This question invokes your deepest values, which are the foundation of your ego, as well as its ultimate strength. If your behavior remains consistent with your deepest values, your sense of internal value increases, reducing the need for ego inflation. With increased internal value, you become less dependent on getting value from others. With reduced dependency as others, you are able to see them as separate people, who, like you, are often blindly and sadly protecting their own inflated egos; in other words, you become more compassionate. You perceive less internal vulnerability and less external threat, which makes you less likely to stimulate reactive anger in others. In short, you make anger less necessary in your life. You begin to see anger as not at all a bad thing but an important signal to get back to your core value.
Unfortunately, reducing perceptions of ego vulnerability and threat by raising core value has not been the history of treatment for anger problems.
The Sad History of Treatment for Anger Problems
Linguistic confusion is a large part of why the major approaches to problem anger have persistently ignored the interacting perceptions of ego vulnerability and ego threat that stimulate anger. Instead, they have targeted the anger for treatment, as if it caused itself.
The 19th Century approach, which lasted almost to the middle of the 20th Century, was twofold: "Good" anger, unexpressed, somehow festers into "bad" anger and most present anger has its source in the distant past.
One of the curious contradictions of the "repressed" hypothesis was the contention that expressing repressed angry feelings makes you less angry, while expressing repressed sexual feelings makes you more sexual. Research shows that they were right in the latter but wrong in the former. As for the "source" hypothesis, its implicit assumption was that emotions do not work in the stimulus-response pattern observed in research, but in some kind of imprinting process, similar to that discovered by Konrad Lorenz in geese. Just as goslings follow the first thing they see move (whether it's mother goose or a middle-aged scientist), anger is "transferred" from the first people who stimulate it, usually parents. While motion-imprinting offers obvious survival advantages for migratory birds, the transference of anger from its "source" to everyone else, if it actually happened, would present an enormous evolutionary disadvantage, by curtailing the flexibility of mammals to adapt to the continual changes in their environments and by destabilizing social units with continuous fights over the inherent unfairness of transference. Thankfully, the large research literature on the adaptability of the brain puts this fear to rest.
The explicit presumption of the "source" hypothesis was that identification of the original source of good anger would somehow stop current bad anger, like turning off a water faucet. Of course it did not; and battered women drew little succor when their psychoanalyzed assailants informed them that they were really angry at their mothers. But the ultimate flaw of the "source" hypothesis is that the truly original source of anger, when understood as a universally mammalian response to threat, lies in a past much more distant than one's parents. It is not transferring old feelings caused by your mother to your wife that is the problem; it's mistaking your wife for a saber tooth tiger, which happens when the ego inflates beyond the deepest values of life and loved ones.
Failure of Insight
By the middle of the 20th Century, a more scientific understanding of brain function revealed why insight fails to change habituated behavior. Once habituated, specific behaviors, along with the thoughts, emotions, and motivations that go with them, are processed in a different domain of the brain that is faster, more compressed (in terms of neural firing), and less metabolically expensive than the language domain. This realization gave birth to what soon became the predominant approach to anger problems - cognitive-behavioral methods to "manage" the feelings and arousal of anger. While "anger management," as it was carelessly called, sometimes reduced the harm one might do while angry, it did nothing to reduce the need for anger to protect a vulnerable ego. Thus "anger management" is one of the silliest terms in behavior science and the subject of widespread ridicule in the media. Anger doesn't need to be managed; the ego vulnerability and misperceptions of threat that cause anger problems need to be reduced.
Ironically, like the insight-oriented therapies it was reacting against, the anger management movement still relied on conscious regulation of unconscious processes, which is why it failed. The habituated presumption of ego vulnerability and the subsequent anger response occur roughly 5,000 times faster than you can say, "I'm angry." By the time we know that we are angry, we're already motivated to attack. In the real world, outside anger management classrooms, anger management fails for the same reason that diets don't work. Before you know that you are hungry, you're already motivated to have a hot fudge sundae and unlikely to remember, i.e., access information from an entirely different domain of mental processing, that you should, instead, have a V-8. The difficulty of crossing domains during emotional arousal explains why Mr. Hyde won't remember what Dr. Jekyll learned in anger management class or, for that matter, what his therapist told him about Mom. What typically happens with real world anger problems - the kind that questionnaires don't capture - is something like this: With the perceived ego threat lying dead or unconscious on the floor, you remember that you should have taken a time out instead. (Anger management does seem to work a little better and last a bit longer with college students, if that makes you feel any safer in your community.)
Beyond Anger Management
In the 21st Century, the therapeutic treatment of anger problems must finally address their cause: perceptions of vulnerability and threat that have become habituated and, therefore, resistant to conscious insight and management. We need to develop habituated responses, which condition the activation of one domain (vulnerability-threat-anger-attack) to activate another (internal value-human other-heal-improve). We must condition habits of automatically raising core value whenever it is lowered, which reduces the motivation to devalue others. This is the goal of most of my work.
