Many believe that they need to control their anger. While it is true that you need to control your emotional responses around people, some tend to believe that controlling your anger means stifling yourself. All emotions should be felt and experienced naturally, if you do not do this you will end up hurting yourself because emotional repression can lead to mental aberrations and even ill health.

For many of us anger is a very powerful emotion. All emotions are energy, energy that is supposed to be naturally used to take action and create change, and anger is perhaps one of the most powerful that we have. In order to learn to manage anger, you must begin by realizing that you cannot suppress this powerful emotion. You must allow yourself to feel this emotion completely and to be able to use this emotion and the power of this emotion to create positive change in your life.

I think what people don’t really realize is the fact that they have far more control over themselves than they realize. Most believe that once they start to experience anger, they are basically lost to a primitive impulse the will take over them (and usually does because this is what they believe) and will make them do violent and silly things. If you believe that anger is such a powerful and primitive emotion, then you will be scared by this emotion whenever you feel it and you will suppress this emotion. If you suppress this emotion, it will become stronger and stronger until eventually you will explode in a violent fit that will indeed be negative and unproductive.

First and foremost start to believe right now that you have far more control over yourself than you give yourself credit for. Secondly, stop suppressing your anger when it presents itself. By suppressing this anger you suppress natural physical activity and emotions that can easily transform a situation that is not to your liking. By experiencing these emotions right away and expressing them, you get the problem ‘in the bud’ as it were. If you don’t act naturally and suppress your anger, you don’t take action, you don’t even provide those facial cues that show another person that you are not happy with the situation, this means that the problem that you have is not fixed. This can only continue so long and it will eventually lead to you blowing up in a huge emotional outburst.

Many believe that if you don’t suppress your emotions you will commit some kind of travesty like the ones that we have seen lately where people go crazy and they start shooting others. You must realize that people that do this are people that have been repressing what they have been feeling for a very long time. People that have not found any other way to express the anger that they feel and the frustration that builds over time. These people believe that their anger is to powerful and that if they expressed even a little bit of it, they will commit some kind of terrible crime. As a result, they suppress themselves and what they feel. Eventually the suppression builds to a boiling point and it is further compounded by the growing belief that they are powerless to change their current situation. Sooner or later these people blow up and they end up either hurting themselves or hurting others.

If you would naturally express your emotions when you feel them, you would not suppress feelings and actions that could solve your problem right away. If you believe that you can’t express your emotions in front of others, then I suggest that you find some kind of outlet for these emotions when you are by yourself. You could for example get yourself a punching bag and beat it, screaming and yelling out your frustrations. In this way if you let your emotions happen naturally, you will end up discovering the reason for your great anger, however obvious or not so obvious it might have been to you before. Yell into a pillow, stomp, rage. Learn to express your anger and you will find great relief.

By learning to express your anger in this way, either privately or more naturally around those around you, you will discover the power that anger has to change a situation to your benefit. There is no need to start screaming and yelling like a half crazed monkey, that internal power that you feel when you get angry can be channeled and focused. You can see this when a very strong leader is giving a speech and even though he becomes worked up, he is still able to focus that energy into his message. If you can manage to focus your anger in such a manner, you can use the power of your natural emotions not only to change yourself but to also change those around you.

By expressing your anger in appropriate ways, you let others know how strongly you feel about something. You let them know how intensely you feel about the situation and how important it is to you. Getting too angry to quickly can numb those people that you are trying to communicate with and this is not constructive in any kind of communication. If you do want to use your anger in a conscious manner, learn to measure your output in order to get the best results.

Be more natural and express yourself and your emotions more naturally. You will discover that if you express yourself more naturally in every situation, you will not suppress your natural self and you will become far more understood and respected by others. You will not feel so powerless and as a result you will not burst out in violent aggression that is usually the result of a feeling of complete powerlessness over a situation.