Tiny Buddha

Tag: angry

  • How to Forgive That Earlier Version of You

    How to Forgive That Earlier Version of You

    “Forgiveness is an action, which your mind can never understand. Your mind’s sole intent is to balance the books. In issues of morality, it only wants to get even. Therefore, practice forgiveness every day if only in trivial matters. This is an excellent way of tempering the mind and empowering the heart.” ~Glenda Green

    Recently, seemingly out of nowhere, I had thoughts about a relationship that ended many years ago. I started to remember some things I had said, emotions I had felt, and things I had done. I cringed.

    What could suddenly make me think of those things now? I pondered it for a few minutes, then put it out of my mind. But when I had those same thoughts a few weeks later, I decided to take a deeper look.

    That deeper look took me back even further to another relationship now decades gone by. And I cringed some more. This time not just because of things I had said or done. This time I winced at the painful experiences I’d endured and the hurtful words others had said.

    Why this unexpected trip down memory lane?

    After much reflection, I concluded that those memories were surfacing now because I was still holding onto that energy somewhere in my body and energetic field. They were coming up now because they were ready to be released.

    For that, forgiveness for myself was required.

    I cringed at those memories because the person I am now, in this present moment, would not have said or done those things. Forgiveness was possible when I realized that the person I was then could not have done any differently.

    Here’s why: Our thoughts and actions are a function not only of our level of awareness but also the sum total of every assumption, belief, and experience we have had up until that moment. That past version of me was at a different level of awareness—one shaped by years of unprocessed abuse, anger, and trauma.

    The years of personal inner work I have done since that time, and the greater awareness that resulted, brought me to this current moment of forgiveness as the next step in my own evolution.

    It’s easy to beat ourselves up when we realize we haven’t completely let something go. I am certainly guilty of this. Many of us have done years of inner work, only to discover that a single issue could have multiple layers yet to clear.

    If we still have an emotional charge around an event or person from our past, we can start by forgiving the fact that we are still emotionally triggered by it.

    We can forgive ourselves for the role we played in that unhealthy dynamic. Then we can forgive that partner for the hurtful and destructive thoughts, words, and actions that occurred.

    Forgiveness does not mean condoning the actions of another. It also doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or putting a superficial coat of positivity on that person or situation.

    Instead, forgiveness is about accepting whatever happened and reclaiming peace for ourselves.

    Forgiveness is a gift we give to ourselves. We can forgive ourselves for not knowing better at the time. We can forgive ourselves for having carried the mental and emotional burden for so long.

    Those things, however unpleasant, happened for a reason. We gained valuable wisdom by having had those experiences. They shaped us as the people we are now.

    So, how do we forgive?

    Simply telling ourselves, “I forgive you” as a thought is often not enough. We need to believe that we deserve forgiveness and then feel that forgiveness, anchoring it in our body. The more senses we involve in this process, the better.

    Here’s a six-step process to release the stuck energy around forgiveness. For best results, go to a peaceful place in nature where you can take a walk.

    Step #1: Visualize the person or event as an energy you’ve been holding in the pit of your stomach. It is a hard, dense energy.

    Step #2: Begin your leisurely walk. As you walk, tune into this dense energy in your gut that represents that person or event that is calling for forgiveness. Feel it.

    Step #3: Now visualize the peaceful, vibrant, and loving energy coming from the natural world all around you—the sun, the wind, the trees, plants, and flowers. Breathe that energy into your body and feel it fill your lungs and nourish every cell. With a few more deep breaths, imagine that the healing energy from nature has filled your heart space as well.

    Step #4: Next, direct that loving, peaceful energy from your heart down into your belly. You can place a hand on your stomach to assist with this process. Visualize the loving energy from your heart and hand softening and breaking up those hard energies housed in your belly.

    Step #5: After a few minutes, as you continue walking, imagine that each step you take loosens the dense energy even more, allowing it to slowly move down from your belly and into your legs with each step. Continue walking until you sense that those particles of dense energy are completely out of your belly and are now at the bottom of your feet, ready to be released.

    Step #6: Find a place in nature to stop and remove your shoes. Place your bare feet on grass, soil, or sand. With your feet on the earth, visualize sending that energy from the bottom of your feet down into the earth, where it is instantly neutralized and composted. Give gratitude to the earth and to your body for assisting in this forgiveness and release process.

    This forgiveness practice is equally powerful—and important—when it is directed at yourself. Rather than bringing to mind a specific event or person from your past, you can visualize the person you once were, starting with ten years ago.

    Recall how you lived your life back then, including how you thought about yourself, about the people around you, and about the world at large. Notice what has changed from who you were then to who you are now.

    Forgive that earlier version of you. You did the best you could given your circumstances and level of awareness at the time.

    Visualize the energy of that former you moving down your body and out the bottom of your feet. Let nature take it for composting.

    Now breathe in more peaceful, healing energy from nature. Let it fill your lungs, your heart, and your belly.

    To conclude the practice, look around you with fresh eyes. Take in your surroundings as if for the first time. Feel appreciation for the stronger, wiser person you are now.

  • 3 Important Things to Remember When People Are Mean

    3 Important Things to Remember When People Are Mean

    “Be kind. Be thoughtful. Be genuine. But most of all, be thankful.” ~Unknown

    Nobody is spared from being on the receiving end of a mean comment at some point or another. And it’s been said time and time again that allowing a mean person to get under your skin only serves to let them control you. The wiser thing to do is recognize that their comment about you is uninformed and get on with your day.

    Still, it’s far easier to know that wisdom than it is to truly feel and live it.

    I remember one instance in particular: A coworker (who I had never been fond of) had recently returned from an extended leave and was seeing me for the first time in several months. Upon encountering me in the hallway, she looked me up and down and said, “You’ve… been eating well.”

    I was so stung that I couldn’t respond. I wanted to respond defensively. Later, I wished I had responded rudely. Every time I thought about it, a new wave of sassy retorts I should have made populated my brain, and I found my jaw tensing and my fists clenching. I even wondered if it was too late to complain to HR. How dare she say something so rude and unprofessional to me?

    I was fully aware that weight is an emotionally fraught subject in my world, as it is for many people. My weight often fluctuated dramatically based on the other circumstances of my life, and I had been through the gamut of not-so-healthy dieting and short-lived attempts at fitness that many of us know all too well.

    Therefore, I was also fully aware that her comment only stung so hard because of my personal journey with weight; that she didn’t know about that journey; that she may belong to a culture or community in which “eating well” is not necessarily offensive; and that if she had judged me on some other aspect, I very possibly could have rolled my eyes and banked this as additional confirmation that yes, she is someone I don’t like.

    I was aware of all this, and yet my blood still boiled at the very thought of her.

    I decided that because this wasn’t the first time a mean comment had had this great of an effect on me, and it wouldn’t be the last, maybe I could compile some mental pointers to help me through these moments, if only for my own sanity. Here is what I came up with:

    1. Never do anything when your blood is boiling.

    Though I was speechless at first, the urge to make a mean comment back at her (if even a few days later) was all-consuming and felt perfectly justified. After all, I’m only human. Yet I’m ultimately glad I kept my cool.

    First off, being mean can majorly backfire—what if she had complained to our supervisor or decided to make my work environment unbearable in retaliation? And secondly, if I decided to reverse our roles, I would appear no better than her—the very person whose actions I scorned.

    But more importantly, I know that while emotions are important and deserve to be honored to their fullest extent, in the heat of the moment, they don’t represent our true nature and are not reliable signals. Instead, they are best expressed when paired with wisdom, which can often only be gleaned with some distance and pause.

    When I gave myself that pause and thought about it, I realized I don’t really want to be the kind of person who combats meanness by going even lower—I know I don’t believe in that. And I also don’t believe in digging deeper holes by starting an unprofessional feud.

    What I do believe is that my outer actions should align with my inner values. This means honoring my emotions with fairness and self-compassion while still maintaining external grace.

    This is really hard—it requires a lot of practice and patience.

    To start, I could process my experience of being hurt through a framework of self-love rather than a framework of spite. This could mean discussing my hurt feelings with a friend or mentor, writing about them, releasing the tension through physical activity or breathwork, or even reminding myself of all my positive qualities and assets that have the power to render one unimportant criticism negligible.

    2. Being civil doesn’t mean I have to like everyone.

    I didn’t want my silence to indicate that I was okay with, or passive to, being treated rudely. But in the professional space, where my focus is supposed to be on getting work done, civility enabled me to meet my goals and contribute to a well-functioning team. There was no reason why my relationship with this coworker had to take on any further form.

    Being civil did not translate to spending more time with her than required, engaging in conversation unrelated to work, inquiring about her life and sharing details about mine, talking to her at staff events, out of the office, or even in the parking lot; those are things I have the freedom to do with people I like. I appreciate the people in my life who bring me personal satisfaction and make me feel valuable, and I recognize that it’s a gift to find and spend time with these people.

    On the flip side, it is totally normal and possible to coexist with people who don’t make us feel fantastic and who we don’t choose to engage with, while still maintaining polite conduct for the sake of the task, event, or other item du jour.

    If a coworker’s behavior crossed into bullying or harassment, I know of formal steps I could take to advocate for myself. However, there is significant gray territory that is often inhabited by the people we simply don’t like—people whose actions we don’t appreciate, who we wouldn’t willingly group ourselves with.

    I gained a lot of relief when I understood that I have the skill and self-control to work on a professional task with someone in this category, but at the same time, I am under no obligation to welcome their presence and energy into other parts of my life.

    It was liberating and empowering to realize that treating everyone with basic civility is the wiser choice, only up until a certain point, and after that point, I have control over who I bring into closer orbit and how.

    3. You learn as much from the people you don’t want to be like as you do from the people you do want to be like.

    It’s joyful to look back and remember an inspirational teacher, friend, coach, or even a kind stranger who touched us with their positive qualities and thus impacted our personal trajectory. On the contrary, it’s painful to look back and remember people who were mean, inconsiderate, cruel, or any one of the innumerable undesirable qualities we inevitably come across. However, those people inevitably impacted our personal trajectory in much the same way.

    A great teacher of mine once said that gratitude does not mean that you are okay with everything; rather, it means that you are grateful for everything you’ve been taught. In other words, we can be grateful for each seemingly negative experience because it helped us confirm that we want something different.

    I see the potential for gratitude toward everybody who brings me into awareness of how I want to live and how I want to treat others, and that list includes coworkers making unprofessional digs.

    Nobody is perfect; just like nobody is spared from receiving a mean comment, at other times, nobody is spared from accidentally (or intentionally) making one.

    So, the next time it entered my mind to make a not-so-kind or not-so-necessary comment, I could remember what I learned from this experience and reconsider my actions.

    This reconsideration and ability to take a different course would be a tiny step toward cultivating the kinder, more considerate world that I want. And for that ability, I owe gratitude to my coworker and to everyone else who made me feel hurt or stung. They have brought me to the awareness that I desire a different action.

    Our interactions with others are unpredictable, and we never know when somebody is going to catch us off guard with a comment or action that stings or angers us. As a result, developing the ability to recognize, ingrain, and respond with some of the ideas I outlined, rather than with our initial experience of shock and raw emotion, is an arduous and, at times, unsatisfying process.

    But this dissatisfaction is often limited to the short term and fades when we do the hard work toward processing emotions. In the long term, doing the harder thing usually aligns with the more satisfying course of action and also aligns with our deeper values and beliefs on how life should be lived.

  • 4 Things You Need to Know About Your Hurting Inner Child

    4 Things You Need to Know About Your Hurting Inner Child

    “She held herself until the sobs of the child inside subsided entirely. I love you, she told herself. It will all be okay.” ~H. Raven Rose

    The first time I heard about inner child work was in a random article I found on the internet.

    It caught my attention because I was struggling to develop loving and compassionate feelings toward myself. Although I understood the role of limiting beliefs and unhealthy habits in my healing process and how to overcome them, I couldn’t feel love and empathy for myself.

    Most of the time, I was either very harsh toward myself for any minor mistake or denied feelings that came up.

    For example, as a teenager and a young adult, I struggled with anger. As I got older, I realized that emotional outbursts aren’t healthy, so I began to mask my anger with passive aggressiveness. However, the shame around anger remained because there were times when I still felt strong and intense anger. I just got better at hiding it. Or so I thought.

    I felt anger quite often, and I couldn’t stand it. I got angry with myself for being angry.

    The same denial and frustration applied to other emotions that made me feel vulnerable, like shame, guilt, or judgment.

    Because of the work I was doing with women, I thought I should be somewhere else, focusing on blooming flowers and appreciating the sunshine. In the meantime, I didn’t feel like I was walking my talk. And that, with no surprise, brought more shame and anger.

    Then, one day, my fridge broke down.

    I began to deal with the issue, trying to schedule maintenance. As I was driving to meet with a client, I received an email regarding appointment times that wouldn’t work for me, and there wasn’t a lot of flexibility in rescheduling.

    Suddenly, I felt an intense upsurge of anger and frustration flooding my body. Although I was able to witness it without reacting, it alarmed me since I hadn’t felt this way in a long time. Tears started to run down my cheeks.

    I felt defeated while asking myself,  “Why am I feeling this way? Why are these emotions still here? When is it going to stop?”

    As I was trying to wipe my tears while navigating rush-hour traffic, a thought came to mind: “It’s okay to feel angry.”

    I placed my hand on my chest, briefly closed my eyes as I was waiting at a red light, and whispered, “I see you” (referring to my inner child, recognizing her acting up by being angry).

    Soon after, something unexpected happened.

    I opened my eyes and felt a profound sense of lightness. The anger had left my body.

    I was in awe. More tears began rolling down my face, but this time from gratitude for the acceptance and grace I was able to give to myself.

    I realized that the whole time I was suppressing my anger, the inner version of me was asking for acceptance. She wanted to be seen and acknowledged, without judgment. It felt as if my inner child had been trying to get my attention and show me something (as kids do), but I kept pushing her away while being busy with other stuff.

    The moment I turned to her and gave her the attention she needed, she settled down.

    After this profound experience, I began to dive deeper into this healing modality and understood four things about the inner child in all of us.

    1. Our inner child wants to be seen.

    When we are acting on our triggers and behaving in ways that we know are not healthy for us, it means that our inner child is acting up. I always visualize a scene of a little girl or boy pulling their mom’s sleeve, trying to show her something. It’s like they are saying, “Mom, look. Mom, pay attention to me. There is something important I want to show you.”

    When emotions we don’t like come up, or we act in the same old ways that bring judgment, our inner child is simply trying to get our attention. He or she wants to be seen, recognized, and acknowledged.

    One of the questions I ask my inner child when she is (I am) acting up is, “What are you trying to tell me?” When I do it with my eyes closed, the answer is almost instant.

    2. Our inner child wants to be validated.

    Most of us have had experiences when we got hurt but didn’t receive an apology.

    We’ve also had experiences when the person who hurt us apologized with sincerity. I’m guessing that at least half of our healing took place at that very moment. Instead of being ridiculed or dismissed, we were validated.

    The same applies to our inner children. As I previously described, only when I justified my little girl’s emotions instead of dismissing her did I experience emotional release and healing.

    Since inner child work is about reparenting ourselves, this is how we can understand it. I look at my subconscious mind as my inner child. That’s where all my beliefs, perceptions, and triggers are stored. My conscious mind is my parent. This part of me is logical, able to question my limiting beliefs and actively acknowledge and heal the wounds that are there.

    The beauty of inner child work is that we don’t need apologies from those who we feel wronged us.

    Since we are in the position of a parent and a child, we can give our inner child anything s/he needs.

    3. Our inner child is missing and seeking love.

    Love is the most resilient emotion. It gives us courage, strength, determination, gratitude, and acceptance, and it is often the emotion that our inner child craves the most.

