A boy was always in a bad mood, he felt anger and hatred very strongly inside him and would fight with his schoolmates. One day his father suggested that he hammer a nail into his bedroom door whenever he argued with a classmate. The boy hammered many nails into the door, but since it cost him a great effort, he stopped arguing with his classmates.
The father suggested that he pull out a nail for every day that he was not angry, and the boy did so. But the father showed him the marks left by the nails on the door and said: never forget, anger and hatred leave marks on our hearts.
“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
-Mark Twain-
Anger and hatred as a problem
A person can feel anger and hatred as a reaction of irritation or rage caused by the indignation of feeling that their rights have been violated. We have all felt indignant at some point because something unfair has happened in our environment (a politician who has acted fraudulently, a woman who has been mistreated) and this indignation in the face of injustice is worthy of respect.
But the problem arises when anger and hatred are used as a cover for our fear of something we have done wrong. In these cases, when indignation no longer has the objective of reacting to an injustice, it becomes a simple manifestation of ego, which demonstrates the impossibility of controlling and managing our emotions correctly .
Anger and its causes
According to Raymon Novaco , an expert in anger psychology, anger is an emotion that has an important communicative function because it allows us to express our negative emotions, but it is often confused with aggression, which is a behavior. The boundary between the two is sometimes complicated.
Novaco argues that there are four essential kinds of provocation that can be the cause of our indignation:
- Frustration or the inability to satisfy a need or desire can generate feelings of anger, such as when a person does not show up for an appointment after receiving a bad grade on an exam.
- Irritating events such as a noise upstairs that keeps us awake, or a key we have lost and cannot find, can cause anger.
- Verbal or non-verbal provocations, if we take them personally, can make us angry. A sarcastic comment from a friend. A car that passes us at high speed and uses its horn.
- Lack of correctness and injustice, such as inappropriate criticism from someone towards us or an unjust event such as someone being killed violently, can be other causes of anger.
Symptoms and consequences of anger and hatred
Behind anger and hatred we can find low self-esteem, insecurity, emotional immaturity, egocentrism, impatience, low tolerance or frustration. Behind excessive and uncontrolled anger , there is always a child (an immature and thoughtless being), frustrated and fearful, according to psychologist Bernabé Tierno who, to free himself from his own fear, encourage himself and scare the other person, uses indignation, fury and destructive violence.
It may be a 16-year-old teenager or an adult of 50 or 70 years old, whose fears lead him to behave like a 3-year-old child, capricious and fearful, who gets angry because a toy has been taken away from him. Anger is the armor with which a person can protect himself from the helplessness of sometimes not having his wishes fulfilled.
“Anger is a poison that one takes hoping that another will die.”
-William Shakespeare-
The anger and hatred that a person develops can have important consequences such as superficial relationships with other people or those based on dominance , the need for obedience, guilt and remorse, loneliness , lack of empathy with other people, and the belief of always being in possession of the truth.
How to act in front of an angry person
When we are the target of someone else’s anger and hatred, it is best to distance ourselves , but sometimes this is not possible and we can take some simple steps to prevent that person’s anger and hatred from getting to us:
- Don’t let him attack you whenever he wants.
- Don’t waste time contradicting him.
- Remember that you are the strong one and the one who shouts is the weak one.
- If the situation is getting out of hand, get out of it and come back for joint reflection when things have calmed down.
“Anyone can get angry, that is easy. But getting angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way is not within everyone’s reach and is not easy.”
-Aristotle-