Do you agree with Dr. Phil that anger is just hurt, fear, or frustration?

Yes. But “hurt, fear, or frustration” is very broad and covers mostly anything you would ever be angry about so…especially frustration. Of course you’re frustrated if you’re angry.

Oh definately! That is the only time I find myself getting upset

He forgot rage and resentment. A little bitterness is also good in the mix.

I would say yes those things can bring about anger but anger doesn’t have to always be outward expression either. One could be extremely angry without expressing that to others. But really what @deni said, they kind of go hand in hand and are rather broad feelings.

No. Occasionally it is actually anger.

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. This is the path to the Dark Side.
Dr Phil? No. Source

I think anger is often expressions of those things, but I do not think it has to involve any of those things. For example, I’m pretty consistently angry whenever I find out that someone has been abused, but that anger is not expressed outwardly, and it does not involve any hurt, frustration, or fear on my part.

Not particularly. I think a lot of emotions go hand in hand. Sometimes I feel angry sans hurt and fear

I don’t agree with Dr Phullofshite on anything. But I do think that anger usually has a foundation in some suppressed emotion that one might not be able to face or express. Maybe anger is a manifestation of the hindrance of true expression?

I am not sure if that is all it is. But what is his point when he says that is all it is. What is he saying that it is not?

[mod says] Please remember: This question is in the General Section. Responses must be helpful and on-topic.

It can be many things, Emotion, sometimes up, sometimes down but always all around! It is what it is…… :-/

I think it is true but it could also be brought on by numerous other things as well. I do believe that depression is often the result of repressed anger. So if you feel it, you might as well let it out! Don’t kill anyone, just go run until you are exhausted, that works for me.

I would like to register my vote for frustration. Hurt and fear are front seat companions to frustration and IMO do manifest in anger when you stir the pot with any one of those emotions.

Dr Phil offers watered-down, popularized psychology, but there is a certain grain of truth. Anger is often the response of those helpless to perceive or deal with a multitude of situations/emotions differently.

Yes.

@anartist You basically repeated what I said up there, and people figured that out way before Dr Phil was just another over-hyped, pseudo-revelation-spouting Oprah minion.

I think his primary point that he’s trying to make by calling attention to this is that it’s easier to express anger rather than hurt or fear.

The latter two are associated with feelings of helplessness or lack of power. It’s much easier to go into anger to avoid having to feel the hurt or the fear. But anger just usually gives an illusion of power.

Really facing the hurt or fear and dealing with it gives a person true power and self esteem which accompanies dealing with something successfully.

A lot of the aphorisms he spouts are really just common sense and known to many therapists and those in any of the helping professions. I don’t think he claims any unique possession of truth which nobody else has access to.

He basically just gets down to brass tacks with people who are BSing themselves and are in sore need of someone to hold up a mirror to their dysfunctional patterns of interaction with others and have them take a good long look at whether they want to continue stuck in those patterns or begin the process of learning a healthier way to approach their lives.

One particularly effective question he often asks hopelessly deadlocked bickering couples is “Do you just want to be rght or do you want to be happy.”

Most (but certainly not all) of the time,) living in anger is a pretty counter-productive way to go through life.

Haven’t you come across people like this at work or in your neighborhood? Are you inclined to want to spend much time hanging around them or getting to know them better?

Even John Walsh who had every right to be angry following the abduction and murder of his child eventually turned that into something more productive and became a crusader for reform of child safety procedures.

Anger in and of itself rarely accomplishes much. Getting to the cause of that anger is usually a far more healthy way to approach life’s problems.

Not necessarily. Sometimes anger is very specifically directed rage and disgust at people who choose not to be kind or do the right thing, even when they have a choice to to do the right thing.

Examples:

Spouses who cheat (instead of going to counseling or simply breaking up with their spouse)

Murderers, rapists and child molesters who choose to do those things instead of going into counseling, surrendering to authorities, or simply killing themselves.

People who hurt animals. No excuse is acceptable for those people.

Lazy people that do rude things, instead of paying attention, learning what is right and wrong, opening themselves up to different ideas that they might not be aware of (short of educating one’s self) learning about common etiquette and stepping up to the plate instead of being lazy.

People who hurt the feelings of other people because it’s quicker, more convenient or less entertaining then being kind and considerate and polite and compassionate.

No. “Dr.” Phil is an unlicensed quack. Nobody needs to take anything he says seriously, especially when he does therapy which he is not legally allowed to do since he doesn’t have a license to practice.

