Anger is best defined as an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation, to intense fury and rage. It is a perfectly natural and potentially productive human emotion; a response to a threat that inspires powerful, often aggressive feelings reactions, which allow us to fight back and defend ourselves. As such, in the days of prehistoric man, experiencing anger was critical to our survival.
However in more modern times, we usually feel anger when we are being hurt; our boundaries are being violated; our needs are being ignored; or, during numerable other scenarios where our expectations are not being met. In these situations we express anger as a means to regain control of the situation and in that regard; it is a perfectly natural state.
Most people experience a healthy dose of anger many times during their lives. However anger becomes a problem when it is experienced too frequently, too intensely, or for long periods of time.
•Too Frequently – most people respond to difficult everyday situations by experiencing relatively healthy emotions such as stress, frustration, hurt or even fear; they reserve anger for the really serious situations in life. However for some of us, we tend to react to everyday situations by immediately getting angry and it becomes an all too frequent response, affecting our relationships, our careers and the quality of our lives.
•Too Intensely – even when most people get angry, the level of anger is usually restricted to raising the voice and expressing a few choice words. However for some of us we find our anger is much more intense, and when we get court up in it, it leads to unnecessary levels of aggression and quite possibly violence.
•Too Long – and even when ordinary people get angry to a more intense level, as a result of venting the anger, they usually find it subsides within a short space of time. However for some of us, once we’re into the cycle, it’s difficult to get out of. Even after the situation is over, we may stay caught in a loop, mulling over agitated thoughts and images for no productive purpose, leaving us with a lingering sense of anger, victimization, and disappointment that permeates us and those around us for hours, possibly days.
And when we experience anger that’s too frequent, too intense or too long lasting, there are harmful effects on our health — because anger involves the activation of many physical arousal systems, anger causes a very real strain on your body. Recent scientific studies have found that recurrent anger contributes to a number of serious illnesses, including heart disease and hypertension.
For those of us who realise we’re hurting and pushing away the people in our lives, damaging our family, social and work relationships, not to mention our health, there is a plethora of self-help material out there on the web.
But do they work? Well that’s something that you’re going to have decide for yourself. But here’s the point, the primary source of anger related issues is the sub or unconscious mind. Anger is not a conscious response — if you could consciously decide to stop getting angry, wouldn’t you simply decide to do so?
The reality is that this would be a little like asking your conscious mind to forget how to ride a bike. You couldn’t could you, even if you tried? And that’s the point, whilst all these self-help strategies may have some merit, they do not deal with the real source of the issue, they do not access the unconscious mind, the reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that sit outside of our conscious awareness and influence all of our behaviours and experiences.
Through hypnosis, we can access the unconscious mind and harness its extreme power to reprogram habitual patterns of behaviour, such as responding angrily to everyday situations.
Hypnosis bypasses the conscious mind and creates an alternative state of consciousness in which attention is focused away from the present reality. Rather like day dreaming, attention can then be focussed towards particular images, thoughts, perceptions, feelings, motivations and behaviours which will help change our habitual responses and learnt behaviours.
Our body already has natural mechanisms to handle stress and regulate emotions such as anger, but occasionally they need help in operating properly. Hypnosis helps you do just that – it enlists the help of your unconscious mind in making the necessary long term changes for you to be free of anger, allowing you to be altogether more relaxed and in control in all those situations in which you used to lose control.
Originally posted 2009-04-06 20:44:56.
