Tag: wisdom
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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.
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How to Transform Your Relationship by Feeling Your Feelings
It was late at night, and my husband and I were having an argument about the same subject we’d been arguing about for two decades—cooking and cleaning.
The argument seemed to come out of nowhere. We were having a nice evening together, the kids were asleep, we were watching a movie and chatting. And then all of a sudden, the conversation went off on a tangent, and it felt like the ground we were standing on suddenly split and a deep dark cavern opened up between us.
Here we were now, standing on either side, an insurmountable ravine between us, throwing anger and pain and disappointment at each other. Trying to convince each other of our own rightness in the situation.
For the whole of our marriage, the patterns have been that I cook and organize the kids, he cleans and takes instructions about the kids—which, on paper, might seem reasonable, but we were both holding deep amounts of resentment, bitterness, and anger about this arrangement.
It was not an arrangement that had been discussed. It was an arrangement that just evolved, and for some reason it drove us both into wild flames of anger.
For days after these arguments, we would retreat inside our emotional selves, like wounded animals tending to the emotional wounds we had suffered. After we both emerged, we wouldn’t discuss the argument; it felt like it had taken so much out of our lives that we just wanted to skip onto the next thing. If I am honest, I knew I didn’t have the tools to discuss it in a way in that wouldn’t ignite the argument again.
Why open up the wound when it felt like it had healed?
But, of course, it wouldn’t have healed, and it would just come up again a few weeks or months down the line.
Cut to five years later and the arrangements haven’t actually changed much, but these arguments have disappeared. Not only have the arguments stopped, the deep old bitterness and resentment have gone. And instead, the discussions about cleaning, organizing the children, and cooking are now mostly along the lines of how can I help you with what’s on your plate today?
How did this happen? What radical change did we instigate, or did we just swap partners to people who were kinder and more reasonable?
No, in these five years I learned about how the brain processes and perceives emotions, and that unlocked a totally new way of being in my relationship.
What felt so radical for me is that when I learned how to work with my emotions in a different way, it changed how my husband (and my kids) started dealing with their emotions.
I didn’t need to explain or discuss anything with them. But by showing up differently, I changed the emotional patterns of my family, and that was the most empowering thing I’ve experienced in my whole life.
Here are five of the realizations that made the biggest shifts for me.
1. What we learned about emotions is usually wrong.
Humans are meant to have emotions, and to have the whole range of emotions—anger and fear, sadness and despair, love and joy. These are all natural. But many of us learned that some (or even all) emotions are somehow wrong and we shouldn’t have them.
Emotions are not meant to be suppressed, avoided, ranted about, thrown at other people, or handled in any of the other ways most of us learned to deal with emotions.
Emotions are meant to be seen, felt, and heard. I like to think of emotions being like clouds. They arrive, we feel them, and then they drift out.
What causes so many problems for us is that most of us didn’t learn to feel them in this way. We didn’t grow up with the sense that emotions are manageable, and that it’s possible to hold them gently in our bodies, allowing them to drift in and then drift out.
This is because our parents and caregivers (and their parents and caregivers) usually struggled with their emotions, so we now struggle with ours.
For example, anger: What did your parents do when you were a child and felt anger? Most of us would have been banished to our rooms for saying things in anger. Or maybe our parents tried to jolly us out of feeling anger, made fun of us, or told us to just get over it. Or our anger was met with our parents’ anger, and we were punished.
What that teaches our brain is that anger is wrong. We shouldn’t feel anger. So, when anger comes up and we don’t know how to hold it, we can end up throwing it at other people by arguing or shouting, or keep it locked inside where it might feel totally uncomfortable and painful. Or we end up having endless angry looping obsessive thoughts that we just can’t stop.
Anger ends up feeling very uncontrollable for us, impossible to have in our bodies, and scary for us to witness in others, and it can become a destructive force in our lives.
But there is a different way with emotions, and this is what emotions actually want. They want to be seen, felt, and heard.
Not to throw the anger at others or keep it inside to feel like it’s destroying our being, but to learn how to feel safe with it. To know that we can feel more at ease experiencing anger, so the anger can come up into our bodies and then come out as we release it.
2. When emotions are high, logic goes out the door.
When emotions activate, it’s like a giant lens comes up and we start to see the world through the lens of that emotion. So, when we feel anger, we see the world through the lens of anger. Which makes it seem like there are so many upsetting things in the world.
Or fear—we see the world through the lens of fear and it seems like so many things are scary or terrifying.
But the thing to know here is that it’s simply the emotion that is coloring our vision. If we are able to work with the emotion, then we stop seeing so many scary-terrifying things and start to see the world as a more nuanced and relaxed experience.
So if I am seeing anger activate in my husband, or fear or sadness or any emotion, I know that he is seeing the world through this lens and there are no ‘facts’ or ‘logic’ that will change that.