    After we acknowledge and validate our inner child, we can soothe them with loving affirmations and words of encouragement.

    Here is a simple exercise I learned from a guided meditation.

    Close your eyes and take three deep, cleansing breaths. Bring into your vision a simple bench where you and your inner child are sitting together. First, ask your inner child if you can hold his or her hand. Once you receive permission, gently stroke your child’s hand and say the ancient Hawaiian Ho’oponopono mantra three times.

    I am sorry.

    Please forgive me.

    I love you.

    Thank you.

    When I practice this mantra, I use the first affirmation, “I am sorry,” to apologize to my inner child for any pain and hurt I caused her by not paying attention to her when she needed me. Then, I ask her to forgive me for denying her presence and the healing she was so desperately asking for.

    These first two mantras are deeply healing because once I forgive myself for betraying myself and my inner child, I feel instant relief and more drive to keep going. I am not paralyzed by subtle guilt anymore.

    In the end, I reassure her that I am here for her by saying that I love her and then thank her for giving me this opportunity to heal both of us.

    4. Our inner child is a gateway to heartfelt emotions.

    Often, when I see a child, there is a level of softness that enters my body. I attribute it to the innocence and sweetness children represent.

    Imagine yourself being upset, and suddenly a three-year-old comes in front of you and starts smiling. Whether you want it or not, it will affect you to some extent, and you may even smile back.

    We can embrace the same dynamic with our inner child and use it as a way to feel heartfelt emotions. One of those ways is to use the visualization exercise I shared with you earlier.

    The more we practice feeling love, compassion, and empathy toward our little selves, the more accustomed we become to feeling these emotions.

    Although guilt, judgment, shame, or anger may still arise, instead of judging or denying them, we can use compassion and curiosity to understand what these emotions are trying to tell us.

    By validating and accepting what we feel, we can reparent ourselves, heal our wounds, and start living from the most powerful place there is—the place of love.

  • Why I Love My Anger and How It Can Be a Force for Good

    Why I Love My Anger and How It Can Be a Force for Good

    “Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    “I don’t know why I’m so angry,” my mother said.

    It was 3 a.m., and my mother was standing outside my door. I had awoken suddenly to hear feet stomping up and down the hallway on one of my last visits to my childhood home before dementia and breast cancer really took hold of her.

    “Phht, me either.” I tried to empathize, but inside of me rose my own fear and anger, as my siblings and I had watched her decline over the years, yet at the same time, anger was not new to her.

    Today, when I think back on this night and so many others like it, the question that I ask now is not “Why are you so angry?” but “Why are you not angrier?” 

    The truth is, I didn’t see a lot of anger in my family growing up, but being a highly sensitive person, I felt it all. I saw the occasional outburst, but I felt every one of my mother’s facial expressions, tones, and movements that signalled distress. I felt it in the room, along with the myriad of other emotions that human nervous systems naturally feel but have learned so well are not always appropriate.

    Two things I did see and feel were love and happiness, so I am grateful for that. But we are so much more than that.

    My suppression of anger was learned very young. If you don’t see something reflected in the mirror around you, it can’t exist.

    I remember so clearly, when I was thirteen, my mother came home from the hospital after her first partial mastectomy with a drainage tube attached to her chest.

    We sat in the living room as it was explained to us, as children, what had happened.

    I don’t remember the word cancer, but as a child, I could have blocked it or simply just not understood.

    What I do remember is the feeling in my body. I can still feel it now. The rising sensation of tightness and contraction that rose up into my throat and begged for expression. But as I looked around the room, I couldn’t see that sensation anywhere else.

    I remember pursing my lips together, probably tightening my jaw to reinforce the guards in case the tightness burst out into the room.

    It was one of the most confusing moments of my life. I understand it now.

    The news felt big and the emotions felt big, as did the overlay of rage—at the situation, others, or myself; I don’t know which. But it had nowhere to go. I felt suffocated.

    I excused myself to “go out with my friends,” which must have seemed like an odd response, but it was the only thing I knew how to do. I didn’t go out with friends. I escaped into the cold night air so I could breathe. I walked and walked, unconsciously moving through an internal freeze.

    The emotions never seemed to go away; they only seemed to thicken as I developed more and more armor. I learned that escaping felt good. I loved my family deeply, so it didn’t make sense to me when I felt relief to leave the house and go out drinking with friends.

    It wasn’t just moving toward pleasure as a teenager; it was avoidance of pain.

    I disconnected more and more from myself and my internal turmoil, and the mask on my outside grew more and more protective, smiley, and sturdy. It became who I was.

    Repressing my anger, sadness, and fear felt like the only option, yet it was literally killing me inside as I developed the opposite expression of external perfectionism.

    Flawless, nice, smiling, impeccably high standards on the outside.

    Complete chaos and a raging inner critic on the inside.

    This growing monster morphed into the extreme control of an eating disorder that nearly took my life. The binging and purging of bulimia felt like feeding an insatiable hunger followed by a complete release and restabilization of the perfection.

    In retrospect, I see this was a young girl’s own internal method of coping and self-regulation. Of course, in reality, it was anything but.

    Thanks to an attuned and compassionate doctor, I was able to finally be seen and heard as someone who was more than an acting-out teen, who was really in trouble. This was the turning point, and I wish I could say it all turned around, but the journey ahead of me was long.

    The road to healing has been one of reclamation.

    Slowly reclaiming my body, piece by piece. Nurturing and nourishing her and paying attention to her needs. Including those parts society has deemed not right or unacceptable.

    Reclaiming and feeling my emotions, all of them. But mostly reclaiming my right to anger.

    During my forties, when I experienced a period of burnout, I realized that anger was the last stone to uncover. I had been skirting around it for decades.

    Even as a yoga and mindfulness student and teacher, I never went into the energy of anger fully, always instructed to notice and surf the emotions on the way to peace and happiness.

    Yet anger was the part of me that needed self-love more than anything else. And the rewards anger gave me in return were not what I expected.

    I did not become an angry person. I became a more confident and powerful person who rose above shame and people-pleasing. I set boundaries more easily because I loved myself more. It gave me back my wholeness.

    Access to the energy of anger also afforded me access to the opposite end of the emotional scale: excitement and enthusiasm.

    Research now clearly tells us that repressed anger can contribute to anxiety, depression (repression), chronic illnesses, fatigue, and pain, and I can feel the truth in that.

    But we have learned very well how to cope. We rationalize (it’s not that bad), minimize (other people have it so much worse), and desperately escape ourselves looking for worth in people-pleasing, validation, praise, and permission.

    We leave our bodies in search for perfection that doesn’t exist and end up continually feeling not smart enough, thin enough, healthy enough, young enough, or good enough.

    The fear of expressing anger is compounded by being labeled as “angry,” which leads to further invalidation and invisibility. That is only what happens if you stay stuck in the stories of blame.

    I uncovered my capacity to befriend anger safely and harness its power to speak, protect, and stand up for myself from a place of self-love.

    I now know that:

    • Anger is the energy of healthy entitlement that says, “I have a right to be here” and speaks up against injustice from a place of ultimate, fierce love.
    • Anger is the energy of healthy aggression that protects your own worth and naturally sets boundaries that protect your body, time, and energy.
    • Anger is the place that defines clearly what you value and what you stand for and love.
    • Anger is the healing we need to step out of the program of perfectionism and the “good girl” (or boy) into our true, whole, authentic aliveness.

    I love anger in all its forms. It is a mobilizer for good in the world, and if you are reading this, I’m guessing you are not someone who will use it in toxic ways for war and destruction.

    You can harness it in small ways to access the true power of your voice, your breath. and the full capacity of fierce love.

    There is often a pot of stored anger to drain first so you can then move through it gently, lovingly, and listen to its valuable messages. To do this:

    • Notice where and when you tighten, contract, or feel annoyed or irritable.
    • Breathe into those areas in your body to create space around them.
    • Inhale and contract right into the areas of anger, including your hands and feet, and then release it with a sigh, sound, scream, or growl.
    • Notice what anger is pointing you toward: What needs to be protected that you value? What do you need? What needs to be said? What do you miss or grieve or worry about? See what rises now.

    Remember, you are a living, growing, learning, and expanding human, and we can heal not in spite of our anger, but through it.

  • I Forgive Forcefully (An Act That Takes Great Strength)

    I Forgive Forcefully (An Act That Takes Great Strength)

    “You don’t have to rebuild a relationship with everyone you have forgiven.” ~Unknown

    “Forgive” and “forcefully” are not two words I have ever joined together before.

    My idea of forgiveness involved kind and gentle meekness.

    Goodness.

    Altruism.

    Compassion.

    But never forcefulness.

    Well, not until I waded through the choppy waters of forgiveness after I had the courage to leave my abusive marriage.

    Forgive is a Verb

    Forgiving isn’t an emotion. It’s an action. It’s a process that has no time limitation or expiration date.

    It can’t be ordered, demanded, or rushed.

    When I first discovered that my husband had been lying to me, we had been married for thirty years. Out of the blue I discovered he had lost his job…over fifteen years previously.

    You read that correctly—fifteen years.

    For fifteen years he led me to believe that he was going to work every day. I thought we were saving money for college for our three children, “rainy day” needs, and retirement.

    But there was no accumulation of money at all. He didn’t contribute anything to our family. Consequently, his financial betrayal had devastating, long-lasting effects on me.

    We didn’t have health insurance. Going to the doctor or dentist was a luxury. We couldn’t afford a lot of the basic necessities for our children and relied on help from our families. He caused all this while criticizing my concerns, saying I was too needy and materialistic, and that I should be grateful for what I had.

    Little by little, I discovered that most of our marriage had been built on a mountain of lies. My ex-husband is a pathological liar. He is also a sex addict. He cheated on me routinely and without regret because he felt like life ‘owed’ him whatever he desired.

    Looking back, I see how he moved us away from my friends and family, isolating me. He belittled me until I had no self-confidence left. He used me like a worthless piece of trash.

    It’s impossible to put into words how it feels to discover that most of my life was completely out of my control.

    The story of my life was written by someone else. Someone who is selfish, greedy, and power hungry.

    Is forgiveness possible?

    Victim Bullying is Real

    Our first marriage counselor beamed proudly at my husband (ex-husband now.) She praised him for his willingness to attend counseling with me and for his acceptance of his faults.

    I listened to him manipulate the facts of the story to present himself in a better light, and I marveled at how blind I had been for so long.

    And then the counselor jumped into the topic of forgiveness, and I felt like my head was spinning.

    This man had abused me.

    For thirty years I was abused emotionally, sexually, and financially.

    Yet now everything was in my hands. He had done his job and apologized, so I needed to meekly accept it. Right?

    But I couldn’t.

    That first session, our marriage counselor gave me three homework assignments: a book to read, a list to write of things he could do to rebuild my trust, and a letter to write expressing how hurt I felt.

    My abuser’s homework?

    Nothing.

    I felt further victimized. I was trying to uncover and measure the piles of dust that were being swept up. At the same time, he was handing me a can of Pledge to clean up his mess.

    We need to stop bullying the victims by pushing them to forgive before they are ready. If the forgiving is completely up to me, then I need to do it my way. Period.

    By the way, this same counselor eventually pulled me for a private session one day and encouraged me to have a bag packed and an exit strategy planned. The blindfold eventually was lifted. She was the first person to validate to me that my experience was abusive.

    One Right Doesn’t Fix Bunches of Wrongs

    Once my husband started admitting to all the wrongs he’d done, he acted as if I should naturally just forgive him right away.

    It doesn’t work like that.

    “I’m sorry” isn’t the magic eraser of bad deeds.

    Three decades of purposeful abuse can’t be wiped away with a simple child-like apology.

    I left my husband and began working with a therapist alone. She helped me see what forgiveness really is. It isn’t absolution for the abuser. It isn’t a free pass. It certainly isn’t a reset button to give my abuser a second chance. In fact, it has very little to do with my abuser.

    Forgiveness means I am releasing the hurt and anger I feel so that it holds no power over me.

    What Needs to Be Forgiven?

    To forgive is to let go of the hurt that crushes my heart.

    Truthfully, I will probably never know the full extent of what my abuser did to me under the guise of being a ‘loving’ husband.

    So forgiveness can’t hinge on knowledge.

    Even though I’ve learned that my abuser was himself abused as a child, I can’t accept that as a good reason why he treated me badly.

    So forgiveness isn’t understanding or compassion.

    What is forgiveness for me?

    It’s forceful action to reclaim my life.

    Forcefulness Is Real Action

    New memories pop up to haunt me all the time.

    The time my ex-husband missed my son’s winter concert. I know he wasn’t working, so where was he? Who was he with? Was he using the money I had earned at my job to go to a strip club?

    The time he fought against taking me to the hospital because we didn’t have health insurance. I was having a hypertensive crisis, and he tried to get me to somehow ‘fix’ my problem at home. I ended up driving myself to the ER, where I was whisked away for a CT scan immediately because the doctors feared I was having a stroke right then.

     My husband put my health in jeopardy by not ‘allowing’ me to go to the hospital, by not having medical insurance, and by not being around to help. Thankfully, I have fully recovered. But it’s something I had to forgive him for, even though he never specifically apologized for that particular instance.

    I’ll never know the full story.

    I won’t hear apologizes for every single betrayal.

    These are the ghosts of my past that linger in the air.

    And with each new spotlighted transgression, I must forgive my abuser all over again.

    This goes on and on, repeatedly. But I no longer view it as re-victimization. I see it as my empowerment to direct my future.

    Forgiving Is Not for The Weak

    So, as an abused person, forgiveness is not a single act for me. It is a continuing action.

    I can try to give a blanket forgiveness, but when bleak memories attack me in the dark hours of the morning, I find myself needing to release and let go of all that hurt again. If I don’t, I risk being weighed down with anger.

    It’s exhausting.

    But it’s also empowering because I’ve learned I can’t rely on the gentle meekness displayed during schoolyard apologies. To forgive is hard work.

    It takes force, which includes:

    • Strength
    • Determination
    • Power

    No, forgiveness is not for the weak.

    Are you struggling with forgiving something that is hard? I understand. Try to take the power into your hands and forgive with forcefulness. You have the strength to do it. And the freedom you uncover is well worth the effort.

  • 7 Steps to Deconstruct Your Anger So It No Longer Controls You

    7 Steps to Deconstruct Your Anger So It No Longer Controls You

    “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” ~Buddha

    For as long as I can remember I’ve struggled with anger.

    My earliest memories of my anger are from junior high school, but it was around much earlier than that.

    The only emotion that was ever shown in my house growing up was anger. My dad had an anger problem, and my mother showed no emotion at all. This is what emotional normal looked like to me—either nothing or anger.

    I was the quiet, reserved kid, keeping my emotions locked away. I buried my feelings, especially the touchy ones, trying to hide any expression of vulnerability. Not knowing what to do with my feelings other than ignore them.

    It was obvious to the teachers that paid attention and cared that I was hurting, and my anger showed it, but I didn’t know it. I was sarcastic and had an edge to the way I talked and interacted with others. One day, while standing in line to leave the classroom, I got bumped from behind, and without hesitation, I turned around and punched the kid behind me to the floor.

    As I went through my twenties trying to figure who I was and what my place in this world could be, anger spewed out of me at unexpected and awkward times. It confused others, but it was all normal to me.

    It wasn’t until I got fired from a job because I was too confrontational toward the owner that I started to see my anger as more about me than others or my circumstances.

    One of my favorite sayings that best describes my view of my anger back then is, “I don’t need anger management. I need people to stop pissing me off!”

    Acknowledging my problem with anger wasn’t easy. It required admitting shortcomings and facing deeper issues within myself, something I’d worked years to avoid. But I finally realized and accepted that my future relationships, happiness, and mental health depended upon understanding and resolving those feelings and beliefs.

