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When reacting to anger, women have three basic modus operandi. Men have one.

I know, it's shocking, but we women have always been overachievers. Women react with either avoidance, depression or the sit 'n suffer. Men are only capable of the sit 'n suffer.

Avoidance: If you're anything at all like me, and admit it, you are, then you despise confrontation. When I became middle aged, I also became vain, and found myself buying boxes of hair dye at the drug store. I used this silly product made by companies who have the nerve to know that I am vain and prey on that fact to squeeze a few bucks out of my wallet and into theirs. Nonetheless, I freely admit that I spent several years doing the deed myself at the expense of several household towels and the bathroom grout, neither of which will ever again be pristinely white.

After years of doing this, my family caviled at the purple hue of my hair to the point that I finally had to seek professional assistance. After some time in the beautician's chair my hair went from purple to black. My actual color, or I should say my birth color, was brown. Black and freckles simply made no sense. So back I went to the beautician for another correction. This time, I came home almost blonde with the dried bleached-out texture of a sweater that sits in the back of your closet because it's too itchy on your skin for comfort and it's a putrid shade of mustard anyway.

I was beside myself. I should've stuck with the purple. I didn't want to go out and be seen in public, but even worse, I didn't want to go back to the shop to confront the hairdresser yet again. I was sure that it couldn't be fixed and that if it could be fixed, it was going to cost me more money for the vanity I already felt guilty about. So instead, I spent a day fretting and staying home avoiding the issue and all mirrors all together. Eventually, I had to force myself and my anger to calm down and confront the issue full throttle. I was angry about the whole thing. I didn't want to have to confront the hairdresser, but in the long run, my hair is now brown, no really, it's brown, my freckles match, and the beautician couldn't have been more sympathetic.

That's anger: avoidance, confrontation and resolution.

Depression: Then there's that stuff-it-down-your-throat anger. This is the one when your boss really pisses you off. So you write him a nasty e-mail to get even. But then you're smart enough not to push the send button. You wait: a very wise thing to do. You calm down. Or at least you think you calm down. Then you spend days resenting your boss and never speaking up for yourself. Your boss sucks. This job sucks. Actually, your whole life sucks. And now, let me be the first to present to you: depression. It's really anger that has fallen and can't get up. I'm really, really good at this one. I have multiple empty bottles of Prozac and Lexapro to prove it.

So I suck it down. Remember Ross Perot? There is a giant sucking sound you can hear coming out of my intestines. Swoop! There it goes deep into the bowels of, well, my bowels, Anger went in. It swam around my bowels for a bit, and then flowed with the current. It made its way into my heart but couldn't get quite cozy. Anger has a lot of energy. So it wasn't too tired to keep swimming.

Upward it went, eventually landing in my brain where it promptly and finally lost its buoyancy. Its arms couldn't take one more stroke onward. Its flippers fell off. And finally, finally, its mask came off, too. Without its mask, it can't see very clearly, so it flops around for a while until it finally removes the snorkel out of its mouth. So now it can't see and it can't breathe. It finally has to come up for air. It was anger that went in. What came out was something entirely different: anger's cousin, depression. If you're a very lucky girl and you're very patient, it may eventually lift itself up and remove itself from your body a little at a time until it's finally gone. You might even be able to forget about it.

That's anger: stuff it down, depression, possible memory loss and, finally, peace.

Sit 'n Suffer: This is the third manner in which women handle anger. It is the only one for men. This is anger that needs support. And I'm not just talking about bras here, ladies.

We all have those people in our lives who just know how to push our buttons. They know the precise combination of parry one and parry two, and when to thrust, penetrate and then turn the sword at a 180-degree spin with a direct hit into your gut. We react by going to the office.

The office is the place where we pull our support together. Our support contains all the people in our lives whom we can count on for utter and complete agreement at our meeting. We don't want opinion. We want back up.

Unless my husband is the target, which is extremely rare, he's always the first one elected to my committee and invited to my executive board meeting. What we need at this meeting is some "sit and suffer." In my family, "sit and suffer" is what you do when party A, the innocent bystander, has to literally sit, and then suffer with party B, the injured party. "Sit and suffer" is a time-honored tradition. If you are a member of my family, and you are not a member of party C, the party who did the injuring, then you sure as heck better perform "sit and suffer" with me if you wish to remain a family member in good standing.

In the end, the meeting is called to order. Everyone supports party B. That's the injured party in case you already forgot. Keep up, people! Party B finally feels better. The anger has dissipated, and now, we can second the motion to begin to discuss the appropriate and mature response to party C. A decision is reached. The meeting is adjourned. The action is taken. The incident is over.

That's anger: sit 'n suffer and peace.

Sit 'n suffer has an added bonus. It's not just for dealing with anger. It's used for dealing with anything unpleasant. If my hubby has a stack of bills he needs to pay, I should be in the room to "help" him. We can't both write the checks. We can't both lick the envelopes. Nope. My job is to sit 'n suffer with him while he has to pay the bills.

Women learned sit 'n suffer from men. Men never learned avoidance or depression from women. You don't see men burying their heads in the sand to avoid an issue. You don't see men crying about issues until they eat them alive. You see men calling in the troops before they go to battle. As much as we women are overachievers, I think men have something here with sit 'n suffer. There's something to be said for creating a team of people on your side and confronting issues head on.

I just don't get why it always has to involve troops and war or sports and teams. How about if we just call the meeting to order and do lunch?

- Leslie Handler

Leslie Handler is a 2015 National Society of Newspaper Columnists award winner. She is a frequent contributor to WHYY's Newsworks, has written for The Philadelphia Inquirer, ZestNow and Boomercafe, as well as blogs for The Huffington Post. She has a bachelor of journalism degree and currently lives smack dab between Philadelphia and New York City with husband Marty, dogs Maggie and Hazel, a collection of fish, said husband's cockatoo who she's been trying to roast for dinner for the last 31 years, and a few occasional uninvited guests. You may follow her blog and read published essays at Leslie goes BOOM!