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This is because what we don't talk about we act out.
You may not act it out in profoundly obvious ways, but it comes out. It
may be in tone of voice, reacting instead of listening, or in a dozen
other ways. It will come out.
Your anger effects others
You are thinking (perhaps hoping) that your anger has not had much of an
effect on those around you. I'm going to ask you to do something that
might be a little threatening. Ask those close to you — your wife, kids,
friends, co-workers — how they believe your anger has affected them.
I bet you will be surprised, embarrassed, perhaps even chagrined by what
you hear.
If you want to confront this stuff head on, also ask those who are
closest to you how they have suffered in response to your anger.
For either question, strap yourself in; you could be in for a heck of a
ride.
Your anger effects you
The surprising thing is that anger doesn't just affect others in a
negative way, it hurts us, too. According to Frederick Buechner:
"Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your
wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your
tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to
the last toothsome morsel of both the pain you are given and the pain
you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The
chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The
skeleton at the feast is you."
Consider the result of this study:
Doctors from Coral Gables compared the efficiency of the heart's pumping
action in 18 men with coronary artery disease to nine healthy controls.
Each of the study participants underwent one physical stress test
(riding an exercise bicycle) and three mental stress tests (doing math
problems in their heads, recalling a recent incident that had made them
very angry, and giving a short speech to defend themselves against a
hypothetical charge of shoplifting). Using sophisticated X-ray
techniques, the doctors took pictures of the subjects' hearts in action
during these tests. For all the subjects,
anger reduced the amount of
blood that the heart pumped to body tissues more than the other tests.
Everyone gets angry. It's what we do with our anger that matters. Once
you become angry, you have three choices about what to do with it:
One is to feed the anger by running the perceived wrong over and over
again in your mind.
Or you can find someone to blame and focus on how they should not have
done what they did.
The more you blame, the more inflamed things get, and the more inflamed
things get, the more you blame. Traffic is a great place to see this
played out.
by :
Jeff Herring
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