    My First Step in Healing – Not as Easy as I’d Hoped

    The journey toward healing started with self-reflection and seeking support. Ironically, this journey to understand myself began as I was completing my undergraduate degree in psychology.

    I found a psychologist to help me unravel the complex emotions I’d been suppressing for so many years. I’ll admit, I was hoping he’d give me a few quick tips and tricks to keep my anger under control and send me on my way.

    No such luck.

    He explained that to truly resolve anger issues, I had to:

    • Deconstruct my anger response
    • Create a healthy framework for processing my feelings
    • Learn new methods for communicating and expressing emotions

    The process wasn’t as quick and easy as I’d wanted.

    What It Looks Like to Deconstruct Your Anger

    Deconstructing your anger means breaking apart and examining the elements that have created it.

    The process requires analyzing and understanding the underlying factors, triggers, and emotions contributing to your anger and its eruptions. Although it takes work and a hard look at some ugly parts of yourself, doing this leads to the effective management of all emotions, which is an essential skill for happiness.

    The key steps for deconstructing your anger are:

    1. Evaluating past experiences

    Past experiences and traumas contribute to how you respond to certain situations and influence the formation of anger. Reflecting on these experiences can help you recognize patterns and triggers.

    For me, it was the influence of my father. He was both emotionally disconnected from our family and blisteringly angry. Any response could be cold or hot, or simultaneously both.

    Unknowingly, like every kid, I was psychologically influenced by him. And although I would have told you I wasn’t going to be anything like him, it turned out that I followed in his footsteps (until my thirties when I began to really do this work).

    2. Understanding your emotions

    Anger is a complex emotion that often masks other feelings. Fear, sadness, frustration, and hurt are all difficult feelings to face. For many, including me, it was easier to get angry than deal with the intensity of these feelings I didn’t know how to face or process.

    These emotions also created feelings of vulnerability and weakness in me that I didn’t want to see, experience, or admit to. And I certainly didn’t want to show them to anyone else.

    But examining these underlying emotions is a necessity for understanding anger and learning how to lessen and control it.

    3. Identifying your triggers 

    Everyone has things that trigger a seemingly automatic emotional response. Identifying triggers, the emotion that follows a trigger, and how your anger rescues that emotion is crucial.

    Triggers can be external (e.g., someone’s actions, words, situations, or events) or internal (e.g., negative thoughts or memories).

    When I looked closely, I discovered that most of my triggers involved my expectations of others. One such expectation is rule following—doesn’t everybody know you don’t drive slow in the fast lane? Or that you treat others the way you want to be treated?

    4. Analyzing responsive thoughts

    Most of us have reinforced certain thought patterns. And these thoughts significantly influence our emotions and emotional response. Deconstructing anger involves examining these thoughts and the resulting emotions that fuel your anger.

    For instance, are you jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, or personalizing situations? If so, your emotional response may be disproportionate or even inappropriate for the situation.

    I began to understand that my expectations led me to make assumptions about others that were incorrect. If you look in the rearview mirror when driving and think about how your speed is impacting other drivers, you’d move to the right, but some people don’t use their mirrors and aren’t aware of what’s going on around them. They should, but they don’t.

    Changing my expectation that everyone drives like me helped me reduce the buildup of anger.

    5. Assessing responsive behavior

    Responsive thoughts often initiate responsive emotions and behaviors, such as getting angry. By examining your behavioral responses and how they impact your relationships, and others in general, you’ll better understand why it’s helpful to consider new and healthier alternatives. 

    I realized that my inclination toward aggressive driving was a result of my anger at others for not following the “rules,” and this was only fueling more anger and negatively impacting me, not changing anyone else.

    6. Exploring new coping mechanisms

    If you’re struggling with anger issues, your current coping mechanisms for the deep emotions that trigger anger aren’t working. You need to find more constructive ways to respond to and express your feelings. Doing so will help break the negative thought-behavior cycle.

    Part of my process was to write down what triggered me, along with my responsive thoughts and behaviors. Looking at them on paper and away from the emotion of the moment allowed me to see them accurately as unhelpful and unhealthy for me.

    I could then write out a more balanced and healthier response. Once on paper, I would practice those more positive responses, and then weekly look back and reread what I’d originally written and my new better coping response to assess my progress.

    7. Setting boundaries and prioritizing self-care

    Recognizing your limits and establishing healthy boundaries will help prevent you from being drawn into situations that trigger anger. It’s also critical to prioritize self-care to ensure that you have the emotional resources to handle challenging situations.

    One of the more effective practices for me is walking away for a few minutes when I feel my frustration or anger rising. By removing myself from a triggering situation I am better able to refocus more on myself internally and less on the external situation.

    These steps aren’t an overnight fix and really need to become a life-long practice. But by following these steps to deconstruct your own anger you’ll gain self-awareness and emotional intelligence that can empower you to respond to difficult emotions more constructively.

    The Transformative Result of Deconstructing My Anger

    As I worked through these steps, I was able to develop and incorporate new ways to cope with my emotions.

    This path of personal growth coincided with my pursuit of multiple degrees in psychology. So, as I learned how to help others change, I was able to first help myself change. Now I’m the doctor giving the advice, which comes from years of training as well as my own personal experience.

    Mindfulness and internal reflection have allowed me to respond to my feelings with greater emotional intelligence. I’ve learned to recognize my triggers and the warning signs of building anger in the moment and implement calming techniques as a response before an eruption.

    But perhaps the most profound transformation came from learning to show kindness and compassion toward myself. I am now able to acknowledge my mistakes, forgive myself, accept that I am a work in progress, and recognize the need for regular emotional check-ins with myself.

    Deconstructing my anger has opened the door to my being more understanding and patient with others. The process has also helped me better empathize with my patients, as I’ve sat where they sit and done the work I recommend they do too.

    I still feel anger at times—it’s a natural emotion, and it can be beneficial in certain situations. I will always be more prone to it than others. But anger doesn’t control my life or negatively impact my relationships any longer.

    My journey toward addressing my anger issues has been long and challenging, but it’s also been profound and life-changing. We all carry burdens, and we heal and grow through acknowledging and addressing them.

    Deconstructing your anger can be a transformative process, empowering you to understand your emotions better and respond to them more effectively. Remember, although anger is a natural part of being human, how you choose to manage it determines its impact on your life and the lives of others around you.

  • How I Freed Myself from Anger by Owning it Instead of Blaming Others

    How I Freed Myself from Anger by Owning it Instead of Blaming Others

    “The opposite of anger is not calmness. It’s empathy.” ~Mehmet Oz

    In December last year, I went to India to study yoga and meditation. About a week into my training, I noticed I was becoming increasingly angry.

    I thought that coming to this peaceful and supportive place would be all about gentle healing while perfecting my yoga practice. Instead, I was furious, very negative, and frustrated with everything.

    Eventually, I talked to my teachers and shared what I was going through since I was becoming worried. They explained that since the training was intense and we were doing lots of activities to purify the mind and body, any stuck energy within would want to be released. This cleansing process could manifest in unwanted negativity, fatigue, emotional imbalances, and more.

    Although it comforted me, I had no idea what to do with this anger and how to deal with it. So I asked myself: “What am I thinking when feeling angry?”

    The answer was quite straightforward—other people.

    Since I removed myself from everything and everyone I knew and was familiar with, there was a sense of silence around me. This allowed my anger to become extremely loud.

    My initial thoughts were about everyone who didn’t support my decision to go to India, at least not at first. I replayed all the scenarios when people tried to change my mind or tell me I should do something else.

    A few days later, older situations began to come up. Things that happened six months ago, when someone said something that hurt me, and I stayed silent. Or when people told me I couldn’t do something, and I believed them.

    After two weeks of this internal rage, I thought my head was about to explode, then one day, it felt as if it did. I woke up with an extreme fever and sinus infection that hurt my face. I was crying all day and couldn’t even attend classes. Eventually, I ended up in the emergency room.

    I remember meeting an Ayurvedic doctor with orange hair and a gentle smile. He gave me some ayurvedic medicine and said I would feel 100% in four days. I couldn’t see how that could happen, but I felt too weak and mentally defeated to protest, so I took the medicine.

    I spent the first two days in bed with a high fever and almost zero energy to even move. On the third day, the fever was gone, and I could eat. On the fourth day, I felt energized and ready to continue my studies.

    The most amazing feeling was the lightness I felt after I got healthy. My anger radically decreased, and I was more patient and happier.

    This state of peace and joy prompted me to look at what had happened to me. First, I knew that my sickness manifested because of accumulated negative energy seeking its way out. Frankly, I was grateful that I was able to release it.

    However, the anger still dominated my days. At first, I began looking at everyone who I believed had wronged me in any way. I tried to forgive them and rationalize their behavior while developing the understanding that everyone acts from their level of perception. Although I could ease the feeling of anger, it was still very present in my life, and I felt it every day.

    Then one day, as I was sitting in meditation, a profound realization came to mind. I couldn’t let go of the anger because I wasn’t angry with others but myself.

    Since I’d allowed things that I didn’t like and never spoke up about them, deep down, I knew I was betraying myself. However, my need for validation and inclusion was stronger than my desire to stand up for myself.

    Since taking responsibility for enabling such behaviors was confronting, I turned my anger toward others and blamed them.

    Although this realization was uncomfortable, it gave me a sense of strength. Realizing that my power was in self-responsibility made me feel empowered.

    Over the next few days, I battled with myself, feeling like a victim at times and, at the same time, refocusing on my new epiphany.

    Here is how I decided to proceed and begin letting go of my anger once this emotional turmoil slightly settled and I could think clearly.

    1. I focused on where my power was.

    Since I had a habit of feeling like a victim, taking responsibility for what I tolerated was new, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable. Therefore, I often slipped into victimhood.

    Once I observed it, I refocused and reminded myself how amazing and freeing it was to live from a place of responsibility. Eventually, I felt less like a victim and more like a healthy individual who could make her choices.

    The most common reason why we shy away from taking responsibility for our thoughts and emotions is because we think it means letting people off the hook. We want them to realize how they wronged us. We want them to validate our feelings, and we believe it will happen if we just stay angry long enough.

    Ironically, we are the ones who suffer. The word responsibility is derived from the word response. And that, we can choose. In the same way, we can choose to set boundaries while defining what we tolerate and being responsible for ourselves.

    After a few weeks of this mental ping pong, I knew there was a component I was missing.

    2. I decided to forgive myself.

    There was no way I could go through this process without forgiveness since I judged myself profoundly for what I had allowed.

    Self-forgiveness was the hardest step. Although I practiced self-forgiveness in the past and was quite familiar with it, forgiving myself for sabotaging my mental and emotional health was a hard pill to swallow.

    Every time I closed my eyes and began speaking my forgiveness affirmations, I started crying. I realized that I didn’t believe I deserved forgiveness—a belief that stemmed from my traumatic childhood—so I decided to incorporate inner child work into this practice.

    I created a vision of my adult and younger self meeting on a bench. Every time we met, I would ask her to forgive me for letting her down and hurting her so much.

    After one week of this conscious practice, my heart began to soften, and I could look at myself with more compassion and empathy instead of harsh criticism.

    This created a huge shift within my healing since I realized a fundamental truth when healing anything in our lives. In order to let go of anger, guilt, shame, judgment, or any other negativity we feed, we must go on the other side of the spectrum and embrace emotions of care, nurturing, understanding, and empathy.

    Inner child work, practicing self-forgiveness, or loving-kindness meditations are only a fraction of what we can do to ease into our healing.

    As I was preparing for my return home, I knew there was one more thing I had to put in place to make this process lasting and successful.

    3. I chose my non-negotiables.

    It was time to boundary up and decide what I would tolerate going forward. I remember feeling so scared and uncertain. It wasn’t the boundary itself that scared me as much as the reactions from people who weren’t used to them.

    At first, I felt like a toddler taking their first step. I went back and forth, contemplating whether my boundary was good or bad, right or wrong, and whether I really needed to put it in place. Then I realized something—there is no right or wrong when it comes to our boundaries. We set them, and that’s it. They are our non-negotiables, and they are not up for debate.

    The moment we begin setting boundaries, we act with respect toward ourselves. We are sending a message to our brain saying, “I love and value myself enough to honor what feels right and let go of what isn’t.” We are also ready to build relationships with a strong foundation underneath.

    It’s important to acknowledge the fear that comes from setting boundaries. Do we fear the loss of people? Are we worried that we won’t be validated or that others will get upset with us?

    Although these concerns are valid, and we all battle them, it’s important to remind ourselves of the cost of self-sabotage and self-betrayal. This way of life isn’t sustainable or healthy, and eventually, it will bring us back to facing the same challenges.

    It has been a few months since I made changes within my relationships and how I navigate them. Although some of them radically changed, I was able to work through my anger and let go of lots of negativity in my life.

    I still fall into my victimhood and try to let myself off the hook. However, I am now better at recognizing it while understanding the privilege I hold to be responsible for my life, and how empowering it feels when I act on it.

  • Why Forgiveness Is the Ultimate Act of Self-Love and 3 Lessons That Might Help

    Why Forgiveness Is the Ultimate Act of Self-Love and 3 Lessons That Might Help

    “The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.” ~Marianne Williamson 

    When you hear the word “forgiveness,” what do you feel?

    Forgiveness used to make me feel uncomfortable. I would physically contract when I thought about forgiving someone who hurt me. I felt like forgiving meant letting them off the hook while I was the one paying for their hurtful words and actions.

    I would play a scene in my head about what it would look like for someone to apologize and admit to their wrongs… and only then would I be ready and able to forgive. I put a moment that hadn’t happened on a pedestal. And in doing so, I outsourced my power to another person.

    This kept me in a prolonged state of anxiousness, resentment, and heartache. I thought that I could bypass forgiveness because there was never an apology.

    While apologies are helpful in healing, they aren’t always guaranteed. You can’t control what other people do or don’t do.

    When you wait for an apology or project high expectations on what it should look like, you’re letting another person’s actions have too much control over your healing. And even if an apology is given, it can never fully take back what happened.

    When I grew the courage to walk away from my partner last year, I felt so much anger for how I’d been treated throughout our relationship. He admitted to emotional cheating, he’d talked down to me, and he’d disrespected my time and energy.

    The last text that I received from him was an apology, and yet I still didn’t feel like it was satisfactory. That’s because the ego will never be fully satisfied. True forgiveness has little to do with what the other person does for you; nobody can truly give you closure but yourself.

    My path to forgiveness began when I received his text. In my final text to him, I was loving and wished him the best. It didn’t involve me trying to say one more piece to gain a reaction or salvage the relationship again.

    It was me listening to the wisdom of my highest self that whispered in the depths of my pain: 

    “I am loving and loved.” 

    “It is for you, future you, and the people that love you that you take this experience of heartbreak and alchemize it into love, acceptance, and peace.”

    My old story of forgiveness was that it was naive and unrealistic.

    But my new story? Forgiveness is empowering and healing. And my future health, well-being, and relationships depend on it.

    Here are three lessons about forgiveness that my breakup taught me.

    1. Forgiveness is a process.

    Forgiveness is not like following the exact route on your GPS to spend a Saturday at the beach. It ebbs and flows. We can’t rush or force it, but we can be willing to welcome its healing effects over time.

    It didn’t feel right to jump right from my breakup into a place of forgiveness. I needed to process the sacred anger, rage, sadness, and bitterness that I was feeling. Because I let myself move through these emotions in healthy ways, I was able to release a lot of energy.

    I then decided I was ready to forgive. I made a conscious choice to forgive internally every time I was triggered or reminded of something painful. At first, it felt nearly impossible. But I reminded myself that it was going to feel hard, and I loved myself where I was at.

