4 Basic Concepts
These 4 Basic Concepts are essential to Humanistic Interaction. They can help you to deal with anger within yourself, your co-workers, and others.
1. Anger is an emotion: What is an emotion? Most people say,
“it’s a feeling.” Although it is true that we feel emotions all day long, and much of the night.
Let’s try this definition:
- An emotion is a state of being, mind and body, that you find yourself in, in reaction to whatever you are paying attention to at a given moment.
- It is a state of being, not an action or sensation.
- It may inspire an action or be sensed in a variety of ways but it is not something that you do or necessarily even notice.
- Your attention may be on your immediate environment, or within your own mind, in the past, present, or future.
- A word like "anger" is a label given to the state you are in during an interaction.
- Emotions tell you something about yourself and your experience, or what you are attending to.
Every emotion gives you both wisdom, and energy.
The wisdom of anger is “I need to protect myself”. When I feel anger, that
is the general message. The energy is to "attack".
2. Anger is natural and spontaneous: We do not choose our emotions nor are we responsible for them.
We are responsible for some of the behavior that is stimulated by emotion and accountable for our behavior, as this makes sense in our social system.
We can work on ourselves so that the same triggers do not produce the same emotional reaction over time but, in any given moment we do not control what we feel.
We can to some degree and in a variety of ways express or suppress our emotions but we can’t choose not to have them.
3. Anger is your "fight reaction": It is the “fight” part of your
fight/flight/freeze nervous system that is your emergency response department! Anger is the “sword” that nature gives you (and every other creature) at birth.
4. Anger is always your "2nd emotion": No environmental
triggers make you angry. I almost never say “always” or “never” as a psychologist, however this is one of those exceptions.
