TEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ANGER

1. The events of this world don’t make you angry; your “hot thoughts” create your anger. Even when a genuinely negative event occurs, it is the meaning you attach to it that determines your emotional response. Responsibility for your anger is ultimately to your advantage--it gives you the opportunity to achieve control and make a free choice about how you want to feel.

2. Your anger will not help you, most of the time. It will immobilize you; you will become frozen in your hostility to no productive purpose. You will feel better if you place your emphasis on the active search for creative solutions. If no solution is possible because the provocation is totally beyond your control, you will only make yourself miserable with your resentment--so why not get rid of it?

3. The thoughts that generate anger often will contain distortions—your own perceptions and thoughts that help you see the people or events in ways that are different from how they actually are. Correcting these distortions will reduce your anger

4. Ultimately your anger is caused by your belief that someone is acting unfairly or some event is unjust. The intensity of your anger will increase in proportion to the severity of the maliciousness perceived and if the act is seen as intentional.

5. If you learn to see the world through other people’s eyes, you will often be surprised to realize their actions are not unfair from their point of view. Unfairness turns out to be an illusion that exists only in your mind! If you are willing to let go of the unrealistic notion that your concepts of truth, justice, and fairness are shared by everyone, much of your resentment and frustration will vanish.

6. Your retaliation against others is unlikely to help you achieve any positive goals in your interactions with them--they usually do not feel they deserve your punishment. Your rage will often just cause further deterioration and polarization, and will function as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

7. A great deal of your anger involves your defense against loss of self-esteem when people criticize you, disagree with you, or fail to behave as you want them to. Such anger is always inappropriate because only your own negative distorted thoughts can cause you to lose self-esteem. You are always fooling yourself if you blame another for your feelings of worthlessness.

8. Frustration results from unmet expectations. You have the right to try to influence reality to bring it more in line with your expectations. This is not always practical--these expectations may represent ideals that don’t correspond to everyone else’s concept of human nature. ( For example, that I deserve whatever I want, that people should think and act the way I do, or that if I work hard, I should be successful.) The simplest solution would be to change your expectations.

9. You have the right to be angry; of course you do! Anger is legally permitted, but the crucial issue is: is it to your advantage to feel angry? Will you or the world really benefit from your anger?

10. You rarely need your anger in order to be human, to assure yourself that you have feelings. In fact, when you rid yourself of that sour irritability, you will experience greater zest, joy, peace, and productivity.

Received from Phillip Crump, Mediato; originally from: David D. Burns, MD, Feeling Good, Revised Edition. NYC: Avon Books, 1999. Pp. 194-197.