There are three kinds of anger.

A momentary and present time expression of anger triggered by an event is the most pure form. Even though there are plenty of other ways to express pain, anger has an important and very specific quality. It assists us in standing up for ourselves by drumming up power from within to draw boundaries when we need them. This type of anger is different because it is proactive and causal, often righteous, and analyzed positively in an anger management course. To stop or go against the flow of anger before the energy is alchemized into a higher state of consciousness, actually suppresses it.

Anger about being at the effect of everything in the world is bred from a victim mind-set and is based in blame and regret. It is often the resultant aftermath of a lifetime of negative beliefs and self-abasement that have never been addressed unless in an anger management course. Clearly, this type of anger will drag us deeper into our traumas and story, rendering us unable to stand up for ourselves, yet it also has the potential to motivate us to blast our way out of the muck. Again, suppressing it here could mean a drop down the ladder into apathy.

Lacking an anger management course, there is the type of anger and rage that presents from angst and resentment. This fear-based varietal comes from seeds soaked in annihilation and is coupled with an undercurrent of dread and terror. Stuck in this place, a person often fights like a caged wild animal to defend. Positioned between victim anger and proactive anger, standing up for ourselves while caught in this place is almost always destructive, though not necessarily wholly negative.

My personal breed of anger is the latter, though I did not come to fully embrace this in myself until fairly recently because I needed an anger management course to survive.

It took a lot of tenacity, willingness and courage on top of the anger management course to see the destructive side of my programming. The side that feels as though it is being annihilated by many people, in most situations, and by the rogue negative energies of the world, certainly did not want to be uncovered because it protected me in my most vulnerable moments. It's been my armor.

Most of us have at least one nagging and addictive emotion we fall back on. And if it's not an emotion, it's a state of mind or body related to an emotion. They are all the same, in a way, and one is just as harmful as the next. Anger just looks more obvious and it's so much less politically correct to walk around angry even after an anger management course than it is to walk around sad or discouraged! Have you ever noticed that people actually like it when you are victimized?

Yet, if you are angry, people steer around you as though you're a mad bull, pawing at the ground. True, if we let it, a righteous flash of anger in the moment can lead to destructive behaviors and eventually full-on rage. That feels dangerous to another person. It can also lead to freedom. Have you freed yourself yet?