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by Wesley Doherty
Even though you can identify it easily in today’s world, anger
may not be
what you think it is. All you have to do is spend a
minute with the headlines and you come in contact with many forms of
anger. For many of us, it is felt much closer than the anger the
headlines report: We feel anger towards others and the anger of
others directed at us.
If the truth were told, most of us carry some degree of anger
within us. We experience anger anywhere from mild irritation all the
way up to seething rage, and we can feel it once a year, once a
month, once a week, once a day, once a minute, or even all the time.
But even if you only experience mild irritation once a year, you
still harbor anger. Carrying anger hurts yourself much more than it
hurts the person you have directed your anger at, so it is in your
best interests to be free of anger completely.
For example: You are happily driving to work one morning,
cruising down the highway in the right lane. As you come up to an
exit, a motorist in the lane to your left blows by you and and then
immediately and dangerously cuts you off in order to make the exit
ramp. You bang on the steering wheel, gesture wildly, and yell at
him for being so rude and careless. You think about it all the way
to work, where you vigorously tell the story to your coworkers. You
think about it often during the day. You drive home with your eye
out for the offending driver so you can give him a piece of your
mind or maybe even dole out a little payback. You also drive a
little more defensively with an eye out to protect yourself from
another driver who might do the same thing. Once home, you retell
the story to your family.
What has happened here is that you have kept your body on high
alert all day. You have carried that anger with you all day --
starting with when you got cutoff and then every time you remembered
the event or retold the story -- and your body responded to every
reenactment in your mind or words with a rush of adrenaline, an
increase in stress levels, a contraction of your muscles, and a halt
to your digestive and sexual functioning, to name just a few of the
body's automatic responses to a threat.
The driver who cut you off, on the other hand, has felt none of
these symptoms. He forgot that he cut you off before he reached the
light at the end of the exit ramp and went merrily about his day,
never thinking about you again. You were the only one to feel the
anger directed at him and you were the only one to pay the price for
that anger.
Anger takes many forms but they fall into two main categories:
Anger expressed inward is felt as depression and anger expressed
outward is attack. Whichever category it falls under and no matter
how we express it, your anger hurts you more than it hurts the
person it is directed at so it is in your best interests to be
completely free of anger.
Here's how most of us believe we get angry: Something external
happens that wrongs us (a mate says the wrong thing, a child
misbehaves, a driver cuts you off, a person or group does something
that is antithetical to a philosophy or way of life you value, etc.)
and we correctly and justifiably respond with anger. As long as you
agree that this is the way anger arises in you, you will be a slave
to anger and all of its negative outcomes (alienation, excess
weight, stress, illness, etc.). As this is a world of cause and
effect with our thoughts being the cause, to experience anger
physically we first had to hold an angry belief. If you want to be
free of anger and its natural outcomes forever, you must first
change your beliefs about where anger originates.
As I'm writing this, I have been laying in a lounge chair in the
sun. As I write, occasionally a hornet will land on me and walk
around siphoning off something they find tasty in my sweat. Once
they've had their fill they harmlessly fly away. These are the same
hornets that stung me multiple times when I drove over their nest
with my lawnmower just the week before. People are the same: we're
just going about our day when someone does something that ticks us
off and we feel attacked by it, so we respond to the attack with
righteous anger, knowing full well we were in no way responsible for
the attack.
To that I say: "No matter how hard you squeeze a grapefruit,
you can't get apple juice." Squeeze a grapefruit with varying
degrees of pressure and from a variety of angles and you can only
get out what is already in there: grapefruit juice. People are the
same way: No matter how much pressure we are under, only what is
already in us can come out of us.
When I was a kid I bit my nails, sometimes to the point of
injuring my finger so it would get cut and filled with pus. The
slightest pressure on that finger would cause me great pain while
ten times the pressure on the finger right next to it could hardly
be felt. Emotionally, we are the same way: We can withstand great
amounts of pressure where we are healed while small amounts of
pressure where we are yet to be healed causes us to writhe in pain
and react strongly. So if you feel angry when your mate misspeaks,
your child misbehaves, another driver cuts you off, etc., it is only
because they are putting pressure on a spot where anger and hurt
already reside.
There are only two kinds of beliefs: a love-based belief and a
fear-based belief. Anger is of fear, so when you are angry, you are
actually afraid. As a love-based belief always comes down to "I
am enough" and a fear-based belief always comes down to "I
am not enough," the original belief that makes you angry is a
belief you hold about yourself that you are somehow inadequate, that
you are somehow not enough. I can remember one time hopping around
cursing with my finger in my mouth because I hit my finger with a
hammer. When the woman I was dating at the time reacted to my pain
by questioning my masculinity instead of giving me some sympathy, I
reacted angrily by questioning her ability to be compassionate. In
retrospect, I got angry with her because at some level I agreed with
her--somewhere in my belief system I believed that real men are
supposed to be tough and feel no pain. Now that I have changed my
belief about what a man is, I don’t get angry when somebody teases
me like that. They can press as hard as they like and I don't react
angrily because that sore spot has been healed.
When we remember that our thoughts create our reality, we can see
that we don't get angry as a response to someone attacking us. We
get angry because we hold a mistaken belief about ourselves as true
and it manifests itself in such a way that we come face-to-face with
a pain we have been trying to disown. When we strike out with anger
at the reminder of our mistaken belief (whoever or whatever that may
be), we reinforce our belief in our own victimization and continue
the cycle of miserable enslavement to a world that waits to attack.
When we instead recognize that our own mistaken beliefs have created
this event, we empower ourselves to choose new beliefs and set
ourselves, and those around us, completely free.
One Way To Become Free of Anger - An Exercise
As they appear, write down the things that make you angry. What
was done? Did someone say or do something that hurt your feelings?
How was it said or done? Who said or did it? What did you
feel--hurt, disrespected, judged, manipulated, envious, imposed
upon, anxious, depressed, worried, insecure, preoccupied, hated,
hatred, sad, vengeful? The more specific you can be, the better.
After you have a few events written down, pick one that seems to
incite a stronger response from you than the others or one response
that reoccurs to seemingly different catalysts.
As thoughts precede outcomes, what thoughts could you be holding
about yourself that would leave you feeling vulnerable to an attack
such as the one you have picked from your list? For example, I got
angry when people teased me about my masculinity. The belief I held
about myself that left me vulnerable to attacks against my manhood
was, "Real men don't feel pain and I feel pain so I must not be
much of a man." Write down all the "I am not enough"
beliefs that come to mind that could have you feeling so vulnerable
to this kind of attack.
After you have come up with all the possible fear-based beliefs,
pick the one that resonates most strongly with you and rewrite it so
it no longer promotes your wrongness. When I changed my fear-based
belief to, "I am a man and I feel pain so real men do feel
pain," I didn't feel like I had been attacked the next time
such a joke was made so I harbored no anger and I was set free! Make
this new, less restrictive and more empowering belief your mantra
and repeat it to yourself 20-100 times a day, especially when an
event occurs that sparks an angry response from you. You will find
that over time, by healing your fear-based beliefs about yourself
(your emotional "sore fingers," if you will) you respond
with anger to fewer and fewer things and with forgiveness and joy to
more and more things. And the more forgiveness and joy you
experience, the easier your life is!
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