    I started with small moments of putting my hand on my heart and wishing peace for my ex. Then I began writing about my forgiveness in my journal. One day, I wrote a forgiveness letter to my ex (not to send) and then burnt it.

    Over time, forgiveness feels more natural and reflexive, but it still requires intention. Be gentle with yourself in the process.

    2. Forgiveness is for you.

    Forgiveness is not about condoning, excusing, or minimizing someone’s behavior and actions. And it’s not about forgetting what happened or giving someone more chances.

    Unlike reconciliation, forgiveness does not necessarily mean letting someone back into your life, although some people may choose that path to rebuild something stronger. But that requires conscious commitment from both parties involved.

    When we resist forgiveness and harbor resentment, the only person we hurt is ourselves. In my case, forgiveness was an act of self-love and acceptance.

    First, I had to forgive myself for staying longer than I should have. Then it was easier to energetically extend forgiveness to my ex and let go of uncomfortable emotions, like anxiety and resentment, which were keeping me stuck in a victim mindset.

    I took my power back through forgiveness because it gave me permission to move on and created space for something more aligned with the highest version of myself.

    When I welcomed the feelings of forgiveness, my energy had a ripple effect. Once I forgave my ex, I saw the best in other people and situations instead of projecting resentful, negative energy, which had previously kept me in a lack mentality.

    Since I started to forgive and love myself more, I have attracted more abundance, love, and success.

    Gratitude now radiates from me and has helped me align with connections, business opportunities, and experiences that have been for my highest good.

    3. Forgiveness invites compassion for all.

    The by-product of forgiveness is an equally healing expression: compassion. When you forgive, you welcome full, compassionate presence as you’re releasing the chains of judgment, blame, and shame. You begin to see the situation or person with a more loving lens.

    As I started forgiving my ex-partner in my heart, I could clearly see that his behaviors were a reflection of his own internal struggles and pain. This gave me pause.

    The feelings of anger and resentment slowly melted away as I saw a side of myself—someone who has also struggled, suffered, and made mistakes. And I couldn’t help but feel compassion for him, myself, and everyone who has felt pain because of pain caused by others.

    Compassion is the antidote to the judgment that poisons our world and creates more suffering. It’s the greatest gift we can give and receive.

    —

    Forgiveness isn’t easy, but neither is carrying the pain in the long run. See forgiveness as a non-negotiable act of healing, empowerment, and self-love. It is the ultimate closure you seek, and it will radically change your life and the lives around you.

  • Riding the Wave of Rage: How Mindfulness Became My Lifesaver

    Riding the Wave of Rage: How Mindfulness Became My Lifesaver

    “Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    My anger has gotten the best of me more than I care to admit. I’ve smashed windows, broken chairs, had movie-worthy brawls on the beach, and said gut-wrenching stuff that has brought people I care about to tears.

    I grew up when mental health was not taken seriously, nor was it even on my radar. I just took my wild nature to mean I was screwed up and hopeless. And sadly, the thought of seeking support only brought up more anger. It felt like I was weak, pathetic, and a loser for being unable to sort my life out.

    So, without understanding why my emotions were such a rollercoaster (undiagnosed depression and type II  bipolar disorder), I didn’t know where else to turn except to my dear ole friend Sailor Jerry, the purveyor of fine spiced rum. Alcohol only fueled my emotional outbursts, exacerbating the problem.

    Knowing that kind of anger lived inside me brings on an emotional blubbering mess of a show. Because overcoming the guilt that came from identifying with those actions and feeling like that’s who I was as a man took years of therapy.

    It feels so different than the person I am now.

    I understood in therapy that it’s not my fault per se, but it is my responsibility to do something about it.

    Nothing has driven that lesson home more than being a dad.

    And if my daughter is anything like my wife and me, we got ourselves a wild child ready to test our limits.

    Living with Canadian winters means it’s inevitable that, at some point, you’ll lose control of your car. I once did a complete 360 on the highway on the way to work as I lost control on black ice. I didn’t think; I just acted based on what I learned in driving school.

    If you’re driving your car and it starts to skid, you go with the flow of your vehicle and move in the direction of the skid, not against it. That’s how you regain control, even if it seems counterintuitive.

    Anger is the black ice of emotions. You’re often thrown into a spiral of anger before you even have the chance to mindfully be aware that you’re losing control. That’s why I’ve found the practice of mindfulness and daily meditation life transforming.

    The anger never goes away because you never stop experiencing the emotions of life, but through the practice of mindfulness, you create space between the stimulus (my wife and I fighting, exhausted from a sleepless toddler, and businesses to run) and the response (thinking it’s time to end the marriage).

    You can choose to respond and act differently because you see the trigger for what it is for you.

    Think of it like a gigantic pause button that allows you to slip into Matrix mode. You see the stimulus, pause for presence, and respond with intention. My daughter is not purposely trying to throw our lives into chaos. My wife and I aren’t fighting because we no longer love each other. We’re dealing with the tornado nature of a toddler, running businesses, and being pushed to our limits.

    It’s better to respectfully and constructively communicate your feelings with your partner if you plan to stay married. I get it. Easier said than done, but we need to believe that we’re not inherently flawed and beyond help.

    My previous relationships all had their fair share of fights (stimulus), resulting in my doom spiralling into believing it was time to burn it all down (response). Without a pause between stimulus and response, the middle became a breeding ground for an unconscious poison cocktail of guilt, shame, and a need to escape the uncomfortable reality of what I was facing.

    Let’s be honest. I wasn’t making any effort to change. Repairing a relationship without tools is damn near impossible. Through therapy, I gained a deeper understanding of my emotional struggles and the root causes of my anger. Now, I have a fully stocked toolbelt that I feel comfortable using.

    And that’s where the power of mindfulness comes in. You learn to know and trust yourself well enough to tap into a greater energy around you, and you become calm in any situation. You see the black ice, grip the wheel, and control the situation by keeping yourself present with the stimulus.

    When faced with a challenge, do you possess the mental flexibility and self-awareness to remain centered and connected with that space between stimulus and response, and move forward in a way you can be proud of?

    Or do you struggle against challenges, only to give up because negative self-talk and conditioned thinking compel you to repeat the same destructive pattern, leaving you guilty and ashamed?

    I’m not saying I never get angry anymore. But I sure as hell try my best not to throw rocket fuel on the fire. Addressing the root of the problem—undiagnosed depression and type II bipolar disorder—helped me better understand how to cope with a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings that previously felt beyond my control.

    Life is a lot like being in a high-stress athletic event. The ability to react to another player’s actions without emotional triggers often makes the difference between making a wise or a poor decision and ultimately winning or losing the game.

    The only difference is that the game of life truly never ends. We will only lose if we stop improving and holding ourselves to a higher standard for how we show up in the world. Taking full responsibility for our lives can be terrifying, but it also creates a sense of personal freedom. This is because it allows us to take action toward becoming the people we know we’re capable of being.

    To thrive, you must mindfully choose to go with the flow of your emotions and drive toward anger, shame, and guilt, not away from them. You must sit with these feelings, pause to recognize how you’ve been triggered, and consciously choose a response you’ll feel good about. This way, you regain control of your life by releasing yourself from a pattern of actions that no longer serves you. Remember, practice makes progress.

  • How I’ve Navigated My Grief and Guilt Since Losing My Narcissistic Father

    How I’ve Navigated My Grief and Guilt Since Losing My Narcissistic Father

    “One of the greatest awakenings comes when you realize that not everybody changes.  Some people never change.  And that’s their journey.  It’s not yours to try and fix it for them.” ~Unknown

    In 2021 my father died. Cancer of… so many things.

    Most of the events during that time are a blur, but the emotions that came with them are vivid and unrelenting.

    I was the first in my family to find out.

    My mother and sister had gone on an off-grid week-long getaway up the West Coast of South Africa, where there’s nothing but sand, shore, and shrubs.

    I was living in China (where I continue to live today), and we were under Covid lockdown.

    He called me on WhatsApp (which was rare) from the Middle East, where he lived with his new wife. Asian and half his age.

    The cliche of the aging white man in a full-blown-late-midlife crisis. Gaudy bling and all.

    He looked gaunt and ashen-faced. That’s what people look like when they’re delivering bad news. He dropped the bomb.

    “I have cancer.”

    What I am about to admit haunts me to this day: I cared about him in the way one human cares for the well-being of any other human. But at the time, I never cared at the level that a son should care for a father. I had built a fortress around myself that protected me from him over the years.

    He’d never really been a parent to me. He wasn’t estranged physically, but emotionally, he’d never been there.

    He was emotionally absent. He always had been.

    I was the weird gay kid with piercings, tattoos, and performance art pieces.

    He was a military man. The rugby-watching, beer-drinking, logically minded man’s man.

    We were polar opposites—opposite sides of completely different currencies.

    I sat with the bomb that had just been delivered so hastily into my arms and ears. Information that I didn’t know what to do with. It felt empty. I didn’t know how to feel or how to respond. 

    Six years earlier, in 2015, I had flown back to South Africa to sit with my mother on her sofa for two weeks while she grappled with the complexity of the emotions of being recently divorced after forty-something years of marriage.

    My mother and I always had been close. She had spent her life dedicated to a narcissistic man who had cheated on her more than once, who was absent a lot of the time during our childhood because of his job in the Navy, and from whom she had shielded my sister and me.

    He had hurt her again. And I hated him for it.

    She had been devoted to him. Committed to their marriage. Gave him the freedom to work abroad while she kept the home fires burning. She’d faithfully maintained those home fires for over a decade already. She had planned their whole future together since she was sixteen years old and pregnant with my sister, who’s five years old than me.

    And this is how he repaid her.

    He’d taken it all away from her and left her alone in the house they’d built together before I was born.  Haunted by the shadows of future plans abandoned in the corners.

    She descended into a spiral of anxiety and depression, resulting in two weeks of inpatient care at a recovery clinic with a dual diagnosis of depression and addiction (alcoholism) that wasn’t entirely her fault.

    He caused that.

    I remember lying in bed when I was about six or seven years old; I was meant to be asleep, the room in deep blue darkness. Hearing my father in the living room say, “That boy has the brains of a gnat.”

    I assume I hadn’t grasped some primary math homework or forgotten to tidy something away. Things that I was prone to. Things that annoyed him to the point of frustrated outbursts and anger.

    “Ssh! He can hear you,” my mother replied. I still hear the remorseful tone of her voice.

    He was logical and mechanical. I am not.

    I don’t remember my crime that day, but I still suffer the penalty of negative self-talk, a lack of confidence, and a fear of being considered “less than” by others.

    It’s one of my earliest memories.

    And there, in 2021, I sat with the news of his diagnosis. I didn’t know what to feel.

    Guilty for not having the emotional response I knew I was meant to be having?

    Shouldn’t I be crying? Shouldn’t I be distraught?

    How do other people react to this kind of news?

    I’ve always been a highly sensitive person. It’s my superpower. The power of extreme empathy. But there I sat, empty.

    I felt trapped.

    I was in China in 2021, and we were under Covid lockdown. There were zero flights.

    I was emotionally and physically trapped.

    Gradually, more feelings started surfacing.

    At first, I felt compassion for a fellow human facing something utterly devastating.

    Then I started to feel fear for my mom, who had held onto the idea that maybe, one day, they’d get back together.

    I was terrified about how she would take this news when she returned from her holiday.

    Within a few weeks, a “family” Facebook group was set up—cousins, uncles, people I’d never met before, myself, my sister, and my mother.

    And the “other woman” and her kids from previous relationships, none of whom we’d ever met.

    Phrases like “no matter how far apart we are, family always sticks together” were pinging in the group chat.

    I didn’t know how to absorb those sentiments.

    Family always sticks together? Didn’t you tear our family apart? Where were you when I was lying in a hospital bed in 2011 with a massive abdominal tumor?  Family always sticks together? What a convenient idea in your hour of need.  

    More guilt. How could I be so jaded?

    A month later, in January 2021, he passed away.

    It happened so quickly, and for that, I am grateful. No human should ever suffer if there is no hope of survival.

    That’s when the floodgates of emotions opened.

    I cried for weeks.

    I cried for the misery and suffering he caused my family, my mother’s despair, and my sister’s loss. I shed tears for my grandfather, who had lost two of his three sons and wife. I wept for my uncle, who had lost another brother.

    I cried for the future my mom had planned but would never have.

    And I cried for the father I never had and the hope of a relationship that would never be.

    I sobbed from the guilt of not crying for him.

    Then I got angry. Really, really angry.

    I got angry with him for never being the father I needed. I got mad for the hurt he caused my mom. I blamed him for never accepting me for me. I was angry with him because I was the child, and he was the adult.

    Being accepted by him was never my responsibility.

    In the weeks and months that followed, the wounds got deeper. My mother’s drinking got worse, to the point of (a very emotional and ugly) intervention.

    We found out that my father had left his military pension (to the tune of millions) to his new, younger wife of less than a year and her four children from different men. 

    While I want to take the moral high ground and tell you it’s not about the money—it’s solely about the final message of not caring for his biological children in life or death—I’d be lying.

    My sister and I have been struggling financially for years, and that extra monthly money would’ve offered us peace of mind, good medical insurance, or just a sense that he did care about our well-being after all.

    But there’s no use ruminating on it.

    Accept the things you cannot change.

    It’s been two years since he passed away.

    I’ve bounced between grief, anger, and acceptance, like that little white ball rocketing chaotically around a pinball machine, piercing my emotions with soul-blinding lights and sound.

    The word “dad” never meant anything to me. To me, it was a verb, not a noun. It never translated into the tangible world.

    My mother once said, “Now I know you were a child who needed more hugs.”

    She hugged me often.

    But I also needed his hugs.

    I’ve found a way to accept that he would never have been the father I needed. I will never have a relationship with my father. Even if he were still alive, he would never have been capable of loving us the way we needed him to.

    You cannot give what you don’t have.

    He was a narcissist. Confirmed by a therapist in the weeks and months after their sudden divorce.

    He was never going to change. He didn’t know how to.

    Using NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques, I’ve been able to reframe the childhood memories I have about my father.

    That fateful night all those years ago, lying in bed, hearing those words that have undermined my confidence and self-worth for thirty-four years: “That boy has the brains of a gnat.”

    Through visualization and mental imagery, I’ve found a pathway to healing.

    Through NLP, I became the observer in the room of that memory. I could give that little boy lying in bed, his head under the sheets, the comfort, protection, and acceptance he needed.

    I wrapped golden wings around that little boy and protected him.

    I became my own guardian angel.

    During the same session, my NLP coach gently encouraged me to look into the living room where my father sat that night.

    What I saw in my mind’s eye took my breath away.

    I saw a broken and withered man. His legs were drawn up close to his chest. I saw the pain inside him. I saw a man who didn’t know how to love or be loved.

    I saw a man who was scared, confused, and deprived.

    In that moment of being the observer, the guardian angel in the next room, a brilliant light forcefully rushed from me and coiled around him. A luminous cord of golden energy.

    I don’t know if the surge of energy wrapped around him was to heal or restrain him. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. It was pure love, compassion, and light. And it was coming from me: I was my own Guardian Angel.

    At that moment, all the past yearning for his love, acceptance, and approval dissipated. I didn’t need it from him; I needed to give it to him—filled with empathy and compassion. I needed to release him from the anger, hurt, and pain he had caused.

    I needed to do it for myself, but I also needed to do it for him.

    I’ve accepted him for who he was.

    It took a lot of journaling, visualization, mindfulness and meditation, listening to Buddhist teachings (Thich Nhat Hanh in particular), and sitting with the emotions.

    It took the desire to heal myself and him—to be happy and whole again.

    He was painfully human. But aren’t we all?

