Megan de Beyer responds by saying that women are often inept at handling their anger. We're conditioned to feel anger is bad and inappropriate. We fear being disliked or rejected. When we try and express anger, we so often do it in a manipulative or passive-aggressive style. Both are unhealthy.

As women, we are often disempowered and may have come up against male aggression. Both of these can make us reluctant to experience and express anger.

Yet, if understood and handled appropriately, anger can be liberating, motivating and aid self-confidence. In fact, it's the most seductive of the negative emotions.

It can be energising and exhilarating; it can make us feel powerful. When it's not handled well, on the other hand, it becomes destructive and dysfunctional. Unbridled anger can mean the death of the possibility of love.

Understanding anger
In its positive form, anger can be a constructive aid to survival. It's a natural and necessary response to threat or violation, and provides us with a boost of physical and emotional energy when it's needed.

It's important, though, to distinguish between the emotion, the physical manifestation, and the behaviour that ensues.

Compare the anatomy of anger to your security company. Let's say you hear a noise, you push the panic button, alarms and guards are mobilised, and someone gets shot. On a purely physical level, it almost happens like this. You experience a threat, your brain releases catecholamines causing you to feel a surge of anger, while other messengers get sent out into the body which sets you up for fight or flight. Your reactions are instinctively aggressive.

Now let's say the shooting was a mistake. Here's the difficulty: if we allow our instincts to rule during high arousal, our thinking or logical fore-brain responds more slowly than the emotional hind-brain. We need to calm ourselves to allow the rational response to kick in. If we separate the feeling of anger from the expression of it, we can control the outcome.

Different types
Anger can range from immobilising tension (when we feel numb) to simmering, and brooding hostility, or from violent rage to cool-headed revenge. It is useful to categorise people into three types: