Anger

"Anyone can become angry - that is easy.
But to be angry at the right person,
to the right degree,
at the right time,
for the right purpose,
and in the right way
that is not easy."
- Aristotle

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As with nearly everything else, there is an avalanche of information available today about anger. Some of this information is very good, and much of it is tedious, inaccurate, irrelevant, and downright harmful.

So rather than leaving you to sort through the avalanche yourself, your trusty LiveReal Editors are doing our best to gather the most relevant and practical information from what's out there, simplify it, gather it in one place, and present it in a way that is useful.

So we hope this is helpful. If it's not, well . . . don't get mad at us . . .

Anger is something that many people don't see as a "problem." It's just a normal experience of life . . . until it manifests in forms such as road rage, spousal abuse, beating people up at a kid's soccar game, and so on.

Yet obvious forms of anger such as these are essentially the very same anger that most of us know day-to-day and experience on a smaller scale.

"What is normal
is to be in a kind of functioning neurosis
of sometimes controlling the anger, sometimes repressing the anger,
sometimes discharging the anger, sometimes expressing the anger."
- Gangaji

Two Basic Perspectives

While what we call "anger" runs a wide spectrum, we can broadly describe two major forms as "healthy anger" and "unhealthy anger" (resentment).

Healthy anger is good, clean, self-assertiveness. Babies demand to be fed, which is necessary for them to survive..In this perspective, anger is an energy that gives strength and fuels the ability to protect oneself, to stand against someone or something that is trying to do you or someone else real harm. There is a clean and clarifying feeling of enhanced self-definition after this experience of anger.

Unhealthy anger is something we almost all have a sense about - it is a kind of violent form of shutting out reality, an emotion that acts like a drug.

Many spiritual traditions (especially Buddhism) speak of anger as a "defilement" or something that obstructs happiness and clouds and distorts our ability to see clearly.

So what's really going on? And what can be done about it?

Two Basic Approaches (that are wrong)

Broadly speaking, people generally take two basic attitudes or approaches towards anger - the "Let it all out" approach verses the "Hold it all in" approach.

This leads to a kind of emotional dilemma that is experienced as "Express . . . or repress?

- or both . . . or neither?"

While there is the whole spectrum, at one extreme, there is the "giving way" to anger, expressing it verbally or nonverbally. And at the other extreme, there is the "holding it in" approach, also can lead to such problems as stress, ulcers, depression, and some say even cancer (some of the more extreme of which are described, for example, in The Angry Book by Theodore Rubin).

Although the situations vary widely and there are rarely clear-cut rules . . . neither of these approaches is seen as the best. So, then, what is?

Here are some perspectives we have found . . .

Osho on Anger
(modern spiritual perspective)

Gangaji on Anger
(modern spiritual perspective)

Swami Sivananda on Anger
(traditional yoga perspective on anger)

Roy Masters on Anger
(alternative Christian psychological perspective on anger)

Carol Tavris on Anger
(modern psychological perspective on anger)

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