Depression • Alcoholism • Addictions • Marital Relations • Stress and Anxiety • Coping with Crisis • Children/Family Issues • Sexual Abuse

Anger

Human beings are greatly challenged in their stewardship of aggression and sensuality. These features of the human condition are primary sources for both blessings and curses.

The right expression of anger can help mature relationships by increasing understanding and asserting important values of the participants. In relationships defined by love and trust, acknowledging anger can increase clarity in communication.

However, anger can reveal our most primitive and immature features when it is expressed as hostility. When anger is expressed in order to diminish the integrity and respect of the other person, when it takes the form of "over powering" the other, and when it destroys communication rather than creating communication, anger has become hostility. Hostility is characterized by antagonism, animosity and ill will. It is destructive to wholesome relationships and brings grief to all parties. This destructiveness is especially evident in relationships where an emotional process escalates to the point of acts of violence. Spouses and children are particularly susceptible to patterns of injury and inhumane care with persons who have explosive impulse control problems and certain personality disorders. While these events often occur in secret and feelings of shame and guilt color the expressions of all parties, let us be clear: this is neither right nor healthy and real change-not the promise of change-is needed.

The family is an inappropriate context for violence, and spouse and child abuse must be permanently terminated. This often means making changes in both the perpetrator and the victim. More often than not, patterns of violence have been learned, and participants have accommodated to assumptions that need to be critiqued and changed. A pastoral counselor can help facilitate this journey. This is hard work, and it is rewarding work. To terminate the cycle of violence and to increase communications of intimacy-including the proper acknowledgement and expression of anger-is a blessing to this generation and to future ones. We can learn positive patterns of communication. We can learn to be angry and sin not.

While conflict and anger are pretty much inevitable in human relationships, our individual capacities to manage our feelings vary greatly. Remember this, you can change, and if you have had problems in managing your anger or in being victimized by others' anger, this pattern need not prevail. You can change. Call your local pastoral counseling center, and set an initial appointment with a staff member to open this difficult subject for review and change. You may salvage many relationships.

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