You know, anger. That emotion that burns holes in your hands as you hold it–as my friend says, “anger is like a hot coal”.
So what to do with this anger?
When someone pisses you off or you just get plain irritated at something?
Describe situations in the past (or present!) where you’ve had to decide how to deal with your anger.
I grumble to myself for a bit, and it goes away pretty quickly on its own. I don’t have enough energy to keep my anger stoked up for days on end.
If something truly makes me really angry it can bug me for days at a time (no matter how hard I try to ignore it).
I hate confrontations, in my experience, getting the opportunity to tell someone off just makes me feel worse, (even if I’m a bazillion percent in the right). So usually if something truly makes me mad or WTH? about an incident that has occurred, it pretty much eats at me until I can force it to go away (sometimes I have to do some pretty strong self-talk).
I have to admit, sometimes I have some pretty creative revenge fantasies that I’ll indulge in for awhile…though I suppose those take my mind off of just how MAD I am and are somewhat useful in getting rid of the anger in some ways.
Luckily things that make me that mad are not that frequent.
I’m a very angry person. I don’t want to be, but that’s the way it is. But it’s really annoying and wasteful, so I ask myself a couple of questions.
Is my anger unjustified? It is when I’m angry about something else and someone has merely annoyed me, bringing the anger to the surface.
Is my anger justified? It is when someone steals from me, betrays me, or lies to me about something when I’m entitled to hear the truth.
So if it’s 1., I try to distract myself, think it over, recall what I’m really angry about, and then the misdirected anger dissipates.
If it’s 2., I immediatly hack into all their online accounts and steal their mail. Then I empty their bank accounts, ruin their credit, cancel all their utilities, and photoshop some pictures of them having sex with a developmentally disabled minor and send them to their place of work and to their family. Then I drop by to see them and offer them sympathy for their persecution by some sick stranger. Of course I only imagine that, and then the anger also diminishes.
I try really hard to ignore it. I hate being angry. Anger is such a pointless, unhelpful emotion. I see no positive side to it whatsoever.
But I do get angry. And when I get angry, I feel really bad about it. I hate being angry.
Depends where I am.
Usually, I get on my MMOG and join war games.
I’m going to repeat this with the caveat that it isn’t 100% true 100% of the time.
Powerlessness leads to Fear.
Fear leads to Anger.
You’re angry because something is happening that you don’t have the power to change or that you cannot control.
Anger is a tool to reclaim Power. It works some of the time, but it isn’t a Hammer, it’s FIRE. It hurts you and it claims control. Anger makes you do things that, on better thought, you would be absolutely horrified of doing yourself or of seeing someone else do. But Anger convinces you that it’s right to do those things, because it’s needed to reclaim Power.
Hatred? Hatred is just anger that someone or something doesn’t fit in the way you want the world to act and be.
So what to do with Anger? Backtrack it with self-honesty. Figure out what you cannot control that is making you angry, why you want to control whatever it is, how you can side-step the need for control or what you can do to regain control over yourself.
I fix whatever is making me angry, or I get even more pissed off if I can’t. Most things don’t other me though.
I dislike being angry. I prefer to keep my emotions under control. Anger makes it difficult to think clearly, and thinking clearly is the best way of dealing with a situation that is making you angry. If I am angry, I try to push it aside and think about the problem - specifically, what I can do to remedy the situation. If there is nothing I can do about it, I forget it - it’s simply not worth the emotional investment. I have other, better, lovely and positive things to do.
YMMV, though. When my son had a devastating stroke about a year and a half ago, like any parent, I was put through a wringer of powerful, horrible emotions. Anger, however, was not one of them. Why? Because there was absolutely nothing I could do about the stroke. I could help my son in many ways, of course, but being angry would just get in the way of the massive project ahead of me. My wife, however, was very angry. Angry that the universe had treated us so badly. In spite of her anger, we worked as a team, each playing to our strengths, and gradually pulled our son back into the world. Massive project, starting over from zero. I can understand why someone would be angry in that situation.
Ten years ago I was super fucking red-hot angry that my boyfriend cheated on me. It was just a bad, bad time. I woke up every day feeling angry and I’d never felt like that before and I hated it.
I got myself a little golden retriever puppy and I haven’t been angry since.
Really?! Um, does this little puppy serve as a substitute for anything in your life? :D:D Cheatin’ bastards…
Push it down, let it fester, eventually explode in the face of whoever was causing the anger over something trivial, then slam the door and erase the person from your life. Regret it but be to proud to go back, and take up angrily drinking instead.
It’s the mature thing to do.
Hey man I said I wasn’t angry anymore thanks to her, not that I wasn’t horny anymore 
I get pissed off on a regular basis. It’s a flash in the pan. If it’s with my family I assume they’re (all male) insane and only put on this earth to drive me crazy, too.
I squawk, it’s over and we go on.
With friends and others, I step back and evaluate, try to see where they’re coming from. (I do this with family, too, but I’d never let them know. Survival is at stake.) I try (if it still really matters) to disagree while maintaining the connection we have. But the very few times when something has really set me off—I’ve “seen red” before. Had to rely on other people’s recollection to know what went on.
Real anger, for me, doesn’t contain the sparks of contention that can almost be playful. It’s stone cold. It’s the dark, deep line in the sand that’s been crossed. I get calm, and quiet. (Never a good sign.) It’s almost always about injustice. I don’t consciously “plot how to get back at” but it remains simmering on a back burner and eventually spurs me to action, whether it’s supporting a bill I want passed, proving a naysayer wrong, or just tripping (if I get a chance) the sumbitch as he goes by.
Revenge fantasies and headphones. Most of my hatred is for inconsiderate co-workers who talk loudly near me when I’m trying to get work done, or the power-tripping security guard in our building. Headphones really help, but when I can’t put them on, I fantasize about someone shutting their yapper for them. That makes me smile.
I don’t know. I put my fucking fist through the wall like a normal person.
Anger is a drive. A form of energy.
First I figure out what I’m angry about. If I’m just angry in general because it’s one of those days where absolutely nothing goes right, I sit down and play a video game that involves mindless button smashing for a while. Or I put on headphones and listen to very loud music for a while. I just find something to spend the energy on, and eventually it goes away.
If it’s something that’s truly bad, and I’m angry because it’s wrong and needs to stop, then I try to let the anger drive me into doing something useful. Speak out against injustices, extricate myself from the situation, whatever needs to be done. Sometimes, I just sit down and write something that outlines exactly what I think is wrong and what ought to be done about it, and then release it into the wild somewhere. Someone will read it, maybe they’ll think the same.
The point is, anger is not itself an evil thing. It’s how you use it, and whether you can channel it, that determines whether it does harm or good.
Post.
This is pretty much exactly how I see it. I get angry, then ask myself why I’m angry. Once I pinpoint the true emotion, I deal with that, instead of the anger. So, I deal with anger by analyzing it. That act in itself usually takes the edge off and I ‘get over it’ pretty quick. Drives my husband crazy.
Yeah, this. It comes over me in a big wave of pure nasty. It makes me angry at myself; it harms my self-image.
And I harbor it, and nurse it, and obsess over it for months. It will come upon me in the middle of the night, and I’ll helplessly go over the event that triggered it, in a nasty cycle of repetitive gloom.
After a while, it erodes away and is mostly gone, although echoes can come back to irk me from events of the far distant past.
Not pleasant, and I judge myself very harshly for it. But what is there to do?