Anger

"Speak when you are angry--and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret." - Laurence J. Peter

Don't you hate it when you have said something and then made you feel bad after saying it? But then after feeling bad, you're glad you've said it because it made you release the anger and pain you feel inside? It's confusing I know, BUT it happens!


We all feel hurt or irritated when someone or something obstructs our needs or desires. Anger, though, is not truly an emotion. In its technical sense, anger refers to the desire to “get even with”—that is, to take revenge on—the cause of the hurt.

The truth is, anger may be a “natural”—that is, a commonly occurring—social reaction to hurt and insult, yet being natural doesn’t make it good for us. Sure, “natural” foods are commonly advertised as being healthy and good for us. Poisons, for example, are also natural, and poisons, by definition, are deadly.

And so there are far better ways to cope with hurt and insult than with anger, because anger itself acts like a poison in your own heart that ultimately degrades the quality of your own life as much as it hurts the life of another person.

So the FIRST STEP in learning a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult is simply to acknowledge that you feel hurt.

This is not as easy as it sounds.