for people getting angry is to hide their unbearable feeling, or prevent them from feeling it. This means that anger is really a survival kit or defence mechanism, invoked to prevent oneself from getting hurt.

Some other causes of anger, apart from an unbearable feeling, include an inability to negotiate, having unrealistic expectations, fear, self-hatred, to protect pride, habitualised arguing (if the person can’t live without arguing – believe it some people are addicted to this), exhaustion and grief.

Anger is also a childhood-learned response. It would’ve been originally used when as a child you had no other way of learning how to cope. The only problem is that most people have never learnt of a more age-appropriate method of dealing with situations, so remain ‘frozen’ into their childhood coping mechanism.

An anger response is usually either where someone blows up or clams up. Either way is destructive and needs to be worked through. The best choice is to learn skills to grow up instead.

Another point to remember is that when you notice an overreaction – either in yourself or another person – this is most likely (over 90%) a response to an unbearable feeling being invoked. An unbearable feeling is one that a person cannot bear to feel and hence they use anger to prevent themselves from feeling it.