FIVE STEPS IN DEALING WITH ANGER

In his book, The Other Side of Love1, Gary Chapman sets out five steps to deal with anger.

1. Consciously acknowledge to yourself that you are angry.
   
   This might not be as easy as it sounds because we often don’t Recognize that we’re angry because it’s not socially acceptable to be angry in most circumstances.
   
   When you get that sudden rush of energy and your eyes start glaring, Recognize that you’re angry.
   
   
2. Restrain your immediate response.
   
   
3. Locate the focus of your anger.
   
   Look for what triggered your anger. Is your anger proportional to the trigger?
   
   
4. Analyze your options.
   
   If your anger is proportional, think of what options you have to deal with the trigger and the situation.
   
   If your anger is way out of proportion to what the trigger is, then the trigger has actually triggered a deeper wrong that you haven’t dealt with. If you can, take a bit of a break so you can recover your balance and focus on the trigger, not the old wrong, so you can think about options.
   
   
5. Take constructive action.
   
   What you do needs to be proportional to the trigger, appropriate, and, if possible, peace-promoting. Your goal is to stop the attack, to remedy the situation. Attacking back doesn’t accomplish this because you’re usually left with a worse mess than you started with. There are very few wrongs that rise to the level where attacking back in kind is warranted. One of the few exceptions is where you need to attack back and use force to stop one person from killing someone.

When you’ve done what you can, release the wrong because you’ve done what the anger was spurring you to do, to take action and deal with the trigger.

Coming soon: Beyond Anger Management