Management of Anger

I am Anirudh Shrivastava, a 35 year old middle manager working in a textile multinational company. I am in the danger of losing my job and also being shunned by my family because of uncontrollable anger. I have a very short fuse and am very quick to get angry at people for the most trivial reasons. I start shouting and abusing at the slightest provocation. Everyone avoids me and today I am socially isolated. I have no friends as I am quick to criticize and backbite frequently. In the office also no one is ready to work with me and I find myself to be very lonely. This furthers my anger. I want to reduce this anger. Please help.

Anger is a defense against helplessness. It may seem that you become helpless more often and find that the situation is out of your control. Once you start feeling frustrated, you get angry at the fact that you are unable to get your desires fulfilled and then as a reaction the body gets tense and the anger reaction starts. The management of anger is quite complex. Firstly, you will have to form at least 1-2 loving relationships in life. Love is the most protective factor against anger. Love may actually foster a lot of patience in your life. You may learn to be accepting and this may help you decrease the anger. It may be difficult initially as you will be tempted to take the relationships as a mechanism for your service than actually share the relationship.

You will find that the old relationships will be prejudiced towards you and take even one show of anger as a relapse to your old ways, therefore you will be tempted to find new ones. The second method is to engage yourself in activities that build a lot of patience, like religious activities that involve no pressure on you to perform. You may be able to look at things in a far more non-judgmental manner in a religious setting. Thirdly, you will have to look into your expectations from life in order to understand your anger.

It may be possible that your expectations may be exceeding what reality can offer you. It may be difficult for you to accept that your fantasies of life may not be realized. This may cause you to blame reality for the problem instead of accepting your limitations. Behavioural methods have also been used to control anger. They include biofeedback methods, counting numbers before you actually react to a situation, distracting yourself through visualization methods, relaxation techniques and the like. It may be entirely possible that all these methods may help you at a certain level only. You may also require psychiatric help too.

You might need to take medicines as well as psychotherapy. Anger may be a part of depression and antidepressant medications may help. More likely medications that help are the antipsychotics like haloperidol and olanzepine or anti-aggressive medications like sodium valproate and carbamezapine. Psychotherapy may also help you by establishing a setting for you to examine the reasons of your anger and to learn better coping methods. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy will explore your anger reasons while cognitive behavioural methods are better suited for the anger management.

There are a lot of other methods that focus on decreasing the stress in your life so that the performance pressure decreases. Firstly, you should pick up a hobby, preferably a sport. This would help you channelize your aggressive tendencies in a more benign manner. Secondly, you should exercise a lot, this will give you much more control over your body and over your muscles and impulsive anger.

Thirdly, you should eat good food and go out more often. This will help you to get exposed to open spaces and help you diffuse your anger. Having looked at all these factors, the biggest factor will be how much you suffer because of the anger and how much you value what you are losing. You seem to suffer from this problem from years and it is only now that you have sought help for this, so it might be a big loss facing you which has prompted you. If what you are losing is very precious, then the need to control anger will be more intense. So, it is better to value your family and your job because they will help you settle down more than anything else.