    He was a narcissist. He drank too much, cheated on his wife, never took the time to have any meaningful connection with his kids, and loved Sudoku.

    He caused my mother pain that still haunts her to this day.

    She still dreams about him.

    I like to think that if he had one more chance to reach out from The Great Beyond, he might say something along the lines of what Teresa Shanti once said:

    “To my children,  I’m sorry for the unhealed parts of me that in turn hurt you.  It was never my lack of love for you.  Only a lack of love for myself.”

    He was a deeply flawed man—but he was my father.

  • How I Changed My Perspective When I Was Too Angry to Be Grateful

    How I Changed My Perspective When I Was Too Angry to Be Grateful

    This is not your usual piece about gratitude.

    I am sure you’re familiar with all the benefits of having a regular gratitude practice.

    Chances are you, as a reader of this blog, have a gratitude routine of yours. I was one of you. I have been regularly gratitude journaling for over a year now. I have experienced all the promised benefits of it myself.

    Gratitude journaling has helped me reduce my stress, get better sleep, and feel more energized. It improved my mental well-being so much that I even started a social media page to encourage others to practice gratitude.

    However, one day, things changed. Expressing appreciation for what I had started making me feel bad, selfish, and guilty.

    What happened? On the sixth of February, my home country was hit by two immense earthquakes. A region where millions reside was completely destroyed. Thousands of buildings collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of people were trapped under the remains. Cities were wiped out. In the entire country, life just stopped.

    Shortly after, my social media feeds were flooded with despair. People who could not get in touch with their families… People who tweeted their locations under the remains of their collapsed houses, begging for rescue… People who lost their homes, families, and friends.

    I was heartbroken. I felt helpless and useless in the face of this tragedy.

    A few days later, like any other day, I sat down to write in my gratitude journal. I couldn’t do it. You would think that after seeing all the unfortunate people who lost everything they had, I would have had even more to be thankful for. After all, I was so lucky just to be alive. But no, I couldn’t do it. Instead, I got stuck with guilt.

    Today I feel grateful guilty for being in my safe home.
    Today I feel grateful guilty for having a warm meal.
    Today I feel grateful guilty for hugging my loved ones.

    It has been almost two months since the earthquake. I couldn’t get myself back into gratitude journaling. Then it hit me. Underneath my grief, there was another emotion: anger.

    Because you know what? This disaster wasn’t just a completely unexpected incident. The scientists had been warning the authorities about this earthquake for years. The geologist said it was inevitable. The civil engineers said the strength of the buildings was too low. The city planners said the right infrastructures in case of such a disaster were not in place.

    Over so many years, we all heard them repeatedly warning the authorities, but nothing was fixed. I was very angry with the broken system that did not care.

    I couldn’t let go of my guilt because I was afraid that if I did, I would let go of my anger with it. I don’t want to let go of my anger. I want to hold onto it so that I keep fighting for a change, a better system that cares about its people.

    I know it’s not just me or this one earthquake disaster. Many people all around the world suffer from the actions of governments. People who live under war, oppressive regimes, or corrupt states would very well understand the anger I feel.

    Rage toward an authority, a government, or a broken system is not the same as being angry with another individual. The rage gets bigger in scale to the number of lives affected. And maybe the worst part is that this type of rage is harder to let go of because history shows that such rage fuels the actions for change in broken systems.

    So I wonder: Is it possible to transform the rage that is harming me inside into something else without losing the desire to fight for change?

    And again, I find my answer in the path I know the best—gratitude. But this time, instead of being thankful for the things I have, I’m thankful for the things I can provide.

    Today, I am grateful for having a safe home because I can accommodate someone who lost theirs.
    Today, I am grateful for having a job because I can afford to donate meals to people in need.
    Today, I am grateful for having my arms because I can hug someone who lost their loved ones.
    Today, I am grateful for accepting all my feelings and having the wisdom to transform them.

  • 9 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self to Help Her Change Her Life

    9 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self to Help Her Change Her Life

    “You are one decision away from a completely different life.” ~Mel Robbins

    At twenty-six years old, I lost my dad to suicide. I was heartbroken and so angry.

    My dad was not the best. Ever since I was little, he would criticize everything I did. I was never good enough for him, and I was a place he discharged his anger through emotional insults.

    It never stopped, and I was always on high alert around him. Right until the moment he took his life.

    He could also be loving, kind, funny, and warm, but my nervous system could never relax around him. He was a Jekyll and Hyde. I never knew what behavior would set him off.

    Then all of a sudden, he was gone.

    I was angry because he had caused me a lot of pain growing up, and now he had left me.

    I was angry that I loved this man so much and felt such deep pain without him. It made no sense to me. Surely my life should be better now that his constant abuse was over.

    But it was just the beginning of my emotional breakdown. Children love their parents unconditionally, no matter how we are treated. But if our parents project their pain on to us, we end up not loving ourselves.

    Now that the abuse had stopped, it was time to deal with all the emotional wounds he’d inflicted over the years.

    But I resisted this and got stuck. I struggled in romantic relationships, unconsciously dating versions of my dad.

    I was full of self-hate. He may have died, but his criticism was very much alive in my head! And I was the one now persecuting myself for everything.

    I may have loved him, but I had no love for myself, as he had taught me that I wasn’t worth that.

    I felt powerless and in so much pain. I numbed this pain with the tools he had given me—wine, TV, food, and caretaking others. I had the busiest diary so I would never have to feel.

    I had no idea how to stop feeling so awful and like I was doomed for life because of this childhood trauma I had suffered. I was in denial that I had even experienced childhood trauma.

    The man who had caused me the pain had gone, so why did I feel the same, if not worse?

    I would lie in bed at night with this huge ache, longing to be loved by someone but looking for it in all the wrong places.

    I felt trapped in my emotions and like there was no way out.

    I sit in my front room now, over fifteen years later, in a life I didn’t think was possible, in a home that feels safe and peaceful. No longer abusing myself. Doing a job that I love and married to the most amazing man.

    I feel like life is a gift and there is no dream I cannot make a reality. That pain that kept me awake at night is no longer there but replaced with love for myself, and even for my dad.

    If I could go back in time, I would tell myself these nine things to get me moving forward to the life I’ve since created. If you also grew up with an abusive parent, my list may help you too.

    1. It was not your fault.

    We put our parents on a pedestal as children because we have no choice. We need them to survive. When my dad persecuted me for not being quiet enough or not pleasing him, I translated that as “I am not good enough” and that everything was my fault.

    We often take all the blame when our parents mistreat us. But what were their stories? How did they grow up? Did someone teach them how to balance their emotions?

    I see now that my dad was struggling. He was grieving the loss of his parents and a difficult childhood. He was not given any tools to manage his emotions. He was shown how to lash out and project them. He was shown how to drink to numb them out.

    He would come home from a job he felt he had to do, feeling tired and stressed, and blame others to help himself calm down.

    Realizing this helped me let myself off the hook. It has also helped me forgive him, which has brought me peace. I started to understand him and his traumas. He was repeating a pattern of survival that his parents had taught him.

    This is generational trauma, and it wasn’t his fault. But it was his responsibility to keep his children safe, which he didn’t fulfill because he had no idea he was traumatizing them!

    2. Reparent the wounded child within.

    The versions of me that still hurt and felt this ache to be loved still lived within me, many years later. The seven-year-old who was shouted at for being too loud, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t study enough, and the twenty-five-year-old that wasn’t there for my dad. All these parts of me had unmet needs and were in pain.

    We can’t change the past, but we can go back in time in our imagination and be the parent we needed.

    I have imagined taking baby-me out of the house where I was born to live with adult me. Telling my parents to get some therapy and sort themselves out before they can have the baby back.

    I’ve imagined holding her and telling her how special she is. Over time, this helped that deeper pain to heal.

    3. Work on self-love.

    I was always seeking love and validation outside of myself.

    I was never taught or shown that self-love and self-care are necessities. You have to be able to fill up your own cup in order to love others.

    I would tell my younger self to take a step back from pleasing others and finding a man. I would tell her to focus on giving herself the love she longed for.

    For example, speaking to myself with love and kindness, having quality alone time, buying myself gifts—these were all things I longed for from a man, but I needed to start doing them for myself.

    I needed to spend time every day giving myself love and listening to my needs, not ignoring them. Do I need rest? Water? A healthy meal? To just breathe? To be in nature to calm my anxiety?

    Learning to listen to my own needs and fulfill them took time. It felt unnatural. It was a new behavior I had to repeat every day, and then soon enough it became second nature.

    4. Get to know your shadow.

    We all have parts of us that are dysfunctional and behaviors that are not serving us.

    For me, it was emotional eating, drinking wine, pursuing emotionally unavailable men, and caretaking my family. The last two made me miserable.

    But I blamed the men and my family for being needy. I didn’t take responsibility for my own behavior.

    I felt powerless over how others treated me. I was trapped in this victim state, and then I would numb with food and booze.

    Getting to know my shadow and recognizing my toxic behaviors were the first two steps to change.

    When a man didn’t treat me well, I stopped trying to prove my worth and changed my behavior to move away from the relationship.

    When it hurt, I learned how to love myself instead of chasing someone else’s love.

    Ask yourself: What am I doing that hurts me? Then work on a step-by-step plan to change the behavior. Baby steps are key in this process, as you can get overwhelmed by trying to do too much at once.

    5. Get support.

    It takes time and work to change toxic behavior and heal. I would give my younger self permission to get help when I was struggling with a change. For example, giving up toxic relationships and booze was a real challenge for me. Finding people who had already been through the transformation I was seeking was so valuable.

    Sometimes this would mean listening to a podcast or reading a book, blogs like this one, or posts on social media, and other times it would be investing in working with someone who had already done the work.

    When you work with someone who’s already made the change you’re seeking, they can outline the steps they took, which saves time and energy and makes you feel less alone.

    6. Get in your body.

    I once was a floating head and very disconnected from my body. It didn’t feel safe to feel fear, so I had to be that way to survive my life!

    I would tell my younger self to slow down and notice how her body feels. That it was safe to do that now.

    For example, certain relationships made my heart race out of fear. This was a sign that they weren’t good for me.

    I would also tell her to find ways to bring the body back into balance by discharging the stress and fear.

    For example, breathwork techniques, movement, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) tapping all help us process our emotions rather than running away from them.

    7. It’s safe to speak your truth.

    I have always been incredibly loyal in relationships. Growing up with a dad who was awful meant I had few boundaries and expectations in relationships. This was the only way I could have some form of a relationship with my dad.

    I would let my younger self know it is okay to step back or walk away from relationships that don’t feel good or safe, even family.

    I would let her know that she can always express her truth in relationships and explain when a boundary has been crossed, but that also it’s okay to walk away. Especially in relationships that feel unsafe and abusive.

    8. Celebrate all your progress.

    A journey of healing and transformation takes time! It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s so important to celebrate the smallest of wins daily. For example, “I meditated every day this week,” or “I said no to an invite so I could take care of myself when I used to say yes all the time.” Change starts small and grows big.

    At the beginning especially it is so important to track everything because it feels like such a mountain to climb. It will motivate you to carry on. Seeing the little changes shows your efforts are paying off.

    Younger me didn’t have a family that celebrated small wins and growth. They focused on my imperfections and were highly critical. By celebrating myself, I help that little girl feel enough!

    9. Set intentions and dream big.

    Each month, set little goals to improve your life and keep you moving forward. This could be for your personal growth, relationships, physical health, emotional health, money, love, or work.

    Make the goal super small, for example, “In January, I will not text my ex.”

    You may want to set an intention to take better care of yourself. Break this down into daily tasks to repeat for the month. And if you don’t know what you need to work on, maybe your task for the month is to read a book to help you find out.

    With intention you can create the life you dream of. But often we don’t know what our dreams are. Get still and explore what would bring you happiness.

    I think of younger-me who looked out of her bedroom window wishing for a safe home.  I think of that little girl and the life she deserves. A full, fulfilling life, just like I’d want for my own child. This has helped me to dream bigger to create a life that is not only safe but also makes me happy.

    —

    You too deserve an amazing life! Not a life stuck in patterns of surviving and playing it small, but one where you heal and thrive. Your parents treated you the way they did not because you were not enough but because they were wounded. You were always enough, and now you have the power to take daily steps to change your reality so it is not longer tainted by trauma.

    I have the most incredible life now, and it has and continues to be a journey of healing. I wish I would have done these things sooner, but it’s never too late to take the first steps on a new path! There is hope, and I believe in you.

  • How My Anger Helped Me Learn to Speak Up About My Needs

    How My Anger Helped Me Learn to Speak Up About My Needs

    “If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness.” ~Tara Brach

    This morning I received a WhatsApp message, and I found myself immediately blown into a state of fury. On the surface the message didn’t seem inflammatory or dramatic; it was a simple request from another parent asking me to do something that wasn’t convenient for me. On the surface it didn’t seem like this message warranted such rage.

    The anger exploded inside my body, and I immediately wanted to ring the person who had messaged me. I wanted to shout and scream at them. And I wanted to blame.

    I didn’t ring them. I hate the anger, but what I hate more is conflict. To ring someone up and start throwing blame and anger at them would be deeply terrifying to me.

    I also wanted to stomp and shout, “This isn’t fair! I hate you! Why are you so selfish?”

    I didn’t do that either because I felt so silly having this reaction to a small, insignificant message. The flood of judgment was quick to come: “Why should I, a grown woman, get so ridiculously upset over a small social arrangement organized over text message? What kind of stupid person am I?”

    Oh, how emotions can judge and belittle!

    In the back of my mind, in a small but annoyingly reasonable voice, someone was saying, “You’re angry. Even if you want to shout at that person, it wouldn’t help. The anger isn’t about them really, is it? You know that about emotion, don’t you? Don’t you…?!”

    The anger was so alive in my body, I would have loved to punch something, or scream, but I started pacing instead. I started ranting in a small, quiet, but persistent way, about how annoying and horrible this person was. I attempted to talk to my husband to get some relief from the pressure inside me, hoping he’d say, “Oh, they are awful! You’re right.”

    But he was working. And to be honest, I should have been too.

    But still, this anger that was in my body—so uncomfortable! So unpleasant! I find it so scary to have the energy in my body because to let it out feels so wildly dangerous. Yet to confine it inside me feels like a bull smashing a china shop to smithereens.

    After a while I settled into myself and started actually doing what I know to do with anger—feel it and work with it instead of trying to remove it from my body by complaining or ranting. I stopped focusing on the situation that activated the anger and instead started to notice how it was playing out in my body.

    What I know about anger, and all emotions, is that they are rarely caused by what’s happening in the present. The emotion is there before a situation activates it. If we don’t work to release it, it will be there after the situation, waiting for something else to activate it, on the off chance we’ll finally pay proper attention to it and release it in another way.

    No one is making us angry. That’s not to say people don’t do hurtful things sometimes, but they are not to blame for the unprocessed emotion that was already there. Not even the person who sent me the text message that screamed to me of selfishness.

    Emotions come up over and over, usually around the same frustrations and challenges in our lives. When we don’t know how to release an emotion, it gets stuck in our body and is activated again and again, because we don’t work deeply, at the very core, to release it.

    Emotions often get activated where there are unmet needs. Because this feeling of anger has come up again and again over this same issue, I know that on the other side of my anger, something is waiting to be attended to. There is a need that I have that I am not acknowledging or expressing.

    The anger was so physically uncomfortable that I stood up—I needed space to fidget and move around—and I tuned into the sensations in my body. I thought about how the anger was showing up.

    It felt like there were a thousand fires in my chest. All raging with big intense energy. Underneath the fires, it felt like a bottomless pit of fear and sadness.

    This was all so uncomfortable, so to help me stay with these sensations, to have the opportunity to work with this feeling, I started to hold myself and rub my arms. I gave myself a lot of tenderness, love, empathy, and comfort.

