We've all been there: Anger

Anger. We've all been there--either as the person getting angry or the person who suffers someone else's anger and it's never pleasant. My son, Danny who blogs here posted about an experience he had in the grocery store with someone who was (inappropriately) angry. It's been picked up by Tricycle and now Elephant Journal where he linked to a poem by Jill McDonough that I sent him. (WARNING: Strong language used in the poem.) I learned about this powerful work from a Rachel Maddow Tweet. It gets right to the heart of the fact that anger and fear are very closely related.

I was brought up to regard anger as "not ladylike" and because it was a loss of control, it was doubly verboten in my family. (My dear husband describes my family gathering as a "carnival of control freaks.") Anger often brought me to tears which made explaining the cause of it difficult. In a recent study, angry women were regarded as less competent. A 1993 study of women and anger found some interesting correlations between anger expression and health.

How are you affected by anger or being in an angry situation?

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