Anger and rage
Peter Spelbos is a specialist in counselling people who want to learn to cope with their own anger and rage. He has helped hundreds of people before you to make this change.
Anger and rage are relatively weak forms of aggressive behaviour.
Their distinguishing characteristic is that you put yourself above the other person and try to disproportionately influence and/or control your relationship with that person.
To act out of anger is not necessarily negative. At least you act forcefully, which can be useful when you feel threatened and want to counter that threat. But if you are unable to cope with your anger, you will probably do a lot of harm.
You resort to much of this behaviour 'automatically', usually in situations in which you feel insecure or frustrated. In such situations, you react purely out of emotionality; you simply don't know how else to react.
In such cases, overreacting is a rather obvious pitfall and tends to cause the other to react fiercely to you, to which you respond with the inevitable: 'You see? …'
Forms of anger
Bottling-up of anger commonly occurs in association with so-called 'sub-assertive behaviour': you go on swallowing something from the other person until it becomes unbearable. Then you explode, and eventually calm down again. What you actually did was to go on too long accepting something that you didn't like.
You can also use anger as a defensive barrier. You don't allow others to see the vulnerable person behind that layer of irascibility who may well be reacting in panic to everything coming his way. This mechanism is often at work in people who readily exhibit authoritarian or fault-finding behaviour.
Sometimes, people (unconsciously) conceal their aggressive behaviour behind other behaviour. They do this because they have learned that it is unacceptable to show one's anger. Systematically lying, exaggerating, joking too often or too loudly, manipulating, interfering or being cynical can all be seen as concealed but accepted forms of aggression.
Going one step further there is passive-aggressive behaviour: aggressive behaviour that is not expressed as such. You show your resistance in all possible ways except swearing, hitting and worse. Perhaps you do everything in your power to try to win a discussion or to be very imposing in your bodily stance of rejection.
Aggressive behaviour may also be directed inwardly. For dozens of reasons, you see yourself as worthless and you prefer to find the cause of all kinds of unpleasant situations in yourself. This results in strongly polarised behaviour. Sometimes you hate yourself so much that you do harm to yourself. Or you turn to drink or drugs.
Coping with anger & anger management
Speaking your mind, asserting yourself, anger, rage, hitting out. No one can live totally devoid of aggression. Aggression - in all its forms - is part and parcel of our humanity. But overshooting the mark in aggressiveness is too much of a good thing.
Over-aggressive behaviour is passed on from generation to generation and is developed in response to anxieties, systematic suppression, provocation or rejection. Ultimately, however, it is you yourself who has the largest stake in maintaining it.
Usually, it is not too difficult to unlearn angry, enraged behaviour and learn functional assertivity in which emotions take their rightful place. Yet you can only achieve this on condition that you are strongly motivated to change and dedicate yorself to the proces.