    “I’m here for you,” I said to myself. “This is really tough, Di. I totally get how uncomfortable this anger is in your body. I get how hard this situation is for you, how it brings up such big, deep, old feelings.”

    And as I was holding myself and giving myself love, the sensations started to shift. A little.

    I put my hand on my heart and allowed myself to be with it all. The horror of the anger. The deep, nauseating sensations of fear.

    All emotions want to be held; they want to be seen and heard. And they need to be felt. But in our society, feeling emotions is uncommon. When we tell a friend we are feeling sad, they try to cheer us up. When we feel upset, we might try and distract ourselves. When we hear our partners are upset, we might try to convince them out of it.

    Or we often blame and judge others: They made me upset! They irritated me! They scared me! We rant and complain. Or we suppress ourselves, ignore the emotions. Run far, far away from them.

    The truth of it, though, is that the feelings just want to be felt. They want us to say, “I see you! I’ll stay with you.” Emotions want to just be allowed to show up in our bodies and to move through them, like clouds in the sky. This is the really tricky, painful, or scary part for most of us—learning to be with those sensations that emotions bring.

    As I stayed with the feeling of anger and met it with love and patience instead of judgment, the intensity of it lessened.

    As the fires of the anger started to fade, I asked it what it was trying to tell me. And I heard that it was trying to tell me to stand up for myself, to say to the person who messaged me, “No, I am not happy with that arrangement.”

    I have learned that so often my anger is trying to give me the courage to say “no.”

    It wasn’t about blaming another person; it wasn’t about forcing someone to do what I want or disagreeing with their requests. There was nothing I could do about anyone expressing themselves, and that’s okay. My anger just wants me to state in a clear, strong voice, “No thanks, that doesn’t work for me.”

    My anger wanted me to be comfortable expressing what I wanted and needed. That’s what the anger was trying to help me do.

    I saw, though, that the reason I didn’t just say what I wanted and needed was because underneath the anger there was fear—fear of saying what I needed.

    I saw how much I wanted to say what I wanted, but how scary it felt in my body. But why would I feel scared about saying what I wanted? What I needed?

    Many of us, myself included, learned to deal with our emotions and needs in early childhood by not expressing what we wanted. We learned to defer to other people’s emotions and needs, to allow their  emotions to take up more space. It felt safer, and still feels safer, to think about other people’s needs and emotions rather than our own.

    But our emotions don’t want us to defer to others; they don’t want us to not express ourselves. They want us to be fully expressed humans who say what we need and who we are.

    And that is why anger kept showing up in my life over and over again when I was asked to do things for people—because my default would be to agree and do whatever anyone asked of me. And anger wanted me to say instead “NO!”

    Until I listened to the anger, until I started to say what I wanted, this anger around being asked to do things would keep going on repeat.

    I saw that I needed to spend time tending to myself, working with my emotions, and helping myself become more comfortable with saying what I deeply, truly wanted to say.

    To be all that I am in the midst of these emotions. Authentically me.

    I checked in with my body again and felt the anger had subsided somewhat; the flames were small now, just a little pile of glowing embers. There was a small pool of sadness and fear still near the fire, and I walked over and sat with it.

    I said, “Fear, I get it. I get why you feel like this. It’s hard. Thank you for trying to protect me. I get why you don’t want to say what I need. You’re afraid I will be rejected, right? Well, I really need to say what I need, even if there is the chance of rejection. Otherwise, I will feel angry again.”

    In this admission of what I needed to do, the fear and sadness seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, and all at once the emotions eased out of my body. The fire was gone, the nausea and bottomless pits. All gone.

    I sat with myself, put my hand on my heart, took a deep breath, and calmly and confidently replied to the message.

  • My Dad Died From Depression: This Is How I Coped with His Suicide

    My Dad Died From Depression: This Is How I Coped with His Suicide

    “Grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” ~Jamie Anderson

    When I was seventeen, my dad died from depression. This is now almost twenty-two years ago.

    The first fifteen years after his death, however, I’d say he died from a disease—which is true, I just didn’t want to say it was a psychological disease. Cancer, people probably assumed.

    I didn’t want to know anything about his “disease.” I ran away from anything that even remotely smelled like mental health issues.

    Instead, I placed him on a pedestal. He was my fallen angel that would stay with me my whole life. It wasn’t his fault he left me. It was the disease’s fault.

    The Great Wall of Jessica

    But no, my dad died by suicide. He chose to leave this life behind. He chose to leave me behind. At least, that’s what I felt whenever the anger took over.

    And boy, was I angry. Sometimes, I’d take a towel, wrap it up in my hands, and just towel-whip the shit out of everything in my room.

    But how can you be angry with a man who is a victim himself? You can’t. So I got angry at the world instead and built a wall ten stories high. I don’t think I let anyone truly inside, even the people closest to me.

    How could I? I didn’t even know what “inside” was. For a long time, my inside was just a deep, dark hole.

    Sure, I was still Jessica. A girl that loved rainbows and glitter. A girl that just wanted to feel joyful.

    And I was. Whenever I was out in nature. I didn’t realize it at the time, but whenever I was on the beach, in a forest, or even in a park, I’d be content and calm.

    Whenever I was inside between four walls, however, I felt restless, lonely, and agitated. This lasted for a very long time. I’d say for about twenty years—which, according to some therapists, is a pretty “normal” timespan for some people to really make peace with the traumatic death of a parent.

    But during that time, alcohol and partying were my only coping mechanisms. I partied my bum off for a few years. I’d drink all night until I puked, and then continue drinking. Couldn’t remember half of the time how I got home or what happened that night.

    Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

    Unfortunately, all that alcohol came with a price. I had the world’s worst hangovers—not only physically but also mentally. At twenty-one, hungover and alone at home, I had my first panic attack. Many more followed, and I developed a panic disorder.

    I became afraid of being afraid. I didn’t tell anyone, because I was scared they would think I was crazy.

    Those periods of anxiety never lasted longer than a few months. But they were usually followed by a sort of winter depression. In my worst moments, I felt like the one and only person that understood me was gone. I felt like nobody loved me, not as much as my dad did. And I did think about death myself. Not that I actually wanted to die, but at times, it seemed like a nice “break” from all the pain.

    Acceptance and Spiritual Healing

    Finally, in my mid-twenties, I went to see a therapist. She helped me tremendously and made me realize that the panic attacks were nothing more than a physical reaction to stress. Yet, it wasn’t until I did a yoga teacher training a few years later that I finally learned how to stop those panic attacks for good.

    Wanting to know more about the mechanisms of the body and mind, I dove into mental and physical well-being, and started researching and writing about mental health.

    I understand now that self-love, or at least self-acceptance, and a solid self-esteem are crucial for our mental health. And I know that people with mental health issues find it so, so hard to ask for help. Their lack of self-love makes them think they are a burden.

    I understand that, at that moment, my dad didn’t see any other solution for his suffering than stepping out of this life. It did not mean that he didn’t love me or my family.

    The pain from losing my dad actually opened the door for me to spiritual healing. It brought me to where I am now. It taught me to live life to the fullest.

    It taught me to follow my heart because life is too precious to be stuck anywhere and feel like crap. And it made me want to help others by sharing my story.

    I have accepted myself as I am now. I know that I’m enough. I’ve learned what stability feels like, and how to stay relaxed, even though my body is wired to stress out about the smallest things due to childhood trauma.

    Let’s Share Our Demons and Kill Them Together

    But honestly, the pain from losing him will stay with me for the rest of my life. And sometimes it’s as present as it was twenty years ago. I don’t feel like covering that up with some positive, “unicorny” endnote.

    I feel like being raw, honest, and open instead. Depression and suicide f@cking suck. What I do want to do, however, is to help open up the conversation about this topic. I want to make it normal to talk about our mental health, as normal as it is to talk about our physical health.

    There are way too many people living in the dark, due to stigmatization and fear. Life is cruel sometimes. And every single human on this planet has to deal with shit. It would be so good if we could be real about it and share our stories so other people can relate and find solace.

    I do hope that my story helps in some way.

  • What Your Anger Is Trying to Tell You and How to Hear It

    What Your Anger Is Trying to Tell You and How to Hear It

    “When we embrace anger and take good care of our anger, we obtain relief. We can look deeply into it and gain many insights.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    It just took a few words from my husband before I felt my body move from calm to a boiling cauldron of rage. My whole being was alight, in flames. Energy felt like it was moving through me and shattering everything inside me.

    I hated it. Anger is so intense, and so big, that most of us can’t bear to feel it in our bodies.

    I wanted to do a lot of things—shout at him, throw things, scream the house down, offer rageful thoughts to anyone who would listen.

    I wanted this anger out of my body. NOW.

    In the past I have reacted to these inner sensations and launched arguments that could last hours or even days. I would rarely get anything other than anger back from my husband, and a continuous wrangling over who was wrong and why.

    It was painful and corroding to our relationship, feeling like a bomb would go off and we would spend days dealing with the damage.

    Until I learned that the source of my anger wasn’t my husband. Or my kids, or that person on Facebook, or politicians or corrupt business people.

    The source of my anger wasn’t outside of me, but within. And it was situations that were activating this anger. Until I learned how to deal with the anger, it would keep coming up over and over again, in ways that felt too overwhelming and painful for me.

    I was suppressing anger most of the time because I didn’t feel safe letting it out, but when it did come out it felt too strong and too damaging. It felt repulsive, overwhelming, dominating.

    Boiling rage. Painful flames of righteous anger tearing through my body. A sensation that the anger was smashing bits inside me.

    Anger is a hard emotion for most of us to feel. It’s got so much energy, so much force, so much intensity to it. And as an emotion, if we express anger, we usually get the most negative response back.

    Anger is frightening. It’s unbearable to hear, it sends shivers through us if we walk past someone angry and fuming.

    But when we suppress anger, when we don’t allow it to come up it gets trapped in our bodies, the energy of it creating havoc inside. For me it felt like it was trapped in my jaw, which was so often sore from clenching and squeezing my muscles.

    I didn’t want to feel overwhelmed by anger anymore. I wanted to be a woman who could be with it, feel it, and not explode or fall apart or trap its tension in my body.

    I started to become intimate and friendly with my anger. I started to recognize when it was coming up in my body—in small doses sometimes, activating minor annoyances in my life.

    “Oh, anger! There you are, I see you lurking there in the shadows.”

    And the times when I would feel a huge surge of it in my body, when my kids would say something, or I’d receive an unpleasant email or read something on Facebook.

    “Oh, lots of anger here now! Okay, I see your anger. You’re here, I understand.”

    And by noticing when it came up inside of me, I began to see how often it was a thread in my life. And by noticing it I started, in a small way, to provide some relief for myself.

    The thing that I would then do, which made such a beautiful and healing difference, especially when huge surges of anger came my way—like when my husband said that thing and I wanted to shout shout shout at him—is to give myself time, space, love and support

    I stay with myself and don’t react externally.

    I don’t blame what I see as the source of my anger, but really isn’t.

    I tend to myself with a loving touch of my heart. (When touch on the body lasts over twenty seconds it releases oxytocin, the love hormone.)

    I give myself loving words—Di, I see this anger is really painful. It’s so big, so overwhelming.

    I ask myself, where is this in my body, how is it feeling?

    All of this attention on myself, at my reactions and how I am feeling, gives my body the signal that I am being deeply and lovingly cared for. I am safe to feel this feeling.

    I might do some relaxing breathing, giving a short inhale, followed by a long exhale which activates the rest-and-relax mode.

    I stay with myself as long as the emotion is there. “I’ve got you, Di! I can be with you through this feeling. I love you, Di.”

    And if I need to move and do something to help the energy pass through me, I do. I go for a walk, smash some rocks, squeeze or punch a pillow.

    Why this is so very important, why this makes so much of a difference in how we handle our emotions, is that it gives us the chance to let the energy of the emotion pass through. And when we do this repeatedly, we teach our system that emotions like anger are safe to be experienced, that we can hold and support ourselves through what life brings us.

    It also doesn’t make the situation worse by exploding at the person who may or may not have said or done something you didn’t like.

    If this is a situation that needs to be sorted out, if what was said or done needs discussion, it is infinitely more effective to wait for your anger to move through you until you are out the other side, than to talk to someone when you are in a rage.

    That’s because you are highly likely to activate their anger, as anger in others can feel like an attack on ourselves.

    And when we are deeply emotional, we can’t truly hear and empathize with other people, so we are just giving a speech, which the other person can’t hear if they’re also emotional!

    We risk escalating the situation further by saying and doing things we deeply regret. And, of course, we can also put ourselves in danger.

    If we want to be truly heard by someone, and if we want to create change, we have to wait until the emotion has passed. Then we have the best possible chance of coming to a positive agreement with someone else about what we didn’t like or want.

    Anger, like all emotions, can give us a unique understanding of what needs we have that aren’t being met. When we see the roots of what has activated the anger, we can see that there are often unmet needs to explore.

    For me, after that big rageful explosion, after I moved through the flames of anger and out the other side, I saw that I wanted more private space for myself to work uninterrupted so I could fully concentrate.

    It was a need I had been thinking about on and off for a while, but that I hadn’t really realized that it was upsetting me. It gave me the sense that I was last on the priority list as everyone else in the family had a space for private time.

    And so seeing that, I could then work on meeting that need, and reducing the chances of anger being activated around that subject again.

    Anger, what are you trying to tell me? I asked, and it told me.

  • Why Your Anger Is the Key to Maintaining Your Boundaries

    Why Your Anger Is the Key to Maintaining Your Boundaries

    “Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom.” ~Henry Cloud

    Late last night, I once again found myself unable to sleep, and boy was I angry. So, in order not to disturb my other half, who is always asleep the moment his head touches the pillow, I dragged myself off to the sofa. Once there, sat seething in the dark, I listened to my emotion and asked it to speak to me, and guess what it screamed?! Boundaries!

    Now please bear in mind that I have been on this journey for a while and had also been discussing boundaries earlier in the day, so my inner knowing came out loud and clear. For you this may not be the case, and that’s okay.

    Practical Tip 1: When you feel angry, take yourself away and write down all those racing thoughts. No judgment, just get pen to scrap piece of paper and write it all down. Do not, I repeat DO NOT, take it out on the person you feel has caused this anger.

    So, where was I? Oh yes, boundaries! Those joyful and challenging rules. That is what they are after all, rules.

    If you think back to being a child, when you broke a rule, an adult got cross. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that anger is a messenger for when you have overstepped your boundaries, or you have let someone else break a boundary you consciously or unconsciously set.

    This is probably where I should explain the difference between internal and external boundaries.

    Internal boundaries are the rules and limits that you set for yourself. They don’t have to be shared with anyone else, but they are for you to follow. They may sound like:

    • When I finish work for the day I will take ten minutes to meditate/for myself.
    • I respect my body, so today is a non-chocolate or non-alcohol day.
    • To protect my time and mental health, I will limit time scrolling through social media to one hour a day.
    • Because I value my family, I will not take on any projects that require me to work nights or weekends.
    • To help myself let go and move on, I will do something healthy for myself every time I start dwelling on my ex and our breakup.

    External boundaries are the ones you set with the outside world. These do need to be shared, unfortunately, and can be challenging in that respect. They outline how you will allow others to treat you. They may sound like:

    • I would love to help you with this project; however, I can only give you one hour a week.
    • Please give me ten minutes when I get in from work for me to settle before we start chatting or planning dinner.
    • I enjoy seeing you, but it’s important to me that you call before coming over.
    • This topic is upsetting to me, so I would rather not discuss it with you.
    • I hate to see you two fighting, but I can no longer be the middleman in your arguments.

    Practical Tip 2: Take that page of anger thoughts and identify any boundaries, internal or external, that have been messed with.

