Growing by Making Friends With Your Anger
publication date: Mar 20, 2010
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author/source: JP Sears
By JP Sears
 As a Holistic Health Consultant, I spend much of my day with clients who feel in some way stuck or frustrated about life. Amongst many other valuable insights that I’ve learned from my clients, one that I continue to learn everyday is that not being able to healthfully express anger is an excellent way to restrict our self-growth and happiness. I would like to invite you to consider that anger is a purposeful emotion. Just as we are designed to experience joy and gratitude, we are also designed to experience anger. What turns anger into a destructive force is when we deny its expression by either being unconscious of it or by purposefully suppressing it. You may be saying, “Well, on to the next article because I don’t really get angry.” I am going to challenge you by saying there are two types of people – those who have anger and those who are in denial of their anger. How can giving oneself permission to be angry possibly bring about higher levels of inner peace? My experience is that what intensifies anger the most is suppressing it. Many people have the belief that it is not okay to be angry and that anger is a sign of weakness. In turn, it is felt that to not express anger is to not have anger. But just because it is not expressed, does that mean it’s not there? When we experience anger we can feel as though we’re a small boat being tossed around in a very turbulent and dark sea. The stressful movement of dropping from the crest of an enormous wave down into the trough below can feel very helpless. However, this e-motional internal storm that we may feel powerless over is actually created by us and therefore, with the light of our conscious awareness piercing through the stormy clouds, we can realize that we do in fact have the supremacy to determine our internal weather patterns. We can grow the relationship we have with anger from that of a destructive enemy to that of a beneficial friend. Becoming friends with this experience of anger facilitates the experiential transition from a stormy, rough sea to one of having our vessel gently drifting about in a peaceful, glassy sea. Many would jump into this peaceful concept believing that eliminating their anger is how to transition to the calm waters. I ask you to consider if it is possible that harmonizing the storm of our anger into peace and calm isn’t about denying ourselves the experience of being angry, but is really about giving ourselves permission to be angry while acknowledging that our anger is always a symptom of something deeper within. Finding Anger: Which Polarity is Your Anger? Like anything in life, anger has polarity. The nature of anger’s polarity is such that it can be experienced either actively or passively. Those who experience their anger in the passive pole are typically those who may be seduced into denying that they have anger. I certainly have plenty of first-hand experience of being passive with anger and denying that I have it! For many years I was convinced I had no anger. I thought to myself, “Gosh, I pretty much have life mastered. I never get angry, I never yell, I never fight with anyone. I am a pretty enlightened guy!” What I am now able to recognize is that there was a lot of anger, it just wasn’t expressed actively, it was expressed passively. As I learned to be more sensitive with myself, I began to notice that when I get emotionally triggered I become very quiet. I can watch myself withdraw emotionally from a situation and go into a cocoon, which is a very passive way for me to experience my anger. In addition to withdrawing, other characteristics of passively expressed anger would be apathy, indifference, defensiveness, frustration, and depression. In contrast to my typical expression of anger we are all very familiar with the actively expressed polarity. Here when a person is triggered, they may put on the whole show of yelling, screaming, arms flailing, etc. Neither active nor passive anger is more or less functional than the other. What makes the expression of anger functional or not is based on if we can give ourselves permission to express anger and to recognize which polarity it is coming from. If an important foundational step in making friends with our anger is first recognizing how we express our anger, I’ll invite you to introspectively consider which of anger’s polarities you take up more residence in, the active or passive. The Purpose of the Symptom Called Anger I know that for me it took a long time to appreciate the function of anger rather than seeing it as an ugly, negative enemy. Having the privilege of working with many clients in their self-growth journey, I have come to believe that when we understand the nature of what our anger means we find out that anger is very healthy and purposeful. Could it be that anger is always a symptom and never the genesis of the issue? If this is true, then we may come to find out that we use anger to blame others for how we feel about ourselves so that we don’t have to experience the sensitivity of how low a part of us is actually feeling. In other words, could it be that anger allows us to deflect from feelings that cause us to feel unsafe and unvalued, such as fear and shame? We can then come to realize that the part of us that has a sense of fear or shame doesn’t want to feel these very threatening emotions, so instead it distracts itself from these internal feelings through the mechanism of focusing its attention externally toward another, often in the shape of anger. To this part of us, it simply seems too threatening to sit with the responsibility of feeling our core emotions, which is what gives rise to the symptom of anger. As an illustration, imagine a scene at a bar: Guy Number One tries to dance with Guy Number Two’s girlfriend. Does Guy Number Two go up to Guy Number One and say, “I have to tell you that a part of me has some fear that my girlfriend might leave me for another guy, and that I’d feel very lonely if that happened. So because I have this fear, would you mind refraining from dancing with her?” Have you ever witnessed this taking place? Probably not, unless you frequent bars that are heavily occupied by Zen masters! But what is familiar in this scenario is the expression of symptomatic anger to deflect from the core of fear. Guy Number Two will likely have a few angry words for Guy Number One and the physical expression of anger is likely to follow, all because Guy Number Two doesn’t feel safe enough to feel his core emotion of fear. Many people say they have been angry for years, or even decades, at another person. If the above is true, then are they simply saying that they have not yet had the awareness to look beyond the symptom of their anger for the unresolved core feelings they have about themselves? What would happen if you asked yourself, “Could