Feeling Angry with Yourself 

When people are angry with themselves, their anger impacts all areas of their life. Feeling angry at yourself is going to interfere with relationships, work, and how you feel about yourself in general. If you’ve done something wrong, it’s important to learn how to deal with the consequences effectively.

When you’ve made a mistake, you might find yourself feeling angry. Perhaps you regret something that you did. Or maybe you regret something you didn’t do. How you respond to your angry feelings makes a big difference.

Feeling angry is okay. However, beating yourself up about something isn’t helpful. If you find that you call yourself names, dwell on mistakes, or punish yourself repeatedly, it is only going to sabotage your future efforts. It is important to learn from past mistakes but in a healthy way.

You can’t heal yourself until you admit your feelings. Identify your anger and the underlying causes. What behaviors or problems did you have that have led to your angry feelings?

Sometimes anger is justified. Maybe you hurt someone else. Perhaps you made a big mistake that is going to impact the rest of your life. However, staying in a place of guilt, shame, and anger is not going to benefit you.

Maybe you don’t even know exactly why you are angry with yourself. Maybe you’ve just always thought you were “bad.” Perhaps your habits of putting yourself down are so deeply ingrained that you don’t even know you are doing it.

Then there are those times that we are angry about a situation and we can do something about it. For example, if you are mad at yourself for taking a job that you hate, your anger may be telling you it’s time for a change. Taking action in such cases can help restore you to some sense of normalcy.

No matter what the reasons are that you are angry with yourself, don’t treat yourself worse than you would treat a friend or family member. Think about what it would require to be able to forgive yourself. If you have difficulty doing so, consider seeking counseling from a therapist or a clergy member.

One Response to “Feeling Angry with Yourself”

  1. Do you think it is correct to make a normal reactive behaviour to a bad situation an undesirable emotion?

    Anger is a perfectly normal reaction to an experience that is awry out of plan, unexpected, costly, etc.

    Anger at oneself? That’s an issue sure, but anger at a situation that is irrational, illogical and putting up bars against resolution? That’s normal.

    Also, do you think that counseling statistically can show that it save marriages? My personal experience is that counseling is a factor at teh end of people’s marriages and gives them justifications or satifies their own thinking and empowers them to finally get out.

    It’s sad really.

    Also, statistically, how many counseling sessions are driven by men’s requests as opposed to women’s?

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