Working with Anger
I’ve been having reoccurring dreams where I am angry with a past partner. I am yelling at him and saying loads of mean things (pretty unlike me in waking life). The dreams really rattle me and I wake up a bit perplexed. For me, the dream world has always been a place of processing subconscious and unconscious thoughts that I might not see in day to day waking life.
Under anger, there is typically fear and grief. I feel like I’ve grieved this relationship but grief can run deep.
When I see anger in my life, I see it as a catalyst emotion. It’s typically the emotion that propels me into the next phase, or it’s the emotion that helps me to set a boundary I’ve struggled to set. Anger can be useful if we learn to be with it and not controlled by it. It’s uncontrolled anger that is damaging.
I can see this anger is helping me process old patterns, old life choices that are no longer serving me and it is moving me into something more aligned for who I am right now.
As a child I was encouraged to cry, feel my emotions fully but anger wasn’t an emotion I was encouraged to work with. I think this is mostly because my parents and their parents’ and their parents’ parents’ were not taught how to work with anger. Anger was viewed as ‘bad’ something we are not allow to access/express and feel. (I don’t think every family operates like this, many people express anger in it’s full force).
Do you know anyone who expresses anger in a healthy way?
What does it look like to express anger in a healthy manner?
In my opinion, expressing anger in a healthy way is this: there is no repression of the anger, yet there is no attack (unless of course, our safety is at play!), it is being able to remain in my body but communicate how I feel without completely attacking the other person.
Anger helps me to set boundaries that I need to feel safe. Anger helps me move away from unhealthy situations.
Take a moment today and reflect on how you process anger in your life and to take it a step further, close your eyes and think about a time you expressed anger in a way that when you reflect back you feel ashamed of. With your eyes closed take a moment and have a redo, go back to that time and place and say what you wanted to say, and behave like you’d want to behave in a way that you can feel proud of.
Just like athletes practice their basketball shots or run through how they will preform head before doing it in real life, we can do this with our behavior such as arguments and fights.
I often ask myself, “Who do I want to be?” ‘What emotions do I want to express?” “What kind of life do I want?”
Then I rehearse those emotions and behaviors in my mind and body.
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