Home→Forums→Emotional Mastery→Anger is my default
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August 5, 2013 at 6:14 pm #39784AnonymousInactive
I have been angry my entire life, or so it seems. I know that it started from when I was a little kid – I would come home from the babysitter’s and do nothing but scream and yell until my parent’s fed me and that would somehow pacify me. So to them, I must have just been hungry. They had no idea that I was burning up inside and that food only gave fuel to the fire and appeased it temporarily. Reminds me of a chart I saw in a book about Qigong – depicting a fire within somewhere near the dantien (spelling?) Mine seemed and still seems to be burning uncontrollably. I do not act out my anger in the typical ways you would think of an “angry” person. Instead – I am cold, and distant, and especially regard myself and others with a lot of contempt. On the surface I am a pleasant person – but underneath I’m seething with anger. No one would depict me as an angry person – but inside is that same young child who came home from the babysitter’s and screamed his head off for apparently no reason. A couple years of therapy have revealed that there are things in my past worthy of my rage but uncovering those origins don’t provide me with the relief I need now.
The biggest problem now is that I don’t even register the overwhelming discomfort in my body as “anger”. It’s been with me my whole life so identifying it as something is counter intuitive. And I’m not dumb – I know that being an angry person is going to drive away everyone around me so I’m scared of admitting it to myself fearing that that will somehow make the anger worse and certainly scare everyone off. So there is fear to admitting my own anger. But I know I must admit that it is there – so that I can be with it – with compassion and loving-kindness.
Anger is terrible, isn’t it?
August 5, 2013 at 6:42 pm #39786JohnParticipantAnger is not terrible and there should be no reason to suppress it or prevent it from arising all together. There are no good or bad emotions. It’s what we do with that energy that matters.
Here’s a silly question, are you an artist? Do you play a musical instrument or write poetry?
I used to be afraid of my own anger too, thinking that if unleashed, I would hit my wife or perhaps even kill someone. But I know deep down inside that’s not true. When I get angry, I need to write or listen to some really powerful music, or go for a really fast hyper intense run.
I’m wondering if you had a creative outlet for your emotions, you could possibly do some amazing things; belt out a new #1 hit, paint a canvas ten feet high that embodies your frustrations, take part in a spoken word event and share your soul with the world.
Maybe that little Jeremy inside who has just come home from the babysitter’s wants to express himself. He doesn’t want to be placated with food! He has a voice and it wants to be heard! It could just be a matter of finding the right medium to express yourself.
Here’s a little inspiration 🙂
August 5, 2013 at 8:10 pm #39798MattParticipantJeremy,
I’m sorry for the conditions in your life that have lead you to a state of generalized anger. I disagree here with John, that investing it in creativity is the best option. Consider picking up the book “Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames” by Thich Nhat Hanh. It is both serious wisdom and lighthearted.
Basically, there are practices we can do which will open the space around the anger and let it settle once and for all. We are angry, and then we are angry that we suffer with anger. As we develop mindfulness around the causes of our anger (which are in our perceptions of reality in the present moment, like “cloudy glasses”), we learn to set it down. Its a great read, and if you follow his direction for even a few weeks, the difference will be noticeable!
With warmth,
MattAugust 5, 2013 at 11:50 pm #39807froggponddeParticipantJeremy,
I can sympathize with your anger, because i myself have been very angry,and like you i dont seem like it on the outside. For me my anger stems from childhood as well and have every right to be angry about them. But at some point i have released that this anger is consuming, and on some level the things that have happened in my childhood have made me the person in am today.
I think that your are just going to stay angry at yourself and the rest of the world if you dont acknowledge your anger. I think on some level you are just making yourself more angry buy not saying to yourself that you are angry. You will not be able to do anything about it if you dont accept it. Don’t worry about what people around you will think about you accepting it. How can it be any worse than,what you already do to them or yourself?
