As an energizer of aggressive behavior, anger may have value in the context of combat, although strong arousal can impair the processing of complex information. However, outside of combat, episodes of anger and aggression are problematic for military organizations, and, in civilian life, a disposition to react quickly and intensely with anger and aggression is inappropriate. Angry people are often fiercely resistant to anger treatment. Because anger can mobilize one's psychological resources, energizing behaviors that take corrective action, we need our capacity for anger as a survival mechanism. In an increasingly bureaucratized world that diminishes the significance of the individual, anger is a psychological fortification for a sense of worth.
Anger provides for personal resilience.
It is a guardian of self-esteem, it potentiates the ability to redress grievances, and it can boost determination to overcome obstacles to happiness and aspirations. Anger, thus, is a Janus-faced character in psychosocial images. Clients may very well be attached to those psychosocial images of anger as energizing, empowering, justifying, signifying, rectifying, and relieving, but they can nonetheless be helped to see its dysfunctional, counterproductive effects, without a hard-sell on the contrasting social metaphors of anger as eruptive, destructive, unbridled, savage, venomous, burning, or consuming. Achieving this, however, hinges on the therapeutic relationship, and there are a number of refractory impediments to that. Unique difficulties arise in the treatment of anger that can thwart or derail the therapeutic process.