Anger....your friend?

Anger and I have worked really hard over the years to build  a healthy relationship. 

Growing up, I had plenty to be angry about: an alcoholic abusive father, a codependent, manipulative, enabling mother, secrets, loneliness, dysfunction, a religious hijacking of God, undiagnosed ADD, and a Grand Canyon-deep sense of abandonment. 

Plenty of reasons, but no safety to express. If I had expressed my anger, there was a very real chance that I would have literally been killed. 

So I learned to stuff it, ignore it, twist it into something else. 

My rightful anger at someone abusing me, taking advantage of me, disrespecting me, dismissing me, or putting me down, was usually met with tears, an apology on MY part for “what I did wrong” (because I also was raised to think everything was my fault) and then a drop into a chasm of shame.

Because I was trained to NOT feel my feelings through threat of physical/emotional/mental harm from a very early age, I learned to doubt my feelings, which meant I quickly began to doubt my sense of reality.

The result was “peace” for the situation, but internally, a battle began to rage within me.

You have to understand that emotions…ALL emotions…are meant to be felt fully, and then fully released. 

Emotions are quite literally energy IN motion. Whether it’s anger or pleasure or something in between, ALL emotions are meant to come in and go out, like clouds across the sky, giving us an impression for a moment, then rolling out and returning our view to a cloudless sky.

When we stuff/shut down our feelings, they leave our consciousness, but remain circulating in our subconscious and body memory. (Yes, your body holds memories in its cells) Those feelings WILL found a way to move out of you, one way or another, as they’re designed to do. But usually, the means and times of exit are sabotaging; emotions that have been kept under pressure will burst through without warning, creating emotional instability and unstable situations. If the emotional shut off continues, trapped emotions will eventually turn into physical disease. 

I stuffed my anger all through my childhood, teens and 20s, but I reached capacity in my 30s, when the rages began. 

My internal gauge for regulating my anger was wonky, due to the years of repression, so I’d have little to no reaction to events that would anger any sane person, but I would lash out inappropriately to insignificant offenses. 

Things came to a head when I was about 27. While driving home from work one night, I was cut off by some teenagers, who added insult to the injury by flipping me off as they did so.

My response?

I literally chased them down in my car. 

Hellooooooo……BAT SHIT CRAZY!! 

Those kids could have crashed and died. I could have crashed and died. Someone else could have been crashed into and died, or any of us could have been permanently damaged. God knows how sideways that situation could have gone, but thank God, I heard a still, small voice whisper “Stephanie, what are you doing?”

That experience was what the alcoholics would call “a bottom”; a moment of clarity that motivated me to look into myself to see how it was that I was capable of that sort of behavior…behavior that was the spitting image of my Father’s rage…the source of my deepest pain. 

The path I took between that moment of clarity, and now, is for my book, but here’s what I want to share with you today about anger:

Anger is a gift. It is filled with energy, and has the potential to fuel your dreams and create the boundaries your life requires in order to support those dreams. Anger has propelled the drive to justice and social change. Anger, when wielded wisely, has the power to move mountains.

But anger is a fire; it has to be respected, and it has to be managed properly, or it will burn your house down.

Anger serves the purpose of illuminating the disconnect between your values and your current experience. 

Your anger is a tool for calibration.

And tools cannot wield themselves effectively; the hammer can’t hit the nail without a steady eye and hand guiding it.

Yet this is EXACTLY what we do when we act from anger: we expect the tool to give us the desired outcome without getting the eye and hand on board! (Man, do I love analogies!)

The first thing to know it this: 

Every emotion triggers a chemical response in the body. In a very real way, emotions are like drugs. 

In the case of anger, the chemical response sends the message that we need to gear up to fight for our lives: the sympathetic nervous system fires up and puts us into fight-flight-freeze mode. 

From this space, our cognitive abilities get paired down to RIGHT NOW….survive RIGHT NOW, fight RIGHT NOW, freeze RIGHT NOW.

There is no cognition available to consider wisdom from past experiences or reasonable assumptions about future outcomes; everything in your brain and body is focused on defending your life in this moment.

Obviously, this is NOT the headspace we want to be in when making decisions, large or small. Reasonable judgment and sound decision making can’t coexist with anger; it’s neurologically impossible.

Note something: the physical response your body has to anger is the same response it has to fear. It is only our perception of the situation that determines whether we’re labeling the experience one of anger or one of fear. 

Recognizing this is of critical importance: where there is anger, there is ultimately fear. And where there is fear, there can be no right action.

In order to make wise, Self-Affirming smart actions for your Highest Good, you must do the following:

1. Become emotionally aware, not just about anger, but about ALL your emotions. Focus on what your emotions actually FEEL like in your body. Get to know your internal emotion landscape.

2. Stop judging your emotions! We’ve all got a “good” list of emotions, as well as a “bad” list. The latter are the emotions that we are scared to feel/express because we’ve been made to believe those emotions are unsafe, unflattering, threatening and otherwise incompatible with someone else’s desires. But your emotions are your internal GPS; consider them to be pieces of data. Data just IS. 
3. Learn how to ground yourself. Emotions are like waves on the ocean (more analogies) Your boat is going to be constantly rocked, so just like a sailor, you have to learn how to walk, stand, and go about your business BALANCING as the waves roll in and out. You are not your emotions or your thoughts. You are Spirit, the master in charge of the emotions and thoughts. Mindfulness and meditation practices teach us how to remain balanced and centered as we ride the waves of life. 

Fostering a rich and intimate relationship with ALL of your emotions is essential for self trust, wise discernment, security and sovereignty. Learning how to feel your emotions, without acting from your emotions, is a step towards returning your Source-connected Self back to its rightful place as Boss Lady of your life.