Right now your anger is who you are.August 6, 2013 at 7:12 pm #39867AnonymousInactiveThank you very much for your responses. It is very helpful to read them. See, what I have been thinking about now is how alluring anger can be. I’m not sure what the story is, or the metaphor, but I seem to remember some teaching of the Buddha in which the Buddha teaches that anger is like a honey-tipped poisonous arrow. Meaning that anger offers temporary relief but that it corrupts and destroys completely when followed until the end. So I try and refrain from anything that may be a kind of “rehearsal” (to borrow from Thich Nhat Hanh) of anger. But it is still alluring. Because I think that it was by other people’s anger and frustration that I became frustrated and angry and so to “give up” anger now would be like to relinquish the power that was taken from me. But anger is not power, is it? I don’t quite understand why or how it’s not. Anger feels like power – it seems to make promises of “righting wrongs” and therefore offers a kind of solution to our problems – but we can’t use it can we? It’s very hard for me to put down anger because I feel as though it would be to give up power and I have felt so powerless my entire life. Does anyone have any experience with this?
August 6, 2013 at 8:26 pm #39879MattParticipantJaydee,
What you seem to be describing is something my teacher called negative negativity. It is when anger seems justified, like it belongs there. It is seductive, because the more angry we get, the more vibrant the perception of injustice becomes, until we’re charged and ready to destroy the unjust actions or people.
This is stupid. Consider that the world we are in is like a fertile field. We implant actions and reap fruit. Punching the field seems just, if it has given a bitter fruit. Maybe we’ll “let it know the fruit was bitter” more clearly if we strike at it. It doesn’t work that way though. What we do is implant a strike. Said differently, we don’t sow resolution of injustice with anger, we sow anger. Then we reap more injustice, more “reasons to be angry”.
So we walk away from it. Say screw that, my mind and body are far too sacred to knowingly implant anger. From that moment on, we only implant it reactionary… when we forget or there is too much chaos to see a better path. Such as my child walking toward a hot stove, I might blert “stop” with anger because of the intensity of the fear.
However, in other situations it is “wait, this feels like anger again, where’s my breath, my cushion.”
With warmth,
MattAugust 11, 2013 at 10:22 pm #40239DanaParticipantI did not read the above writings yet. I have a thought in my mind that I want to express as purely as possible. It is that anger used to be my default. However, a thought occurred to me a few years back that profoundly changed my life and made me finally move forward and gain some control on my anger issue. It goes like this. Let’s see……. ok, when ever I used to tense up and expect a bad outcome in whatever I was involved in, and it came to be, I would get furious and beat my self up. There in lies the problem.
We only gain freedom proportional to the amount of responsibility we accept for our predicament. I had learned to blame and beat myself as if I was blaming and beating a separate person. How could that separate person be so stupid? How could that idiot separate person be such a f-up. I wouldn’t do that if that separate person didn’t dwell in me. These were my unconscious thoughts. WHHAAT??? One day it hit me. There is no separate person. Anger was a cop-out.
Has this arleady been covered? If so I apologize. Anyways, I still do this on a rare occasion when I am hit with several difficult situations at once coming down off of a cup of coffee or what ever. But I witness.. I witness and watch. and I wait. I don’t punish like I used to.Have a good day.
August 12, 2013 at 11:58 am #40272AnonymousInactiveDana,
It’s true, and complete madness – to treat ourselves as though we were a separate person. It would be like watching someone have a shouting match with themselves. I think the delusion lies in that we have been so conditioned by society to think that punishing ourselves will make us become the kind of people we think we should be and then loving ourselves will be easier. But instead we consider ourselves unlovable and so put ourselves through hell – trying to perfect ourselves – in order to become lovable. We do this by berating ourselves – beating ourselves up when our natural human nature crops up and decides to throw a wrench in our plans of being a “perfect person”. The truth is that there are such things as greed, laziness, anger, mistakes in conduct, etc… Our job is to love ourselves despite our flaws – and love others in kind. Thanks for sharing.-J.D.
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