I, therefore, am not going to engage in conversations about cooking and clearing when he is in his emotions. Or anything that feels important to me. I will wait to talk about things that feel important to me when he isn’t emotional.
3. We shouldn’t listen to our thoughts when we are emotional.
Similarly, when I am feeling anger, instead of allowing my mind to find 234 things to feel angry about and then accusing my husband of being the cause of all of them, I am going to recognize that I feel anger and I am going to work with that emotion instead of throwing my anger at him.
My feelings are my feelings, and his feelings are his feelings. And although my brain wants to say, “He’s the reason I am feeling angry! He’s to blame!”, the anger I feel is actually bigger and older than him. Most of our emotions arrived way before our current situation, experience, or relationship—even though it doesn’t feel that way.
Most of our feelings are old because we never got to process them—to see, feel, and hear them—so they stay trapped inside of us. So maybe we feel some new anger about a situation, but it gets added to the decades-old pile of anger that we haven’t processed, and that’s why it feels so very big, so very significant. and so painful.
Emotions are yearning to integrate; they want to be released from our bodies, and so they look for things to bring them up, in the hope we will finally allow them to be here and fully allow them to be seen, felt, and heard.
4. My emotions are my emotions; your emotions are your emotions.
By taking responsibility for our feelings as our own, we can move through them much more quickly than trying to work through them together. We get to get out the other side. And if we want to have discussions with our partners—say about cleaning and cooking and kids and arrangements—it’s on the other side of our feelings that we want to do it.
When the anger has released, when the lens has been wiped clean. When we are through that feeling. Then we can have empathy, understanding, and a much more expanded vision of our lives and relationships.
Once I worked through my piles of historical anger, rage, and sadness that had accumulated over the decades of my life, and the pains of disappointment I had felt but tried to run away from, I automatically started to see the relationship I had totally differently.
I was then able to communicate with my husband how I saw experiences and situations in our relationship from a place of calm. When I wasn’t throwing resentment and anger at him, and not having conversations when he was emotional as well, our communication totally changed its texture. We started to negotiate our needs and find the space to support each other from a place of empathy.
5. What do emotions need? To be seen, felt, and heard.
Emotions are looking for these three simple things. The first is to be seen, to be acknowledged—not blamed or judged (or blaming other people for having emotions). A simple step is to just see them:
Oh, I see some anger has activated here!
I am feeling some fear.
What am I feeling? Gosh, I think it’s some disappointment, and some sadness.
And what emotions want so very much is to be met with empathy, understanding, and compassion:
I am feeling so much anger right now; gosh, this is a lot! It’s uncomfortable and hard to stay with this feeling, but I understand why anger is here. This has always been a hard emotion for me.
Fear is a lot! But I am going to offer some compassion as I hold this fear, to sit with myself in it, and give myself a lot of empathy.
Disappointment is a tricky emotion for me! Can I offer myself some understanding here? To acknowledge it’s not easy for me as I learn how to be with this emotion with more kindness and gentleness?
We need to step away from our thoughts in this process, to see that the emotions we experience are actually held in our body, and it’s in our body that we get to fully feel them.
It’s by fully feeling our feelings, rather than getting lost in our thoughts, that we get the chance to release the intensity of our feelings.
Not by following along with the blaming and judging ourselves or others.
The last part is to hear them. Emotions are incredible guides for us when we learn how to feel and release them. They always come with guidance around our unmet needs. They aren’t here to punish us, but instead show us where we can become more authentic, more in line with our values, and stronger in our boundaries.
When we decide to give ourselves space and support through our emotional reactions, this is what changes the texture of our relationships.
What could your relationship be like if you were able to move through those big, sticky feelings that arise, that may cause conflicts or make you react differently to how you want to react?
It’s not just the case of intimate relationships with our partners, but also true of our relationships with anyone we love. When we speak to our parents or siblings, our extended family, or friends, and we have big difficult feelings about them, if we can work through those feelings our relationships will automatically change.
When we can unblock our relationships from big piles of shame, fear, anger, or loneliness, we can move into spaces where much deeper intimacy, mutual empathy, and support live.
It’s a wildly beautiful place to live, in trust and connection, knowing that we can still have feelings, we can still have conflict—but when we can work with our emotions, we don’t stay stuck in a place of raw, untended pain that arises and derails our lives and our relationships.
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How Highly Sensitive People Can Feel More Fulfilled in Their Relationships
“Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.” ~Swami Vivekananda
Highly sensitive people naturally bring some really beautiful, love-promoting qualities to their romantic partnerships. But these same qualities can sometimes end up undermining the strength of their relationships. This was true for me in my first marriage and led, in part, to it ending in divorce.
We HSPs are known for our caring, conscientious, and considerate natures. It matters deeply to us that we do our best to be loyal and caring in our relationships.
