Truisms

In English, we're asked to pick a truism, and write about the believing side of it as well as the doubter side. There were three from this list that was given to us that interested me, but the one that popped out at me was this: Expressing anger is necessary.

Believer's Side:

The title says it all. It's necessary because if we do not express our anger, it will only bottle up inside of us. When a little incident happens to push us over the edge just a little bit, all that bottled up anger will explode out of us like a shaken up bottle of soda. In my observations, I've seen this happen to fellow friends, family members, and even myself. This especially happens with my father. On multiple occasions, he has gone to and come home from work seeming fine. He doesn't talk about his day much, so we all assume everything is fine. What we don't know is what all is happening at his work place. From Monday morning to Friday afternoon, everything could have gone wrong. He doesn't communicate this with us, so as I said before, we think everything is fine. So it's a Friday night, the evening going along as it normally would. Him coming home, relaxing a little bit, and then preparing dinner. My mother goes into the kitchen to try and help and notices the beans on the stove have been cooked enough. "Honey, the beans are ready, would you like me to take them off the stove?" And he blows up. Not because she offered to help, but because she "doesn't like his cooking" or because "she doesn't know what she's doing." (No hitting, just verbal yelling.) So he goes to bed and leaves dinner to be cooked by my mom. If he were to have expressed his anger little by little through-out the week, this incident would have not occurred. He could have expressed his anger by complaining to my mother what has been happening at work, and none of it would have been bottled up.

Doubter's Side:

Expressing anger is absolutely NOT necessary. Whenever anger is expressed it hurts many things: people, people's feelings, pets, objects of value, etc. Anger is a negative feed that is not needed in peoples' lives. If you think about it, anger is basically stress. Stress can be let out in different ways other than shouting and hitting. Meditation is a solution. So is shopping (for those with a loaded bank account), cooking, listening or performing music, getting a massage, so on and so forth. In my experience, I've learned to control my angry outbursts into harmless stress releases. When I was a kid, if I didn't get something I wanted, I would throw a tantrum (which a lot of people have done), or how if I'm on the road and someone cuts me off, I would tailgate and flip them the middle finger. I've realized that these actions don't really help the situation, instead they make it worse. So if now I don't get what I want, or some idiot driver make a bad decision, I release that stress with music. I'll sing and listen to my iPod. It doesn't hurt anything or anyone at all (unless you're next to me while I begin to sing). Whenever my mom is stressed, she makes quilts or reads a book. There are actions that can be done so anger is not present and everyone is happy.