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Is Your Temper Replacing the Niceties in Your Relationship? 

What impresses you about a person on a first date? That he/she is pleasant, courteous, and calm. Now, imagine your date in a not-so-pleasant situation. Do you think he/she will be able to retain the pleasant composure then? You may not be able to judge that in the first or the first few dates, but you will definitely know if you get into a relationship with him/her. Anger comes naturally to everyone some time or the other; the reasons may vary. Now, one’s attitude is reflected in the way one handles the anger.

How is your relationship? Do you or your partner get angry at each other very often? Do you add ‘short-tempered’ in your social networking profiles? Having a temper is nothing to boast about. And you will understand that when you face the repercussions. Uncontrolled anger will not end your relationship in a day but it definitely starts spoiling your relationship gradually.

While talking about anger management and relationships, Dr. Marty Tashman discusses five steps that will help you deal with anger.

  1. Rate yourself on Dr. Marty’s “Anger Scale”
  2. Step back from the angering event and calm yourself.
  3. Understand the anger’s origin
  4. Think about how these angry feelings have left you with a sense of loss of control
  5. Develop a plan about how you can regain control.

If you are wondering what Dr. Marty ‘s “Anger Scale” is, it is just a way you rate your anger. 1 represents mild anger while 10 represents out-of-control anger.

If you want a healthy and happy relationship, you have got to control your temper. If you think the problem is with your partner, try to make him/her see reason when he/she is calm. You can even seek anger management counseling if you or your partner cannot handle your respective tempers on your own.

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This article was written by Staff Writer, and posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 5:28 am. It is filed under Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Is Your Temper Replacing the Niceties in Your Relationship?”

  1. You may think your anger isn’t extreme, or that you don’t get angry, but if you’re like many men, anger is affecting you more negatively than you realize. All of us, myself included, need to take the destructive aspects of anger seriously and change some of our habits.

    Here are some interesting facts about extreme anger from the article Why So Angry? published in Men’s Health. Take a minute and see what you can learn.

    *According to a 2006 Harvard study, 10 million adult men in the United States are so angry, they’re sick. In fact, their disease has a name: intermittent explosive disorder, or IED.

    *Previous estimates put the number of IED sufferers in America at less than 0.5 percent of the population. But if the Harvard researchers are correct, almost 1 in 10 adult men routinely display wildly disproportionate aggression, and are so angry that they’re likely to damage property, or threaten or injure others.

    *Considered alone, the symptoms of the disorder are easy to dismiss: a commuter flipping off a fellow driver in a traffic jam, a basketball player charging the stands during an NBA game, the guy I saw a few rows back screaming at the hot-dog vendor because he had no mustard left. But there’s more behind an IED diagnosis than a few isolated acts of rage. “If you’re blowing up a couple of times a week, you probably have the disorder,” says Emil Coccaro, M.D., a leading anger researcher at the University of Chicago. “The average person shouldn’t be having arguments and temper tantrums.”

    *”Anger is like cigarette smoking,” says Howard Kassinove, Ph.D., an anger researcher at Hofstra University. “In the short run, you feel good. In the long run, you’re more likely to die of heart disease or stroke. People think it’s macho to be angry. It’s more macho to be alive.”

    *Most anger is productive. In Anger: Taming the Beast, therapist Reneau Peurifoy proposes a three-part test to decide whether your anger is helpful, rather than hurtful: (1) A real threat existed. (2) The level of your anger was proportionate to the threat. (3) Your actions.

    *Dr. Coccaro proposes an easier test to determine whether you should seek help: “Ask yourself: Does it get me into trouble?” he says. “It really is that simple. If people tell you that you have to calm down, or that you have an anger problem, you probably have one.”

    *In fact, more than 30,000 heart attacks each year are triggered by momentary anger, according to a 2004 Harvard study. “People who have a lot of anger invest a lot of energy in trying to control it, and that kind of friction is likely to increase the probability of a heart attack,” says Charles Spielberger, Ph.D., a University of South Florida psychologist who developed the most widely used test to measure anger. “The more intense the anger, the more likely the heart attack.”

    *Other studies have shown that angry men are three times more likely to develop premature cardiovascular disease, six times more likely to have an early heart attack, and three times more likely to have a stroke.

    *In other words, chill or die.

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