We have all fall short of the glory when it comes to flaring up uncontrollably. Although anger is a completely normal human emotion, it can be destructive if not termed.

Abraham Twerski in his ideology gave an in-depth on how we can control our anger.

His Words:

The concept of anger is of three phases. One is somebody provokes me and I feel angry, I don’t have any control over that. There’s another phase of how to react to such anger, do I walk away or do I respond or punch the guy in the face? Any decision I make, that’s my reaction to anger and then the other thing is how long am I going to hold on to that anger, an hour or a day or 22 years right?

However, I give these three phases, three different names. The feeling of anger, I call anger. The reaction to it, I call rage, and the hanging onto the intense emotion is called resentment. I can do nothing about my feeling of anger other than perhaps take some things in perspective.

One of my father’s teachings that helped me a great deal was that when somebody did something which should have provoked anger, my father would say, what he did was so foolish, if only he knew how foolish of what he did, he wouldn’t have done it so you respond by feeling sorry for the person for being such a fool . But if you feel sorry for a person, how can you be mad at him. Pity and anger don’t go together but nevertheless

I can’t control how I feel when provoked but I certainly can control what my reaction is going to be and finally how long I hang on to the resentments.

My greatest lesson came from Alcoholics Anonymous where somebody said harboring resentment is allowing someone who you don’t like to live inside your head without paying any rent and I’m not that kind of guy, this helped me get rid of resentments.

Reacting to anger took me a while to be able to control my rage and then I had to realize that this is part of my being human. Animals react with rage when provoked, as a human being, I’m supposed to be above that, I’m a northern Homo sapiens so I learned how to control my flaring emotions.

If a person keeps things in mind, there are some people who feel guilty for feeling angry especially at a parent. You don’t have a choice okay, the feeling of anger is nothing so if you don’t have a choice there’s no reason to feel guilty about it. How you react now, my suggestion is keep an anger Journal.

Write what happened today , like how you reacted when the provocation occurred. At night you can evaluate your actions towards the hurt and ask if you handled it in the best way you could and the answer becomes a lesson for the next time. I think keeping a journal about anger and how we responded to it is an excellent way of checkmating ourselves because if I am enraged, it doesn’t hurt the other person as much as it hurts me. “