Anger is a very powerful driving human emotion. In it’s most healthy form it can be protective for others and ourself. It can motivate us to ‘change the world’ and fight unfairness and inequality. On the other hand unhealthy anger at its zenith it is uncontrollable and dangerous – massively self-defeating and damaging to others. There is also repressed unhealthy anger, which I’ll call toxic rumination. This often leads to depression or explosion.
I believe that anger is pretty much unavoidable but also it doesn’t just magically arise out of nowhere. Most usually we find that stuff from our past, low self appraisal and inadequacy lie at the core of toxic anger patterns.
The neuroscience of anger is being understood more and more and it very self-empowering to begin to understand the basic chemical changes which trigger our ‘fight/flight/freeze’ responses to events and situations. From this, we can then begin to explore our own anger signatures and learn ways to express ourselves better and get our needs met without exploding, privately seething, or sulking.