How Can I Manage My Anger?

Take our Anger Management Test

Find a therapist to heal from anger

Anger is a feeling that drives behavior. It signals to ourselves and others that something is wrong.

Distress can quickly pile up to anger, past what we can regulate. Even excitement can trigger it.

Anger is contagious, so physical punishment often angers the child, the parent, and onlookers alike

Try curiosity: What set off the anger, why now? Distract youngsters with games or songs.

Anger—we have all felt it, heard it, and seen it in ourselves and others. In this discussion, I want to look at the role anger has in physical punishment. I suggest that by better understanding anger, we have a better chance of understanding and decreasing physical punishment. So, first, we will explore what anger is from a variety of perspectives, and then focus on its role in physical punishment.

Anger seems so often to be misunderstood. Anger is a feeling. Feelings cause behaviors.

Feelings (or “affects”) are reactions to internal and external stimuli, contributing to our motivations, behaviors, communication, and emotional development.

According to the late psychologist Silvan Tomkins, anger is one of our nine basic feelings. The others are interest and enjoyment (positive feelings); surprise (resetting); and distress, fear, shame, disgust (reaction to unpleasant tastes), and dissmell (reaction to unpleasant odors) (negative feelings) (Tomkins, 1991, Holinger, 2025).

Anger, like all feelings, is a signal—to oneself and to others. Anger could be termed an SOS signal, a call for help: “Something is wrong here!” As Tomkins notes, “All the negative affects trouble human beings deeply… Anger is problematic above all” (1991, p.111).

And as Aristotle noted in The Nicomachean Ethics in 340 BC, “Anyone can get angry—that is easy… but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy.”

Anger is linked to the affect of distress. Everyone has a stimulus threshold that can trigger distress and then anger.........

© Psychology Today