Why do you get angry? What do you think is going on in your head when you lose your temper?
Basically, all emotional responses can be routed back to just 2 – love and fear.
Happiness, joy, pleasure, calm – these are all responses to some thing or person we feel we love. Jealousy, frustration and sadness all stem from fear. Sometimes when we are afraid, we respond with anger.
Now, each person is different, but anger generally comes from the fear of a loss of power or control. We grab hold to a position, outcome or way of being so that we can have some semblance of control.
We’ll be annoyed with a colleague who does things differently because it is not our way of doing it.
We get angry with our spouse who doesn’t follow through because we think they are trying to usurp our power in the relationship.
We’ll be angry with politicians because we believe they have too much control in our outcomes.
The store clerk gets our wrath because their ‘lazy attitude’ is controlling our valuable and ‘limited’ time.
Action – Taking all this into consideration, when you last lost your temper, what might you have been fearing?
Anger doesn’t come from the other person or thing. It is yours to own and understand.