And because we tend to have high standards for ourselves and work hard at being kind supportive friends and lovers, we often successfully create strong intimate bonds with others.
We also have a knack for being aware of the needs of others. Our ability to pick up on subtle cues makes them feel deeply understood and cared for. On top of all of this, we tend to think deeply about our romantic relationships, giving them much of our mental and emotional energy.
This is all really wonderful for the lucky partner of a highly sensitive person. It’s part of why they felt drawn to you and nurtured, safe, and loved with you. But things can go downhill fast when our significant other doesn’t behave the same way.
It’s human nature to be unable to deeply understand what it’s like to live another’s experience. Though HSPs tend to be quite empathic, it’s still nearly impossible to really see through our partners’ eyes. This can be the source of so much pain.
In my first marriage, I often wondered why I seemed to be the one to show more interest in the health of the relationship. I would ask myself things like, “How can he be okay with going to bed when things aren’t resolved between us?” “Does he even notice that I’m sad?” “Doesn’t he want to help me feel better?” “What’s wrong with him that he doesn’t think to offer some kind words?”
Because those were things I naturally did for him.
Those high standards I had for myself about relationships? I had them for him, too. When he didn’t meet my ideas about how we should be with each other, I’d think something was wrong.
I’d think his lack of consideration and awareness meant he didn’t love me as much as I loved him, that maybe I wasn’t enough for him. Thinking that really hurt.
That pain, unfortunately, only led to me acting far below my own high standards for myself. Because when we humans feel hurt, we say and do things we wouldn’t otherwise.
I’d complain, maybe curl up and cry, or give him the cold shoulder. I’d point out how he was falling short, question why, if he really loved me, he wasn’t more affectionate, more aware of my feelings, more interested in resolving issues—in short, more like I was naturally (well, when I wasn’t upset!).
We’d end up in long conversations that never concluded satisfactorily. He’d end up feeling like he wasn’t doing good enough.
Because I was aware of subtle shifts in him, I could see how badly I was affecting him. And that would only lead to me feeling guilty and bad about myself, which made things even worse. It seemed like a rock and a hard place that we didn’t know how to get out of. After many years of this, we ended our marriage.
What a wake up call! Since then, I’ve learned so much and changed my life in major ways, and learned to work with my high sensitivity in ways that not only support me, but also my romantic relationship. I am now very happily remarried.
Though I had to learn the hard way, I now have a lot to share with others about how to have a mutually loving, supportive, and connected intimate relationship as an HSP.
Assuming you’re in a healthy, non-abusive relationship, these three tips can help you feel more fulfilled in love and be an amazing life partner.
1. Honor differences, yours and theirs!
Just as they must learn to accept our sensitive natures, we must understand that others may not have our superpowers of high conscientiousness, deep caring attentiveness to others, and the uncanny ability to know what they most need to feel good.
They may not want to resolve issues as thoroughly as you do, because they may not feel things as intensely and as long as you do. They might not enjoy processing or getting to the heart of the matter the way you do—it may even make them really uncomfortable.
All this can be especially true if your partner’s male, because of some big brain and cultural differences between males’ and females’ approach to relating with others. So he may not be attuned to the play of emotion across your face—or quick to try to make things right for you.
If you fight to change his brain’s wiring, you’re fighting a losing battle. Instead, when you feel like you know better than he does about how to love well, remind yourself: It’s not better; it’s just different.
2. Stop holding your partner to unreachable standards.
Apples will never be as juicy as watermelon! But you can’t make a great pie out of watermelon.
When I let go of my own high, unrealistic standards and stop comparing, I can actually see the way he does show his care and is loving me. Which is what we all ultimately want: to feel cherished and supported.
Maybe your partner doesn’t read your mind and give you that hug when you want it most, but he does make kind gestures like offering to take the kids so you can have some quiet time to yourself, or she invites you on some adventure she’s excited about. Look for and enjoy the different gifts your partner brings to the relationship. Let them spice up your life.
Would you really want a clone of yourself for a partner, anyway?
3. Attend to yourself.
We need to keep coming back to giving ourselves loving attention, especially as HSPs.
When I don’t, I feel empty and needy, and tend to look to my husband to fix it. Which often backfires and I feel even worse.
When I get complainy or needy or act in ways I don’t like, I know it means I need to pause and notice what I really need. And then take action on it. If it’s something my husband can do for me, I can always ask lovingly for it, without expecting he’ll be willing or able.
So let them be who they are, and take care of who you are. Nothing fills us up like self-appreciation and caring for yourself the way you like to care for others.
My love life changed so much once I deeply understood that my way is just one way, not the way to express love for another human being. I can now really feel and appreciate my husband’s unique ways of loving me, and I receive them as big gifts. That allows me to feel truly fulfilled and to easily reciprocate to my sweet husband—in my own unique and special way.
