When your biggest Life Achievements occured during times when you were most Angry, does that say anything about you? (addiction, anxiety)

[ragnarkar]

Looking back at my life, I feel the times I've been most productive, focused, perservering, and successful were also the times I genuinely felt most angry. (The anger could be directed at myself, others, or the world/society in general.) If anything, it seems I have a knack for channeling my anger towards productive uses. Conversely, I'm afraid if I become too complacent, I will stop growing as a person.

Beside something obvious and trivial like that I'm motivated by anger, what sort of conclusions can you draw about my psyche from these facts?

[kat949]

Originally Posted by ragnarkar

Looking back at my life, I feel the times I've been most productive, focused, perservering, and successful were also the times I genuinely felt most angry. (The anger could be directed at myself, others, or the world/society in general.) If anything, it seems I have a knack for channeling my anger towards productive uses. Conversely, I'm afraid if I become too complacent, I will stop growing as a person.

Beside something obvious and trivial like that I'm motivated by anger, what sort of conclusions can you draw about my psyche from these facts?

You're determined.. but at the same time, you have unresolved anger.

If anger fuels your motivation to strive for achievement, you're also depending on the anger for your happiness and success.

Even though logically, it may make sense, it really doesn't because you can't relax and your way of coping feeds off of a vicious cycle of not finishing unfinished business.. a sort of running away, avoidance, fear, anxiety.

Keeping busy is a way to deflect your pain, and creates an empty hollow, a void that may never be filled, because nothing will ever be 'enough.' Sorta like an addiction, dependence on motivation to feed off of anger creates an imbalance of true happiness that wavers superficially in the forefront. You need to confront and face your fears, because that's when mid-life crisis occurs and people continue to live in ignorance, because they blindly keep their anger buried deeply inside (stuff like this can also physiologically manifest into psychological stress like alcohol addiction and physical stress like cancer) and they make really poor decisions. So their personal successes become self-defeated because they bury their anger so deeply they act out in ways which are out of character.

Balance is really important in life for a reason.

[silibran]

The anger propels you to get something or things done, by giving you an extra dose of energy.

Yes, this sort of thing has happened to me, although I wouldn't say what I accomplished was my life's greatest achievement.

Somehow, in my case, the anger has to "go" somewhere, and for me, it goes into an energy consuming activity.

[The Postman]

Just make it a healthy competitiveness: but one that is not mean or overly aggressive to others.

[Sugah Ray]

Originally Posted by ragnarkar

Looking back at my life, I feel the times I've been most productive, focused, perservering, and successful were also the times I genuinely felt most angry. (The anger could be directed at myself, others, or the world/society in general.) If anything, it seems I have a knack for channeling my anger towards productive uses. Conversely, I'm afraid if I become too complacent, I will stop growing as a person.

Beside something obvious and trivial like that I'm motivated by anger, what sort of conclusions can you draw about my psyche from these facts?

That you are probably justifying your anger by trying to find positive attributes. Your real fear is probably that anger makes you a bad person so you are trying to convince yourself that you are not a bad person by assigning positive attributes to a negative emotion

Anger is an emotion, it doesn't define who you are but it seems to me(based on your post) that you think it does. Being an angry person is what you think makes you successful, so you are not gonna give up that emotion and the negative behavior associated with that emotion(anger outbursts) because that would make you a failure. No way anger can be bad, right?

We can thank the media for perpetuating this irrational thinking. Most heroes are angry people who are entitled to their anger outbursts because "the truth" or "justice" is on their side. "The end justifies the means" The problem with this thinking is that it is root of all violence in this world. Many wold leaders, fundamentalists and even regular people use it to justify violent behavior that can range from simply raising your voice, throwing objects to assaulting people or killing them.

[124c41]

The times that I have had accomplishments in life, I may have begun them with anger, but eventually the emotion was turned into resolve. I am one who, when someone tells me something can't be done, and I feel it can be done, I have to try. My motto in life has always been--Better to try, and even if I fail, at least I won't live with regret, never knowing if I could have done it. Basically, I am hard-headed.

[jtur88]

No. No professional athlete that you have ever heard of has ever performed well when anger. The top echelons of athletes, the ones who make it to the professional level, are the ones who have learned to compete and excel without anger. Even those in brutal sports like boxing or American football. Anger is what you resort to when you are already losing, and if anything turns you into a winner, it will not be anger.

Even in wartime, the men promoted to the rank of high officers are the ones who no longer wage war in the anger that they were originally brainwashed to display.

Anybody who ever accomplished anything in anger, would have done better if he could have set his anger aside and worked around it.