For me, anger is just a feeling like any other feeling. The important thing is to understand what the feeling is telling me and then to do what -- if anything -- I need to do about that in a healthy way that both takes care of me and that doesn't make me feel ashamed -- or put me in the position of having to make an amend.
I've found that when I'm feeling angry it's because there is something going on that is not OK with me -- maybe behavior that is inappropriate, or unacceptable, or disrespectful, or dangerous, or whatever. The anger is telling me to pay attention to whatever is not OK and to do what I need to do to take care of myself in that situation (i.e. to do what I need to do to make it OK for me.)
I don't find it helpful to be afraid of or feel ashamed of or embarrassed about my feelings -- including anger. I just need to feel it, get the info it's giving me, and take appropriate action for self-care. If I don't feel the feeling and follow the process all the way through to the appropriate self-care part, then several different things -- none of them healthy or good -- can happen:
1) If I act rashly out of the angry place (without thinking it through), then, the chances are that I am going to act in a way that I'm not going to feel good about or proud of later on. There is also a really good chance that whatever I do is not really going to result in good self-care and may even make the situation worse.
2) If I squash the anger and refuse to feel it, it gets buried inside and gets all ugly and distorted and dangerous, until, finally it explodes -- usually totally inappropriately and sometimes even at people or situations that have nothing at all to do with what the original anger was about.
3) If I feel it but don't work through what it's about and what I need to do, but, instead, just ruminate on it and on how I'm so victimized and my misery is someone else's (or everyone else's) fault, then I find myself nursing a huge resentment -- and, like they say, harboring a resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die. And when I'm in that place, I'm basically emotionally disabled through no one's fault but my own.
So, for me the only healthy way through a feeling is to feel it, identify what it's telling me, and take the appropriate self-care action to which the feeling is trying to direct my attention.
Now, I make that sound so easy, right??? But, before I was able to access my program tools as well and as quickly as I am now, I did have a couple of stop-gap measures to help me deal with anger without embarrassing myself or unnecessarily hurting myself or anyone else. The first was to scream as loud as I could into a big pillow or in the car where no one could hear or see me. (This sometimes actually had the added benefit of making me so hoarse that I couldn't possibly scream at another human being!) And, as a last resort, I have to say that I've had excellent results with taking a bunch of old glass bottles and smashing them as hard as I could against the garage wall. Yep, there's something very therapeutic about the sound of all that breaking glass!
freya