Anger Management - Why Controlling Your Anger is Not the Issue When Using Your Emotions As Tools

Many experts tell you that you need to control your anger. The experts are giving you old advice! The best approach is to learn how to USE your anger as a tool to improve your personal life and your relationships. Controlling anger will not get you any improvement in your life or in your relationships. Control only puts a temporary lid on the expression of the feeling. Another option is online anger management.

Think about it for a minute. You do not control your car unless it is in some type of emergency situation. Rather, you learn to use the power of your car as a tool to get you where you want to go, in other words, to manage it for your own good. You can combine two useful elements, management and technology when you opt for online anger management.

If you have a dog, you do not need to control it unless its behavior becomes inappropriate. You do need to learn how to work with your dog to get the most out of your relationship with it. As an example, I have learned to "understand" my dog when she attempts to alert me that she hears something outside my house and distinguish these alerts from when she is telling me she needs to go outside to do her business. You can learn to understand the message of your emotions. You can also learn how to harness the power of your emotions with online anger management.

I do need to be clear about anything you do when you are emotional. What you do when you are angry is always a choice and always your responsibility. If you tend to act inappropriately when angry, you need to learn how to control, manage, or adjust your behavior, as with online anger management.

A definition of anger...
1. Anger is an emotion.
2. Anger is a tool that can push you to accomplish your goals and help you improve both your personal life and your relationships with others when you learn how to use it. The job of your brain is to keep you alive. Your emotions are the way your brain informs you about your situation and prepares your body to survive. Anger is the way your brain prepares you to deal with and overpower a personal threat. Anger gives you an opportunity to make a choice about what you will DO about the threat. Anger and all emotions are a normal and natural part of your functioning. These and related insights are valuable insights available when you take online anger management.

Everybody constantly (and unconsciously) scans their environment for any threat. When a threat is perceived (seen or heard), the part of your brain called the amygdala broadcasts a message to your body. This message moves very fast and causes the release of chemicals into your blood.

These chemicals prepare your body to fight, flee or freeze. Your body instantly reacts. Once they have done their job, the chemicals are reabsorbed to be reused later. The whole emotional process starts, completes, and is over in 90 seconds and is totally automatic as it should be if your survival is at stake. The reaction of your body to the perception of "threat" is what you experience when you get anger. This information is very useful and is a key component of online anger management.

Another important concept that's examined in online anger management is the fact that at the same time the reactions explained above, the thinking part of your brain, the cerebral cortex, is alerted to think about and decide how much of a threat actually exists. This process is much slower than the one triggered by the amygdale.

The decision you make about how real the threat is and your choice of how to deal with it is your emotional response. If you decide that there is a threat that you can do something about, you keep the emotional process going, the anger intensifies, and you take action. You can also decide that there is no threat and allow the anger to go away. This is how you can use your anger as a tool to guide your actions. Indeed, you can make a rational choice such as opting for online anger management.

Your emotional response always involves a choice. Consider this example of an emotional response to anger. It's the kind of exercise used in online anger management.

You come home after work and your spouse is critical of you. You cuss her out. Or you shut him out by ignoring him for the rest of the evening.

Here is what happened.
You heard the criticism (your senses).
Your brain prepared you to deal with a possible threat.
You "decided" that your ego, your intelligence, or, perhaps, your integrity, was threatened and had to be rescued.
You made your choice and acted on it.

The job of your anger is to alert you to the existence of a possible threat. Your brain and your anger did their jobs! (Whether or not a threat actually did exist is a completely different question.) The critical issues in the example were the decision you made about the message of the emotion and the choice you made about how to act on that message. The emotion was the messenger. This explanation is basic information at the core of most online anger management courses.

The emotion of desire informs you that you see yourself in a situation in which you really want the object of your desire. Your "job" is to decide whether or not to listen to the desire. The emotion of anger informs you that you see yourself being threatened and you need to do something to protect yourself and make the threat go away. Your "job" is to determine how real and how important the threat is.

Using your emotions as tools involves understanding the message of the feeling and using it to make effective decisions about your behavior.

You do not need to control the tool.

You do need to use the tool to control behavior.

And now, you can begin to use your emotions as tools to improve your life.
http://emotionsastools.blogspot.com

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