There are eleven things you should know about your anger before you can adequately recognize and own that your anger is maladaptive.

If we feel frustrated, resentful or defiant, the three types of anger, we are more likely to become hyper-aroused. If we are tired or hungry, anxious or stressed, we are more prone to react in an angry fashion.

Anger is most often externalized, projected directly onto the object (person, place or thing) that we deem as a threat to our sense of self or are sources of blocked needs or goals. Additionally, it can be displaced onto something or someone else that symbolizes the original source of threat to oneself (ie: kicking the dog after getting yelled at or reprimanded by the boss), resulting in significantly damaging relationships.

Assessing one’s anger requires both identifying and overcoming triggers for his or her anger. If we tend to hold our feelings inside rather than talk them out, our hidden anger becomes “intrapunative,” projected onto oneself and likely to have a variety of behavioral, physical and psychological consequences and symptoms associated with depression.

The underlying seething anger experienced by many people can have complex beginnings in the consequences of being raised in a dysfunctional family of origin and the distorted attributions and conditions of worth held by the person because of these early experiences.