Anger is actually sadness taken up one notch. If we are angry, say, at Dr. Phil because we think he is a quack, it’s because we feel sad and disappointed that someone who has been given his kind of pedestal and exposure did not choose to do something more worthy with it. When I get angry at my daughter it is because I feel sad that she doesn’t understand how much I love her and the reason why I said something /asked her to do or not do something. When I’m angry at my brother for being an asshole it’s because I am sad that he is making his life miserable, I am sad that he does not appreciate himself and by default he fails to appreciate me.

To take what Dr.Phil said down one notch, it is about sadness. @Buttonstc ‘s comment continues from my thought.

@shalom Yet your point makes no sense because I am neither sad nor angry about Phil being a quack, I’m simply stating a fact. The sky is blue, grass tends to be green, Phil McGraw is someone who should not be doing what he’s doing because he isn’t licensed to do it any more than someone who doesn’t have a license to practice medicine should walk into an operating room and start cutting people open.

Anger has nothing to do with sadness for many people. It might be the case for you, but you are not everyone. Everyone does not have the same emotions and reactions that you do. Anger is actually an emotion in and of itself.

No, because Dr. Phil is a douchebag.

@klutzaroo I don’t get angry much anymore when I start paying attention to anger-arising and arising-dependent thoughts. People react so quickly from a series of thoughts/associations to an emotional feeling/reaction that they seldom realize there are hundreds of movements that happen in a flash. Often an angry reaction is triggered quicker because of sad / angry thoughts already resonating in your body, dominant thoughts/memories that are suppressed.

I’m just saying as i learned to observe and rewind from reaction I have learned to see where it originates. My point makes no sense to you because of what you allow or don’t allow to make sense and not because by itself it cannot make sense. What you call a “fact” is a perception or an illusion to others.

I used to get angry a lot and people used to explain it with “temperament, upbringing, bad-temperedness, impatience, inflexible, etc”. None of that made sense until I became aware of anger-arising, observed each arising and slowed them down like a film. So, I’m just stating I agree with the question and my reasons why without necessarily agreeing to the whole idea of Dr. Phil and what he represents to both fans and detractors.

I’m not defending Dr. Phil, just stating the facts. Dr. Phil holds a B.A. from Midwestern State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from North Texas State University with a dual area of emphasis in clinical and behavioral medicine.

It was because of Oprah that Dr. Phil got his television show. He is retired from psychology and does an entertainment show. The exact quote posted is about sibling rivalry. Dr. Phil uses the premise of the anger quote on many other discussions of anger.

I think it is a good starting point to opening your mind and getting to the root of some specific anger issues in your life.

@shalom Your point makes no sense because it makes no sense. You know nothing about me, for instance the level of knowledge that I have about emotional responses from a therapeutic perspective. Its not that I’m “not allowing” your idea to make sense, it doesn’t make sense because it is essentially nonsense. While you might be able to trace your own personal emotions back to something, that in no way means that everyone else operates in the same manner. Ascribing what you feel or would do to everyone else is ridiculous.

@bkcunningham Phil McGraw is not retired. His license was suspended because of professional misbehavior and he never sought to get it back. He practices without a license, no matter what label he puts on it. For anyone not a celebrity, practicing therapy without a license is a big no-no.

@shalom I think what @klutzaroo is saying, and I agree, is that you have found where anger comes from in you, but the danger is you thinking that everyone is the same as you, and has the same root source. They just don’t. People are incredibly different. Even when they are extremely similar there are myriad subtle differences. One’s anger is something one has to figure out the source of by oneself, and we can speculate where it comes from, but most likely we will be wrong. You are generalizing when you say that all anger comes from sadness.

@klutzaroo you’d think he’d be arrested and put in jail or at least cited and not allowed to continue breaking the law. I wonder why he isn’t since he’s so high profile and on national television and a best selling author?

Dr. Phill not exactly the most reliable source.
Please see
http://www.drphil.com/slideshows/slideshow/6096/?id=6096&showID=1516
and the video on (page 3 only)
Url=/house/flv/9012_4.flv&background=header_drphil_video.jpg
Instead of giving him advice on what to do and what to avoid, Dr. Phill is beating up on the father of the overweight young lady. The reason? To provide free ad to Structurehome? It can’t be anywhere else it has to be Structurehome? Kickback?

….Above, Please read “Structurehouse”. But the point is the same.