    Have you let yourself down in some way? Or did you let someone break a boundary without gently reminding them it was there?

    Strong boundaries help us protect our time, our energy, and our physical and mental health, so it makes sense we’d feel angry when they’re violated. But oftentimes our boundaries are unclear or fuzzy, or we negotiate them without conscious awareness because we’re tempted to give in to our impulses or we don’t want to make other people feel uncomfortable.

    This is why we need to practice self-awareness and recognize which boundaries we’ve allowed to be crossed and why.

    Seething on the sofa, there I was, scolding myself for breaking a boundary that I have set and reset many times over the past few years—allowing myself at least thirty minutes of quiet wind down time before bed, with no distractions, no talk of work or anything that might get my highly sensitive nature all stimulated, making it hard to sleep.

    Practical Tip 3: Once you understand the boundaries that were crossed, the first step is forgiveness. You are a human being doing the best you can right now, and it’s okay that at times you forget to uphold boundaries with others or yourself.

    Thank the anger for drawing it to your attention, forgive yourself and resolve to do a little better each time. If you are alone, I recommend doing this out loud a few times.

    This first stage is powerful and really calmed me down, enough that I could crawl back into bed with a snoring partner and finally drift off. However, that is not the end of this lesson, dear reader. In the morning light, sat at my desk, I reviewed the boundary I’d crossed and asked myself a few questions, just like the ones in the next tip.

    Practical Tip 4: Time to review your boundaries and ask yourself:

    • Is this an internal or external boundary? Did I let myself down, or did I not uphold a boundary with someone else?
    • Why did I not maintain this boundary? How did neglecting it negatively impact me?
    • Is this a boundary I want to have? Is it time to set a different boundary? Or is there something I need to change or address to better maintain this boundary?
    • If internal, what is the purpose for this boundary? Is it in alignment with who I want to be?
    • If external, have I communicated my boundaries clearly to this person? What kind things can I say to remind them of my boundaries when they start to cross the line?

    The results of my review were that I want a balance around this boundary, as I love staying up late into the night chatting with my partner or watching TV, yet sleep is crucial to my well-being. Therefore, I have resolved that Monday to Thursday I will uphold my boundary, and the weekend is the time to relax the boundary a little.

    Over dinner I will discuss this with my partner and get his buy-in and most importantly ask for his support in helping me to uphold the boundary during the week, just until it becomes a new habit!

    Remember:

    Boundaries are just rules we set ourselves.

    Boundaries are yours to uphold regardless of if they are external or internal.

    Anger is a great messenger for boundaries you have allowed to be crossed.

    Communicate why you have a boundary with others and ask for their support.

    It is all within your control.

  • How to Stop Reacting in Anger When You’re Triggered

    How to Stop Reacting in Anger When You’re Triggered

    “Freedom is taking control of the rudder of your life.” ~Yukito Kishiro

    “What’s for dinner?” It’s a simple enough question. Yet it’s one that has made me lose my mind at my husband on more than one (or ten or twenty) occasions.

    It’s not the question itself. It’s a valid question and one that needs an answer (at least by one of us).

    A trigger of mine is being asked to answer a question when I’m already in the middle of something, feeling overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted, or just sick of answering questions.

    So then I snap and overreact.

    I’ve come a long way in my personal growth journey, but I’m by no means perfect. I still react in anger but to a lesser extent and less often. I get mad, but I don’t stay there. I screw up, but I can apologize with humility and forgive myself.

    When we’re in reaction-mode to life’s challenges, we aren’t in control. We react in ways that are not in tune with how we want to be.

    Learning to navigate our triggers not only enables us to take back control and enjoy life more, it has an amazing trickle-down effect to those around us too. It better connects us in our relationships and models for others or our children what it looks like to be gracefully resilient so those in our circles can mimic the same.

    So, what does it look like to react in anger?

    Someone at work criticizes you and you instantly get defensive.

    Your partner asks you to do something when you clearly have your hands full, so you immediately get pissed.

    Plans change unexpectedly, and you panic or get irritated.

    Someone in your life is controlling or manipulative, so you either get scared and shut down, or feel livid and lash out.

    Someone does something that goes against your core values like being mean or inconsiderate or lying, and you explode.

    It can also mean reacting to your own thoughts or actions and getting angry with yourself for “doing it again,” being lazy, or failing.

    And all that leads to feeling guilty for saying things you don’t really mean or making a mountain out of a molehill, or maybe even rehashing past events.

    It can lead you to beat yourself up again for how you handled things in the past.

    And it can leave you feeling misunderstood because you recognize that your reaction stems from something deeper than this one incident;  a culmination of events, or some underlying fear created this trigger for you.

    Why We Are Reactive in the First Place

    We are reactive or over reactive when our stress response is triggered sending us into fight, flight, or freeze mode.

    We react on autopilot. In this space, we aren’t in full control, and it’s hard to see things clearly and objectively.

    Sometimes our triggers relate to events from the past. For example, you may get triggered when someone ignores you because your parents frequently neglected you when you were a kid, causing you to feel unimportant. Other times, our triggers are events that make us feel out of control.

    For example, one of my triggers used to be slow drivers on the highway. I would instantly snap into fight mode and get angry. I’d drive too close to them or shake my fist (or special finger) at them, honk my horn, or speed past them in a fit of rage.

    Sitting here calmly as I reflect back on my past, reactive self, I’m a little embarrassed and shocked remembering the actions I took while angry. That’s because I’m in a calm place and my fight mode is not initiated, so I have full control at the moment. I wouldn’t do any of those things when I’m in a healthy mental space—those choices don’t reflect the kind of person I want to be.

    When we react from a place of fear and anger, we rarely feel good about the things we say and do.

    How to Stop Being So Reactive and Respond to Stress More Calmly

    We don’t have to let our fear and anger control us. At any time, we can make a choice to respond to life from a calmer place. Here’s how.

    Prioritize self-care so you’re less likely to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or on the verge of snapping.

    If you overextend yourself or regularly neglect your needs, you’ll likely feel triggered by even minor annoyances because your default state will be imbalance and agitation. And you’ll find it nearly impossible to handle major issues because you won’t have the inner strength to handle them. Take good care of yourself, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and everything will feel more manageable.

    Set yourself up to not be reactive by identifying your stress triggers.

    What things lead you to react in anger or fear? Awareness is key here! Create a list of things that you know trigger you, and why.

    Then describe how you typically react when those triggers occur.

    For example, a trigger of mine has always been other people getting angry at little things that I don’t think warrant being angry about.

    Funny enough, my reaction to their anger was anger! I would get mad that they are angry and yell at them to be calm. Obviously, this strategy didn’t work for me.

    Then ask yourself, “How do I want to respond instead”?

    As I reflected on how I usually reacted to my triggers, I realized I would rather remain composed than lose my cool and flip out. If I could pick any response to other people being angry, it would be for me to stay calm and in control.

    And that’s one of the main reasons I realized I have such a strong reaction to other people’s anger. I think that the “right” way to be in this world is to be calm, kind, and compassionate. When someone reacts in the polar opposite way, it conflicts with my values, and ironically, I end up getting angry with them.

    This is why this step is so important. We often react in ways that are not in tune with our values when emotions are running high, so we need to consciously decide, in advance, how we want to respond in stressful situations.

    From there, think about what you are trying to control that you have no control over.

    At a certain point, I realized that some people are going to get angry, and I won’t agree with their behavior. My anger stemmed from judging their reactions and wanting to control how they were feeling and behaving. I have no control over other people. I may be able to influence them, but I will never be able to control them.

    If traffic triggers you, you may be trying to control your time because being delayed makes you feel anxious. If chaos triggers you, you may be trying to control your environment to create a sense of safety. If angry people trigger you, you may be trying to control how other people react and experience stressful situations.

    Now, ask yourself, “What do I have control over?

    Since I don’t have control over what other people do, and wanting to control them was creating anger within me, in order to reach my desired response of staying calm and in control I had to shift my focus to myself. Because the only thing I have control over is what I do.

    So when someone else is angry and I think they’re overreacting, I can take some deep breaths, step away from the situation, and ask the other person how I can help (in an effort to help calm them), or just sit back and allow them to process the situation however they need to in that moment.

    I started to notice that as I stopped reacting to anger with anger, the people around me showed less anger over time. And when they did get angry, they didn’t stay angry as long.

    I started to realize that they were often mimicking me, whether they realized it or not. Of course, part of it was that I was no longer adding to the anger and fueling it from my end too. But seeing what it looks like to stay calm and in control is an important skill to witness. It shows others what it looks like so they can do the same.

    —

    We all get triggered at times, but we don’t have to say and do things we regret, which will ultimately damage our relationships and leave us feeling bad about ourselves. With a little self-awareness, we can stop reacting on autopilot and start responding to life from a calm, neutral place. Maybe not all the time, but more often than not, and we’ll feel a lot more peaceful and in control as a result!

  • How I Stopped Feeling Angry with Everything and Everyone (Including Myself)

    How I Stopped Feeling Angry with Everything and Everyone (Including Myself)

    “Tears of despair can be fuel. Thunders of anger can be light.” ~Maxime Lagacé

    Let’s talk about rockets.

    This is going somewhere, I promise.

    If you ever watch a rocket launch, you’ll see a large cylinder fall off once it gets to a certain height. Breaking earth’s gravity is not easy, so the cylinder is filled with a high-powered propellant that helps the rocket gain altitude.

    The thing is, once all the propellant is gone, the cylinder becomes dead weight, so it has to be jettisoned. Otherwise, the rocket would fall back to earth, and all of that work would have been for nothing.

    Now for an abrupt segue.

    I entered my twenties as a very angry young man. I was angry at the world for being difficult and not doing what I wanted it to do.

    I was angry with a lot of my close friends because they had the nerve to go on with their lives and do normal things like graduate college and have long-term relationships. They had even stopped drinking every day.

    I was angry with my family and people who cared about me because they were always pointing out all the things I was doing that were not going to turn out well.

    More than anything, though, I was angry with myself. My drinking and drug use were completely out of control, but I could not figure out what I needed to do about it.

    I was angry with myself because I had dropped out of high school and then been kicked out of college a few times, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I wouldn’t have had the skill set necessary to do what I wanted even if I had known what it was.

    There was this one James who wanted to do good things with his life and be responsible and all that good stuff. Then there was another James who always showed up and wrecked everything.

    Good James was fighting an uphill battle because not-so-good-James could torpedo months of work with one decision. He was an elite assassin: one shot, one kill, and he always had my life in his crosshairs.

    I couldn’t seem to get traction. I knew I was in a hole, but for some reason I kept digging. When I finally hit rock bottom, I decided it was time to get a jackhammer.

    Feeling Like a Loser

    There’s a particular frustration with being a loser that’s hard to explain to people who’ve never been one. People look at you a certain way, people treat you a certain way. You tend to treat yourself poorly because it feels like you’re going to waste any opportunity that comes your way.

    It’s frustrating and infuriating and debilitating all at once.

    We could dive into all the reasons for this and the psychology behind it, but the simple fact was that I had just turned twenty, and I felt like I had already made irreparable mistakes. The consequences felt insurmountable.

    After a few car wrecks and trips to jail, I moved to West Texas to try again. I was about to be a dad. I knew that things needed to be different, but I didn’t quite understand how to make that happen.

    I talked a little bit about how going to the library and getting into things like meditation made a huge difference in another post, but I’m not sure anything changed my life as much as becoming a father.

    Now, it shouldn’t be surprising for me to say that I was not the kind of guy you want caring for a baby. I was emotionally immature, entitled, self-destructive, and I had zero insight. And those might have been my better qualities.

    I didn’t think about what I did as anything I was actually doing. It was just the way things were. My self-absorption was near 100%, so seeing outside myself was near impossible.

    I remember holding my son for the first time and thinking, “I’m sorry, kid, but you got screwed in the dad lottery.” I’m not being self-deprecating here when I say that. He had gotten screwed in that lottery. But that thought was followed by another thought that I had never really had before: “What if I did something different”?

    I had definitely thought about doing something different many times, but I’d never taken it seriously. People like me didn’t change, so it was always one of those thoughts that floats through your brain that you don’t pay much attention to.

    I don’t know why, but this time was different.

    A weird thing happened at this point. All that anger from being a loser for so long stopped paralyzing me and became rocket fuel for me to do better (I told you the rocket thing was going somewhere).

    All those years of feeling like people were looking down on me and being told that I had potential that I wasn’t living up to, gave me focus and energy that I’d never had before.

    I quit drinking and using drugs and burned through a bachelor’s degree in a few years. I even quit smoking cigarettes, which ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be compared to everything else.

    I worked as a social worker for a few years and then went back and got a master’s in sociology. It was great information but wasn’t a useful degree without a doctorate, so I went and got a master’s in counseling as well.

    Through all of that, my desire to show people that I wasn’t a loser, my desire for the people who had looked down on me to see success and know they were wrong, drove me.

    Crashing Back to Earth

    Anger was a great propellant until it wasn’t.

    Anger had driven me to make a lot of good decisions and invest in myself and do some things that were good for me, but all of these changes had also changed the world I lived in. I was now able to pass as a healthy person, so I was working and spending time in healthy environments.

    I didn’t need all of that anger to keep driving me forward, and much like the empty propellant tank, it began to drag me back down.

    I still saw most of the people around me as untrustworthy and threatening. I was militantly dedicated to protecting my time and making sure I took care of the things I needed to take care of.

    If I’m honest, there was a deep fear that if I stopped sprinting forward, I was going to start sliding backward, and I’d be a loser again before I knew it. That’s one of the tough things about being a loser—I’m not sure the feeling ever goes away completely.

    Looking back now, I can see where I alienated what would have been some good people in my life, and I was a more difficult employee than I needed to be. On top of this, other people could leverage my middle-finger attitude for their own good, and I made some decisions in my work that I regret now.

    I would have treated a few people differently and handled quite a few situations with more respect if I had recognized that anger could no longer be the driving force in my life sooner than I did.

    None of this is to say that anger is bad or that we should pathologize it or pretend like we don’t get angry. That being said, I don’t know that it’s ever the best option.

    Everything I accomplished was within my grasp the entire time. Anger just gave me the motivation to do it. I wonder what it would have been like to go through college and make all the changes I made without the anger.

    I would have had more friends, and I would not have pushed away some of the people who tried to help and mentor me. God forbid, I might have even enjoyed that time in my life.

    Anger Never Shows Up Alone

    The thing with anger is that it’s a secondary emotion. It never shows up on its own. I tell people that anger carpools, and it’s never the driver.

    Anger is usually our attempt to take a vulnerable emotion and transform it into something a little tougher and more actionable. Things like fear, disappointment, sadness, rejection, and all those other icky, vulnerable emotions leave us feeling helpless.

    Anger, while being destructive, can make us feel empowered and powerful.

    This is especially true for men since we’re not really allowed to experience emotions apart from anger in any real way. I think we’re allowed to laugh at things and people, and we get to cry a little when our dog dies or something, but most of the rest is out of bounds.

    There’s always something under anger. If you can see what emotion you’re actually experiencing, life opens up in a whole new way.

    Looking back, I can recognize that I was anxious and fearful all the time but being angry allowed me to skip over those things and believe I was still in charge of my own life. If I got rejected or felt disappointed, anger would let me blame the situation, not myself.

    I could get lost in complaining about all the things that should have been different or about why the other person sucked instead of allowing myself to feel those things, and maybe change the things about myself that led to them.

    The ego fears change, and anger is a great way to keep us stuck where we are.

    Jettison the Unnecessary

    I don’t get angry a whole lot these days. Don’t get me wrong—it still arises, but I’m pretty good about identifying what’s actually going on and addressing that instead.

