I will make a clear difference between anger, feeling hurt and irritated. When someone gets in our of our needs or desires we all feel a little hurt or irritated at times. Most people will say that anger is an emotion, but it is not an emotion. Anger refers to the desire to get even with or take revenge on whoever is causing the hurt.
When someone angers you your adrenaline starts pumping, your heart rate jumps, your blood pressure rises, these are immediate fight or flight physiological responses to a perceived threat. As a psychological reaction to those immediate physiological responses the rage and anger overrun your mind. Then you fall into a desire to revenge. You scream a curse, give a dirty look, and make threats. And there is your anger. Anger is the wish for harm or bad things to happen to the person who has obstructed you. You want to hurt the person in the same way they hurt you, so the psychological process is clear and simple.
If something like a simple traffic jam leaves you feeling tense or frustrated, what do you do? You find something petty out of place at home and then blow up, just to take the frustration out on your family or you are at a bar and find a way for someone to offend you so you can get into a fight. You do this because you believe in your mind that these people have somehow hurt you and deserve to suffer for it, therefore angry can be expressed indirectly.
Anger may be a natural or commonly occurring social reaction to hurt and insult and there is more to anger than meets the eye. Although it is natural, it doesn't mean that it is good for us! Poisons are also natural and are also deadly! There are many other ways to cope with hurt and insult than with anger. The reason I brought up poison, is because anger is like poison, because it degrades the quality of your own life as much as it hurts the life of another person.
To acknowledge that you feel hurt is a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult. Easier said than done. When you get angry you don't have time to feel your inner vulnerability and hurt, you just want to feel the power and get revenge. Anger just shows weakness and is a big puff of smoke, an emotional fraud, it makes you seal off your own emotional pain.
Unconscious anger, you suppress the awareness of your honest inner experiences, because you feel hurt by someone close to your or out of fear that your immediate impulse to hurt that person will cause you to lose that person's love. You can convince yourself that everything is fine and peaceful and the hurt becomes anger. You remain hurt while the desire to hurt the other person gets pushed into your unconscious where it stems into resentment. When you deny that you have anything to feel hurt about you are just deceiving yourself and your relationship. Anger turned inwards is often called depression.
It is human to have hurt feelings in response to insult. Child abuse, domestic violence, drug addictions, hatred and prejudice can all be caused by these anger issues never becoming recognized. The people who usually let people walk all over them, rather than admitting that they feel hurt about anything usually have a lot of resentment and dirt underneath their "welcome" mat (that would be me).
Follow the hurt back into its roots in the past to all those times and circumstances that you felt the same way is another step in making a healthy response. Any insults in the present is magnified by similar insults from the past. If you don't recognize old insults from the past only makes the current insult seem larger.
The last healthy response is to avoid negative responses to feelings of hurt and insult.
