Anger
is probably the least understood of all the human emotions
--
mainly due to its
power. Anger is really about
vulnerability and hurt.
Think about it.
Why do we get angry?
Because we have been injured
in some way.
We are
all entitled to our inner experience of anger. We
are not entitled to use that anger to hurt or control
another. Yet anger is such a
seductive emotion. In the heat of the moment,
it tricks us into thinking that weare entitled to push someone else
around with its explosive power.
The
good news is that acquiring the skills to resist the
temptation of anger is a fairly mechanical process that most
of us can easily learn. The capacity to manage anger
is one which I have taught regularly since 1993. With some sincere
application, results are assured.
Emotional Literacy
School
does a good job of making us literate and numerate but it
neglects the realm of human emotions.
Many of us have difficulty
identifying what we are feeling and some of us don’t even have
access to our feelings.
It’s
especially the darker emotions that give us trouble: sadness,
fear, grief and despair. And yet there is a wealth of
wisdom and intelligence that our emotions are seeking to carry
to us.
In my
practice, I encourage patients to befriend their feelings by
helping them to identify them, experience them, process and
integrate them. When you learn to be with
the dark emotions, you enlarge your capacity for joy.
All feelings exist on the same spectrum and sending the
dark emotions away will only create a condition of emotional
flatness and rob us of our capacity for joy.
What we resist, persists; what we examine falls away.
~ Neale Donald Walsch
