Anger: What is the cause? What will be the result?

When anger develops it is very useful to try to pause and think about the cause and then think about the result of your anger
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A neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains that when we get angry we can lose the benefit of our critical thinking cortex. As a result, the prefrontal cortex, which is important for emotion regulation and moral judgement, loses its ability to control our emotional limbic system
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Anger is underlined by fear, we tend to get angry when we feel hurt, physically or emotionally: we want something that we did not get or we get something that we did not want. Underlying this anger is a fear that we will not get what we need, that we are not loved, not respected, not included
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One way to overcome anger is to ask yourself ‘What is the hurt that has caused the anger? What is the fear that we have?’ When we can acknowledge and express our fear, how we are feeling threatened, then we are often able to soothe the anger
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But to achieve this we need to be able to admit our vulnerability. We can often be ashamed of these fears and hurt, thinking that if we are not vulnerable then we will not experience pain, but this is not the nature of being human. If we can have compassion for ourselves and acknowledge how we feel afraid, hurt or threatened then we can also have compassion for others
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