it be even halfway true that everyone who I’ve ever been angry at has simply been a person that I’ve projected my hidden feelings about myself onto?” Suppressed Anger If it is true, as I mentioned earlier, that there are those of us who have anger and there are those of us who are in denial about our anger, then it is safe to say there is a lot of anger being suppressed in many of us. Why would this be? One of the most significant reasons we suppress anger is because as children we never had our emotions of anger validated. We weren’t told that it is okay to feel angry. In fact, for most of us just the opposite happened- we would actually get punished for being angry. It is a bit paradoxical to realize that as a child when I got angry, my parents would get angry at me for being angry! From there we’ve written our software such that it is safer not to show anger. So we hide it from other people and mostly from ourselves! It is important to understand that there are consequences when we suppress our anger. Anger isn’t tangible. We cannot smell, taste or see it. Because of this we can easily fool ourselves into thinking that it isn’t there. It is a similar scenario for people who are constipated from suppressing their bowel urges for too long. Many of them don’t even know they are constipated. Yet their backed up fecal matter continues to decay, while sending toxins into the circulation of the body. Our eyes do not pick this up, yet this internal self-poisoning and destruction goes on. Anger similarly effects our internal environments, both physically and emotionally. Emotionally speaking, the more we suppress anger the less sensitive to life we become, almost like being anesthetized. Physically speaking, suppressed anger can have systemic effects in many areas of our physiology, though according to Chinese medicine it most directly impacts the liver. If you find a person with detoxification troubles, blood sugar imbalances, trouble digesting fats, high or low cholesterol, poor assimilation of nutrients, or hormonal imbalances you are likely going to be looking into the eyes of a person with repressed anger. It is said that what we resist persists. Therefore transitioning from suppression to acceptance about our anger is the paradoxical yet powerful path for its dissipation. When we sweep anger under the rug it is important to acknowledge that we are the rug and what we are hiding rots what it is under! Acknowledging our anger allows us to experience it and allows for it to flow through and naturally dissipate out of our bodies and minds rather than becoming stagnated and stuck. Growing from Enemy to Friends with Anger Self-Discovery Exercise When we can express anger without being angry at or ashamed of our anger, we are in a new dimension of freedom. It is a place of freedom where we do get angry, yet we naturally shed the anger like a snake sheds its skin rather than piling anger up in our backpack and carrying it around with us indefinitely. Below we’ll explore steps that facilitate the movement from being in a place of conflict with our enemy to a place of expansion and freedom with our friend called anger. Step #1 Notice how you express anger, as talked about above. Do you tend to be more passive or active? Allow yourself to recall a time when you expressed anger passively and a time when you expressed it actively. It is quite challenging to change the relationship we have with anger until we realize what our relationship with anger looks like. Step #2 Give yourself permission to be angry. When we deny ourselves the right to be angry, we become even angrier. We become the anger. Conversely, by giving ourselves permission to feel anger we allow the anger to become part of us, which allows the anger to be expressed through us and it can naturally dissolve. Step #3 Express your anger responsibly. Responsibly expressing our anger means that we take ownership of it. If feeling the need to raise our voice or argue with another, we acknowledge with our words, “Yes I am angry, and though it is coming your way, it is my anger to deal with, not yours.” This prevents us from attempting to deceive others into feeling the burden and responsibility of our anger with blame and self-righteousness. Responsible expressions of anger also mean that we feel and act out our anger in a way that does not compromise the well-being of another person. Step #4 Take two points of view about any situation, issue, person, or event that you feel angry about. You can begin with the line, “A part of me feels pretty angry about this. And another part of me feels…” Your whole being will not be angry, even though it may seem like it. So you get to finish the above sentence with how another part of you feels about the same situation. As an example I might say, “A part of me is very angry at her. And another part of me feels scared about her behavior.” With two points of view we’re less likely to stay rigidly stuck in a stream of anger. Step #5 Introspect about your anger. Asking yourself the question, “How am I feeling about myself in this situation?” permits you to shift your focus from the other party back to yourself. Of course “yourself” contains the original source of the anger. By contemplating how we feel about ourselves, our anger becomes more transparent, leaving the door open for discovering our core emotions. I also invite you to consider that with Step #5, some of us, when emotionally triggered with anger, actually lose the capacity for conscious consideration. When this is the case we can still garner tremendous growth from this step by reflecting on this question a few hours or days later when we are in a less paralyzing intensity of anger. Conclusion Perhaps making friends with anger is really about accepting the parts of ourselves that feel angry rather than making them an enemy and rejecting them. By acknowledging the purpose of our anger and allowing ourselves to experience it, we can stay conscious of anger rather than being unconscious to its existence within. Not only can anger be a very healthy human expression, but we can also turn it into a very powerful catalyst of self-growth and healing with the self-discovery practice mentioned above. With anger as our friend, perhaps you and I can experience the inner peace and self-discovery that it comes to teach us. About the Author  A Holistic Health Consultant, JP Sears presents holistic healing and self-growth classes at numerous locations nationally and internationally on a regular basis. As a presenter and coach, JP is highly acclaimed for his heartfelt style of work. He runs his private client coaching practice at the C.H.E.K Institute in San Diego, California where he specializes in holistic emotional healing and lifestyle coaching. JP is certified as a Holistic Coach and is a member of the C.H.E.K Institute Faculty. For information on upcoming classes or becoming a client please visit www.HolisticHealthandFitness.com or call 760-420-9593. |