From the earliest ages, most of us are taught to view painful or difficult emotions like diseases-foreign invaders out to harm us that should be quickly eliminated or at least ignored.

Just think about your own childhood: How often were you told to cheer up, calm down, put on a happy f...

Suppose you ask your co-worker to fix something in a presentation you're working on together and they snap back at you with: "Well, I've had to fix plenty of your mistakes!" There's anger functioning to alleviate some feelings of embarrassment, for example, at their mistake.

Once you learn...

See, what most people don't realize is that anger is actually a positive emotion . We think of it as bad or negative because people who are angry often end up doing negative things. But if you really think about it, the feeling of anger ...

• Behind every assessment of "you're dumb" is an implication of "I'm smart."
• Behind every judgment of "that's wrong" is an implication of "I know what's right."

Once you understand that anger actually feels good, you can start to see why people so easily get angr...

Of course, if someone else's aggression is so extreme that you're in danger, you should seek professional assistance or simply call the police.

If you see a therapist or counselor, they can be a resource for helping you make a plan moving forward. Your primary care physician can as well. T...

This why high-anger situations tend to quickly devolve into unproductive shouting matches. We pour fuel on the fire when we criticize or judge people for their emotional experience of anger.

Then, to make matters worse, we don't really deal with the other person's aggression in a smart, co...

What we're not not is how to listen to our emotions. Few of us learn that rather than giving in to or avoiding how we feel, there's a third option: you can calmly listen to them, consider what they're "saying," and then make an informed choice about how to proceed.

The best way to think ab...

The first thing to understand about anger is that it's fundamentally different than aggression.

Anger is the emotion we feel when we believe we've been wronged. Aggression , on the other hand, is the act of expressing our anger, mostly in terms of what we do and say.

The point is, it's very easy to start telling ourselves stories in our head about other people's anger and what it means. And usually these stories aren't super objective, in large part because they tend to be self-serving.

Once you've built up a story in your head about why their anger is...

The first thing to understand about anger is that it's fundamentally different than aggression.

Anger is the emotion we feel when we believe we've been wronged. Aggression , on the other hand, is the act of expressing our anger, mostly in terms of what we do and say.

Here's an example:

Suppose your wife yells at you the minute you step through the door because you're half an hour late and now she's late for a meeting. Almost instantaneously, your thoughts and self-talk start spinning a tale about what her anger means:

God, why does she have to b...

• Instead of criticizing people's anger, learn to validate it. Let them know that you understand that they're angry and that it's okay for them to feel that way. Many, many anger issues will resolve with that simple step.
• Set and enforce clear boundari...

When your spouse, for example, gets angry and ends up shouting and berating you, what's the consequence? Most people respond to aggression in two standard ways:

• They get aggressive back. They shout back, they point out the other person's mistakes, dredge up pa...

How might you respond?

First, start by validating their anger and frustration. You might say something like:

• Telling ourselves that if we had studied more we would have gotten a better grade makes us feel in control.
• Blaming your manager makes you feel less guilty about the fact that you've been slacking off lately at work.

At time, we can harness our self-talk and storytelli...

Second, this storytelling is self-serving. The fact that these stories you're telling make you look like the good guy and her look like the bad guy are going to make you feel better. And the fact that it makes you feel better is a major conflict of interest when it comes to being objective. Maybe...

• I knew I should have studied for those extra three hours instead of going out with friends.
• My manager's just overly critical. She's always picking on me and singling me out.

In both cases, we tell a story as a way of making sense of what's happenin...

• Really, she's angry ALL THE TIME?
• It's not a big deal to you, but have you really considered all the reasons why it might actually be a pretty big deal to her?
• Because she yells at you that means she has anger issues? Do you even know what anger issues mean...

We crave the security and comfort that comes from believing things have an inherent purpose and order to them. And we often impose our own purpose and order on things by telling stories.

Think of a time when you performed poorly at something, maybe getting a C on a test in school or a poor...

Rather than theorizing about their anger based on assumptions and self-serving instincts, try to be a bit more factual. One option is to try to understand the function of their anger as we discussed in number 2 above.

Another option is to simply catalogue the facts of the situation: Wh...

Differential reinforcement isn't a cure-all. But in certain situations it can be a game-changer. In any case, it's a helpful way to think more carefully about the patterns of anger and aggression in your life.

Dealing with other people's anger can be a challenging and sometimes frightening...

• Insults, sarcasm, put-downs, shouting, and other forms of aggressive speech.
• Physical acts of aggression from slamming doors to physical abuse or shunning.
• The stress, loneliness, anxiety, guilt, awkwardness, or any number of painful feelings that often follow from a major ...

In short, our default tendency is to be harsh with other people's anger and either be overly accommodating or equal harsh with their aggression.

The solution is to flip your strategy. When confronted with an angry partner or co-worker, for example, you want to validate their anger and put ...

But suppose simple validation doesn't work, and they respond with something like:

This is aggression that needs to have firm boundaries put on it.

Here's how to get started:

This distinction between anger and aggression is critical because we need to handle each very differently. Unfortunately, our instincts for how to do this tend to be dead wrong.

Instinctively, we tend to get defensive in the face of anger and say (or think) things like:

Furthermore, understanding the function of someone's anger makes it easier to acknowledge and validate their anger like we discussed in number 1 above.

The next time you find yourself confronted with someone else anger, ask yourself: What function could their anger be serving? What doe...