By Marty Brenner

Anger gave your prehistoric ancestors the courage and strength to kill very large, very scary prey. This powerful emotion causes a cascade of physiological changes that make you strong enough, quick enough to defend yourself when you are in serious trouble. Anger puts the fight in the fight-or-flight reflex humans rely on when in mortal danger. Modern man doesn’t have to struggle against saber-toothed tigers anymore, but he does have to find a way to control stress in his life so he doesn’t burst into a fit of anger during dinner with his family every night.

Ideally, you build a family unit on a foundation of love, where two parents engage in adult love and lavish parental love upon their children. Humans typically associate love with the desire to provide comfort and happiness. When you love someone, you want to take care of them and give them nice things.

While this sounds nice and easy in theory, it takes a herculean effort to provide a nice home, decent clothing, healthy food and emotional support in this modern world. One or both parents must leave the confines of the warm, comfortable home to battle traffic, deal with an unreasonable boss and impossible workload to earn a paycheck that doesn’t quite cover the bills.

The modern world is filled with unnatural, man-made stresses like working long hours in a factory or sitting on a freeway for hours, and there are very few ways to vent frustrations between the stressful workplace and the comfortable confines of your own home. There is little choice but to transport the negative emotions from the outside world into what should be the positively-charged environment of a loving family home.

When you do arrive home from a stressful day at work, with your emotional resources depleted and in need of replenishment, you need your family to love and appreciate your epic and stressful battle. It feels good when your family acknowledges your hard work and valiant efforts. Conversely, it feels terrible when, despite your best efforts, you slip further and further behind in the bills and no one in the family seems to care.

Your parents and family taught you how to deal with stress and anger from the time you were an infant. You observed your parents’ reaction to the misbehavior of siblings and suffered the consequences when you acted inappropriately. You also watched how your parents expressed and repressed their own negative emotions. Children are programmed to deal with problems in nearly the same way as their parents had. Chances are, if your parents could not deal with stress and anger, you and your siblings will struggle as well.

You carry these anger management tools from the confines of your family home into the workplace, and you will introduce external, stressful influences into your home. You teach your child how to manage his own anger in the face of stress, based on what your parents taught you. Your kid may never have to slay a saber-toothed tiger, but she will have to learn how to deal with her anger caused by stressful, modern life.

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