Anger Management
A self-help guide
David Tuffley, PhD, M Phil.
Published by Altiora Publications at Smashwords
© Copyright 2012 David Tuffley
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
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Contents
Strong emotion cancels rational thought
Do not worry about what you cannot control
Preface
Anger Management: a Self-Help Guide gives you a fresh perspective on the nature of anger. Once you see it in this new light, it becomes easier to manage. You understand what it is. It will never go away completely since it is part of human nature, but it can be brought under control so that it does not continue to create problems for you or the people around you.
Introduction
Anger is part of the ancient arsenal of survival instincts that we inherited from our evolutionary past. Our ancestral environment was a dangerous place in which people struggled to survive and anger got us ready to fight for our lives.
In your world today, are there still dangers lurking around every corner and behind every bush? I hope not. More likely, you live in a more-or-less civilised society that has solved many of the challenges to survival that faced our ancestors. For many of us though, our survival instincts are still on high alert, as though we are back in the jungle or on the savannah and predators were never far away.
If we live in a civilised world, why do we still get angry? Our circumstances may have changed, but our basic natures have not. We are very similar, genetically-speaking, to our ancestors from 100,000 years ago. If you took a man or woman from that far distant time, cleaned them up, gave them a good haircut and dressed them in modern clothes, they would be indistinguishable from anyone else on the street.
Part of the reason for people’s anger in the modern world is that it is a complicated, crowded, often confusing place. We evolved in extended family groups of less than a hundred, often much less. Large crowds feel threatening to many people for this reason.
Modern life requires us to behave ourselves for the good of society, but the crowded, complex nature of modern life is itself the cause of primitive behaviour. We are not supposed to feel that way, but we do. It makes us feel that there must be something wrong with us.
The Seven Deadly Sins
I must emphasise that this eBook takes a cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology view. It does not take a religious view. There is one example from religion that is helpful though; the Seven Deadly Sins. It illustrates very well the point that our primitive natures were once useful for survival, but these no longer serve us well in the modern world.
As we know, the Seven Deadly Sins prescribe certain behaviours as morally wrong. Yet these were once useful for survival; anger, greed, laziness, pride, lust, envy and gluttony. It is one of the functions of religion to prescribe how not to behave in society. This example is from Roman Catholicism, but all religions make similar prescriptions.
Anger warns us of impending attack, and gets you ready to fight.
Greed makes us acquire excessive quantities of the things we need to survive in case there is a shortage later.
Sloth or laziness conserves energy. Food was scarce in the Pleistocene with its repeated Ice Ages; people would have been cold and hungry if not starving for much of the time. Survival would have depended on conserving one’s energy for the high-dividend activities like hunting or defence.
Pride enhances self-esteem. High self-esteem improves survivability because it leads us to value ourselves and therefore be more likely to claim and fight for the resources we need to survive. Humans are social creatures who like to live in hierarchical groups. Pride allows us to claim a higher place in the hierarchy, with all the privileges that goes with it.