    I don’t try to pretend that I don’t have anger, and I definitely don’t suppress it, but I try to allow it to be present without taking over the world. It’s the difference between anger being in the audience and it being the keynote speaker.

    There are a few things that have been more difficult since I’ve started engaging things more honestly. Situations involving conflict or confrontation are a little scarier without my anger.

    It was all definitely easier when I lived in a castle made out of middle fingers, but I’m also able to engage these things in a more honest way and learn from them. A castle protects, but it also isolates.

    I don’t think that I experience more fear or anxiety than I used to, I’m just aware that that’s what I’m experiencing instead of being angry. This has made me a better friend, a better husband, a better father, a better son, and an all-around easier person to deal with.

    I even like myself a little bit these days as well, which is nice.

    Anything we are attached to can become a deadweight if we aren’t willing to cut it loose at the right time. Anger not only has the potential to drag us back down to the earth, but we’ll die in a fiery explosion as well.

    We have to let it go if we want to break the gravity of all the things trying to pull us back down.

  • How I Overcame My Anger to Be Better for My Family

    How I Overcame My Anger to Be Better for My Family

    “Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    As a special-needs parent, it feels that I am in constant anger and fight mode.

    I am fighting with my children on the home front.

    I am fighting for their right to get access to services.

    I am fighting for their acceptance.

    I am fighting for my children to help them make progress.

    To be in constant fight mode can be overwhelming and exhausting.

    In my weakness, I let my emotions get the best of me.

    I lose my temper with my loved ones.

    The One Thing I Regret Saying to My Daughter

    A particular incident that took place many years ago stands out in my mind to this date.

    The principal of my daughter’s school told me she was causing lots of problems there. Her behavior was disturbing her classmates, and many parents had complaints about it.

    “We feel that this school is not suitable for her and it would be best to find her another school,” said the principal.

    I fought with the school to let her stay. This was the third school we had to fight for her acceptance.

    I felt that I was coming to another dead end.

    After that meeting, I headed home and was greeted with an onslaught of screaming and shouting children.

    Adding to that chaos, my daughter with autism poured out the contents of every toiletry bottle she could find into the bathtub. It is incredible how much children can do given one minute unsupervised.

    At that very moment, I snapped and yelled.

    “What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?”

    “Why are you always wrecking the house?”

    “Why can’t I have a moment of peace without you causing any trouble?”

    “I did not sign up for this!” 

    “I don’t want you!”

    My daughter with little communication skills stood frozen. I saw fear in her eyes. She felt every ounce of anger I had in me then.

    Why Yelling Further Delays a Child’s Development

    When children misbehave, yelling at them seems like a natural response. We feel that when we yell at them, we get their attention, we are disciplining them.

    None of us likes to be yelled at. When we yell at our children, they are more likely to shut down instead of listening. That is not a good way to communicate.

    For children on the spectrum, yelling can be particularly detrimental, as it may result in them retreating into their own world and not engaging with other people even more.

    The more we connect and engage with them, the more they can thrive and grow. Hence, yelling can never be a means to “discipline” them regardless of how stressful and frustrated we may feel at that moment.

    Not Yelling—Easier Said Than Done

    Trust me. No one understands this more than I do. When you are stressed and frustrated, releasing all that pent-up emotion seems like the only solution.

    I struggle at managing my anger. There are so many times I find myself regretting the way I spoke and raised my voice to my loved ones.

    With each angry word exchanged, I see my daughter retreating into her own world, and it pains me so much. Her mother caused all of that.

    The truth is, I am not angry with my daughter for the silly things she has done.

    It is not her fault.

    My beautiful daughter is not making life difficult for me, she is having a difficult time.

    For her sake, I’ve I had to find a positive way to deal with my anger issues.

    I’ve needed to help myself so that I could help her.

    Anger Is Just a Mask for Another Emotion

    Anger is often a secondary emotion. It is a mask that covers a deeper feeling that I am unwilling to address.

    Behind my anger are my fears, frustration, and insecurities.

    More than often, my anger stems from my inability to control what is outside of myself.

    I am unable to change the school’s decision not to accept her.

    My daughter is unable to receive decent therapy support in our home country.

    Instead, I have had to be my daughter’s therapist, and I felt insecure about my abilities to help her then.

    All these overwhelming feelings of being frustrated, being unfairly treated, not being respected, triggered the anger inside of me. Unfortunately, my poor daughter had to bear the angry burns of her hot-headed mother.

    How I Address the Real Meaning of My Anger

    In order to manage my anger, I’ve needed to:

    1. Acknowledge the emotion I am feeling.

    What am I feeling now?

     I am feeling angry.

    Telling myself that I am angry helps me to calm down.

    It’s important to recognize and feel the anger in these situations. By addressing it, I am acknowledging that I matter, and it prompts me to take a deeper look at what is going on behind the scenes.

    2. Identify the emotion behind the anger.

    What am I feeling besides anger?

    I am feeling rejected by what the school has done, and I am also feeling anxious about having the time to find another school for my daughter, or if I even can.

    My anger is always trying to tell me something. Once I listen to it, I’m in a better place to understand the situation and move forward toward the healing process.

    The more clarity I get about why I am angry and the more I acknowledge those emotions, the less my anger impacts me. By gaining more clarity, I can also find productive solutions to solve my problems.

    How I Manage My Anger

    1. Replace negative thoughts with more constructive ones.

    I realize that my attitude affects how I interpret my circumstances. It impacts my thoughts, energy, and above all, the actions I take.

    Much of my anger and frustration can be better managed when I practice reframing.

    Instead of saying, “My child is a brat who doesn’t listen and is out to make my life miserable,” I try to say, “My child doesn’t quite understand what I’m trying to tell her. I need to demonstrate to her what she is required to do.”

    By reframing my thought process and how I describe my children and my problems, I am able to see things with acceptance, compassion, and empathy.

    2. Identify common anger triggers.

    Identifying my common triggers helps me mentally prepare myself prior to the event.

    I start by visualizing a typical situation and ask myself how I can respond to it wisely. The more I practice this visualization, the more I can react to such situations more appropriately.

    It also helps to journal down what times and moments cause these triggers.

    3. Practice some relaxation/calming exercises.

    Using simple relaxation and calming strategies helps me soothe those angry feelings.

    Some examples of common relaxation exercises:

    • Having a cup of tea
    • Using breathing techniques
    • Practicing yoga and meditation
    • Listening to music
    • Exercising
    • Using stress-relief tools (e.g. stress ball)

    Since I’ve been practicing these exercises, homework and therapy times at home have been more pleasant for me and the children. Meditating for five minutes before homework takes away any lingering frustrations and stress.

    4. Focus on the solution, not the problem.

    All too often, when a problem occurs, I focus on the negative situation, and this puts me in a bad mood. I resolve more things when I focus more on the solution instead.

    To start, I take the time to fully analyze the problem and make a list of possible solutions.

    When I do this, I know I am taking proactive steps to improve our lives. I am focusing on what I can control instead of mindlessly reacting to my circumstances.

    5. Find humor in the situation.

    Sometimes laughter is the best medicine.

    Finding humor in a situation, even amid the most trying times, can be both relieving and empowering.

    I was in the car when my daughter started screaming and crying suddenly. I stopped the car and asked her what the matter was; no amount of coaxing, hugs, and bribes {sweets} was able to calm her down.

    I was feeling stressed with the situation, so in desperation, I made funny faces and fart noises at her. and she laughed hysterically. After a good laugh, my daughter explained that she was angry with me because I promised her earlier that I would bring her to the shop, but instead was driving toward home.

    If I had responded in anger then, I would not have been in a position of empathy to help her, and the mystery to her emotional outburst would remain unsolved.

    6. Take a time-out.

    When I sense a wave of anger coming up, I try to excuse myself from the situation. Taking a time-out prevents me from saying things that I may later regret.

    Finding a quiet area to cool down and practicing some of the relaxation exercises mentioned above has saved me on many occasions.

    When the anger has subsided, I find it helps to think of what I may say before returning to the scene.

    7. Practice forgiveness.

    It’s difficult to find peace when we’re bottled up in anger and pain. Constant internal hostility saps away our energy both physically and mentally.

    It helps me minimize the hostility within to see everyone like my daughter—not giving me a hard time, but having a hard time. It’s much easier to forgive when I consider that everyone else is struggling, trying their best, and sometimes falling short.

    By forgiving, I accept the events for the way they are. I am letting go of any negative attachments.

    By forgiving, I am taking control of my life by saying that this act no longer defines me, it no longer controls me.

    By forgiving, I can finally find peace and move on with my life.

    Learning How to Own My Anger

    I have seen first-hand how my anger affects my family. It doesn’t serve them at all. Out of love and necessity, I will do whatever I can to be a better person for them.

    Hence, every day in every way, I am making a conscious effort to control my anger before it controls me.

    There will be days when I still mess up. We are all human and we will never be perfect.

    I recognize my mistakes and acknowledge what needs to be done to improve.

    Slowly but surely, I am getting there. I am, and will always be, a constant work in progress.

    —

    Is your anger controlling your life? What strategies have helped you work through and let go of your anger?

  • How to Mindfully Calm Your Anger and Stop Doing Things You Regret

    How to Mindfully Calm Your Anger and Stop Doing Things You Regret

    “Neurologists claim that every time you resist acting on your anger, you’re actually rewiring your brain to be calmer and more loving.” ~Unknown

    One of the most impactful ways that mindfulness has changed my life is how I’m able to work with my feelings of anger.

    Anyone who has met me in recent years would never know how anger used to run my life. I often wish that people who are just now meeting me could realize the transformation I’ve gone through from my past. If people could see how mindfulness has changed me from an angry, irritable person who hated the world to a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky guy, I think everyone would give mindfulness a try.

    My mindfulness practice has allowed me to pay attention to what’s happening in my mind and body when anger is rising. I often call this the “volume knob” of anger, and I’ll dive a little more into that shortly.

    First, I want to give you a glimpse into my past so you can have a better frame of reference of where I used to be and where I’m at now through a practice of mindfulness.

    The Child of an Alcoholic

    I grew up as a child of an alcoholic mother, and this gave me a host of issues while growing up, but the biggest one was anger.

    I was extremely angry with my mom because I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stop drinking for me. I thought that if she truly loved me, she’d be able to quit drinking for me, but she didn’t. My mom ended up getting sober when I was twenty years old, but it was twenty years too late, and I still had two decades of resentments toward her.

    Aside from the anger I had toward my mother, I had anger toward the rest of the world.

    Looking back on it, it seems completely insane (and it kind of was). It angered me growing up with kids who didn’t have to go through what I was going through in my home life. The kids I grew up with had great parents who made a decent amount of money and could buy them whatever they wanted. But it wasn’t just the material things; they actually had parents and family members who cared about them.

    A Life Full of Anger

    Being angry all the time was exhausting, but it was the only way I knew how to be. Because of this, I took my anger out on anyone who crossed paths with me.

    Although I wasn’t someone who got into many physical altercations growing up, I had words that were venom. I hurt many people throughout my life by saying the most hurtful things I could think of, and then I felt extremely guilty about it. While I thought that every woman I dated was at fault, I could look back at my past and see how toxic I was to anyone who had the misfortune of dating me.

    I forgot to mention that I turned into a drug addict and alcoholic myself around eighteen years old, but I managed to get sober on my twenty-seventh birthday in 2012.

    Part of the program of recovery that I work says that one of the main reasons we drink and use is because of resentments, which I could definitely relate to. Another part of this program is making amends. Making amends to the people I had hurt in my past was something that helped me forgive myself, but I’m also not a big fan of making amends.

    One of the issues with getting sober is that you don’t immediately become this spiritual being. I still had a lot of anger, and I still couldn’t control my temper. I was the epitome of someone who reacted rather than responded. Whenever I would react poorly, I had to humble myself to apologize. I needed to figure out a way to manage my anger before it got to that point, and that’s when I found mindfulness.

    Mindfulness is My Anger Management Tool

    I didn’t find mindfulness until I was three years sober. My anger wasn’t nearly as bad as it used to be, but it was still there. I knew that I still had a lot of self-improvement to do, so I gave mindfulness meditation a try.

    From the first time I tried meditating, I immediately understood how transformative it could be in my life, but I didn’t realize how much it would help me with my anger issues.

    One of the reasons I love the practice of mindfulness is because there are so many informal practices. As I started introducing different practices like mindful walking, mindful listening, and mindful communicating, I was becoming more mindful in my everyday life.

    What I began to realize was that I was only acknowledging my anger when I was ready to explode, and it was often something that had been building up for a while. Since I wasn’t recognizing the early triggers of my anger, I wasn’t able to deal with it before reacting in a way that I would regret.

    Some of the patterns of my anger triggers I started to recognize include:

    • Disrespected
    • Lied to
    • Being talked down to
    • Not being treated fairly
    • Not given credit
    • Not appreciated

    When I speak of the “volume knob” of anger, I mean that mindfulness has helped me begin catching my anger at a volume level of one or two rather than at a nine or ten. By the time my anger gets to the highest volume, it is controlling me rather than me controlling it.

    Being more mindful throughout my day has given me the opportunity to not only spot my anger in its earlier stages, but it’s also allowed me to treat it with compassion and curiosity.

    Now, when I feel that initial anger within my body or mind, I get really curious. I take a calm breath and simply think, “That’s interesting. Why am I feeling this way towards this person or situation?”

    Mindfulness helps declutter the mind and help me get to the root of what’s really happening within my own mind. Often times, I find that my anger is based on circumstances that are completely outside of my control, or they’re based on other circumstances that have nothing to do with the other person or people involved.

    Perhaps the most profound way that mindfulness has affected me is that it’s had me realize that my anger is often based on belief systems that are rather closed-minded.

    A Mindful Communication Practice

    A great practice you can begin using is mindful communication. This involves being fully present during a conversation, which involves listening while also being mindful of what your own mind and body are doing.

    I suggest you begin practicing this with someone who you may not get along with too well, but not someone who makes you overly emotional. This could be a coworker you’re not too fond of, a family member, or a friend in your inner circle. If this is too much for you, you can do it while browsing social media posts or watching the news.

    While communicating with this person, be mindful of the emotions rising in your body and the sensations you’re getting. Begin to notice what they’ve said that’s triggered this initial emotion and be aware of where you’re feeling sensations in your body.

    Rather than turning to judgment, just be curious. Be fascinated by why your body and mind are reacting the way they are in that moment. When you treat these thoughts and sensations with equanimity, you’re less likely to react poorly in the situation.

    When I speak of being fascinated, I mean to treat your experience with the curiosity of a child. This was one of my first lessons in mindfulness. When you’re being curious, you’re not judging. Inspect your experience like a child closely examining a leaf for the first time. This helps takes the power away from the strong emotion you’re feeling in that moment.

    This whole practice is extremely important because it gives us a chance to pause. When we pause, we’re able to respond rather than react. Reactions are often what the primitive part of our brain wants to do, and we don’t put much thought into it. This typically leads to regret and suffering. By being able to pause, and then respond, we make much wiser decisions.

    This is going to take practice until you have your temper under control, but over time, you’ll begin to reflect on situations that would have set you off. I’m personally amazed at how well my anger is managed today, and it’s something I continue to work on. Now that I know how to respond rather than react, I don’t find myself regretting the decisions I made out of a knee-jerk reaction to anger.

    As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, I wish more people could truly understand how much mindfulness has changed me. Whenever I see senseless acts of violence such as domestic abuse, physical altercations between strangers, or even murder that happens due to somebody’s inability to manage their anger, I just think of how much different this world would be if more people learned this practice.

    My hope is to be an example to others when it comes to managing anger through mindfulness. If they can see how I respond to life’s difficulties on a daily basis, maybe they’ll decide to give this mindfulness thing a try.