@bkcunningham Famous people get away with all kinds of shit. Especially if they do it in California. Anyone who has worked in the field knows that what he’s doing is practicing unlicensed therapy and calling it entertainment and the officials care more about the money he brings in than the welfare of people being harmed by this idiot. So they “buy” that he’s just entertaining people, no matter what the reality is.

I know this is an old question that, I so agree. I am in my mid-fifties but 40 years ago I was molested by my stepfather and I told my mother immediately and when she confronted him he was going to leave. My mama told me that he was the most important thing in her life. That she still loves us but he was the most important thing in her life but she would always be there for us. I was 12. She came to get me and made me go in the room, the dark bedroom and told me he was going to leave is that what I wanted? Of course that’s what I wanted, but that’s not what she wanted and I couldn’t break my mother’s heart because she was my mom. So I said no. continued to molest me for 5 more years. Periodically she would ask me if it was still happening and I don’t always tell her no. My life can of fell apart in my mid-20s and I went to live with my pastor and his wife who was a counselor and had a practice in a nearby City. They did call my folks and told them confronted them and told them what had happened and I was blamed. I wasn’t there but I was called a liar and a Seducer a thirteen-year-old Seducer of a 42 year old man. No one could see but even if that were the truth I was still the victim however, it wasn’t the truth. So we’ve live like it never happened. Since then my younger brother is died and it’s just the three of us. I’ve been divorced for 10 years and I was never able to have children. My wife is so empty but my mom and I don’t get along. I’m just so angry that she didn’t put me first. I’m so angry with her that she can’t see that I’m a better person than her. She is such a narcissist that everything I do or say is a slight toward her. She’s always trying to prove she’s better than me because she knows she’s not. I have two master’s degrees and she didn’t graduate from high school so she always thinks I’m way smarter than her, and I am LOL but she can paint a picture and I can’t even draw a stick figure. I think of others first she thinks of herself first. We are so different and now that she is entering her late 70s I fear that she will die and never make me feel like I was important to her. I don’t like feeling alone in this world. I was obese for 40 years and she was embarrassed because people judged her because I was fat. Care so much what other people think. When I was 13 she elbowed me at church because I was singing out loud and tell me people can hear me. I wasn’t a good singer it’s been more than 40 years that I’ve never sang out loud in church since. I’ve told myself the Bible says to make a Joyful Noise not a pretty noise, but I can’t convince myself of that. I taught high school for a lot of years and love those children and I hear from most of my students and they tell me I remember the math you taught me but I remember how you made me feel. I’m so happy that they remember how I made them feel I’m also jealous but nobody made me feel the way I made them feel. Isn’t that pathetic? 55 years old feeling that way. I was married to a wonderful man and something happened 6 years into our marriage. His mom died his dad died his brother died and he went off the deep end he resigned from the church he was pastoring for 30 years and began to have an affair with a Wiccan High Priestess with whom he worked and I came home from work with my house half empty. It’s been 15 years and I just don’t seem to be able to get past all this anger and it is nothing but hurt absolutely nothing but hurt. Anytime my mom says or just something stupid I roll my eyes or say something to her that I should have just kept my mouth shut. One day this pain will be gone, but until then you just got to live with it and keep going one day after the next one foot in front of the other and enjoy what you can. I’ve rescue two pit bulls and they are incredible animal and they bring me joy. You find Joy where you can. The other day a woman in the store was rubbing some CBD balm on my shoulder. I have a disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis and it has caused my upper back to fuse and become hyperkyphotic. That means my spine is overly curved forward in my head is fused in a prayer-like position. I can’t turn my head tilted look up look down or look all around LOL because of that I have pretty intense muscle spasms along my shoulder and spine. She was rubbing this CBD balm on my trigger points to show me how well it worked and I started getting these Goosebumps and tears were welling up in my eyes and I was trying so hard to not have this response. The harder I try the worse it seem to get and she noticed. She asked me what was going on was trying to say nothing and blow it off. The truth was I hadn’t been touched by human and weeks and there was something about her rubbing my shoulder her skin online that was giving me some kind of a response that I wasn’t expecting. It wasn’t sexual don’t get me wrong. It was a connection just a human touch. when I finally told her she began to cry. I realize that she had a heart similar to mine because it broke her heart to think that someone would go that long without anybody touching them or hugging them and how she didn’t realize how much she took for granted crawling in bed each night with her husband and having him cuddle up next to her. She said I’ll never complain about being too hot again LOL I hope she does, I hope it doesn’t change her, but I hope she enjoys the cuddles more because they won’t always be there life is a cycle and we don’t all live forever. I work every day to try to let this anger go and I will eventually, somehow…