Anger is a very common and natural emotion that everyone experiences regularly throughout their lifetime. However, anger can spike and become intense and difficult to manage, this is when it can have negative consequences on both in the short-term and long-term. If struggling with anger management is something you can relate to, there are several skills and tools you can use to manage anger spikes and express your true feeling effectively.
Anger is one of the emotions most people would put in their list of fundamental feelings that they, and most others, would experience regularly. There are entire treatment modalities and services specifically dedicated to anger management that help educate and coach individuals in recognizing anger triggers and reducing the spikes in distress in the moment. This does lead to the idea that anger is one of the most common emotions that people do struggle with in ways that directly effects their lives. Though anger is a very strong feeling and one of the ways we may choose to express how we feel in many situations in our lives, it was during my start as a therapist that I was taught, and then reaffirmed through my experiences, that anger almost always comes second. This is means that it is rarely a primary emotion and is often then referred to as a secondary emotion. A secondary emotion refers to a feeling one has about another already existing feeling. It is here that the iceberg idea begins.
