What is anger?
Anger is an emotional state… but what does it mean?
We can feel various range of anger from a very mild sense of frustration to irritation, to very intense fury and rage, and we can also have all the states in between those extremes.
Usually, anger can be caused by both an external and internal situation, linked to our thoughts and our way of perceiving things.
Essentially, Anger is a response.
When we feel anger, we are responding to a threat, to a dangerous situation, to something that we feels deeply wrong. Most probably we believe we are responding to an injustice, or to something that didn’t go the way we wanted.
We can detect and feel that we’re getting angry by observing our body.
For example: when we get angry, our heartbeat is going to speed up, and/or we are crunching our hands, biting our teeth, clenching our jaw, and most of our face muscles are in tension, and we might even turn red.
Many of us are afraid of anger. Often our experience with anger is passive, it is related to aggressive behavior that made us feel overwhelmed and we responded freezing our feelings and sensations. Anger can be expressed also through aggressive behavior as a “fight response” to something that we are perceiving as a threat.
Many of us are living in survival modality, as we feel constantly unsafe, threatened or somehow in danger. So, what do we do, how do we emotionally answer to the threatening? Often the automatic answer is to get angry, either clearly expressing it, keeping the anger inside, which with the time passing will burn, consume, tear down all our vital energy.
It’s very important to allow us to express our anger in a very safe way, and there are many safe ways through which we can express it.
When we allow ourselves to express anger, we can succeed in opening a new door towards vulnerability.
We know this can sound strange to many of you, but we can guarantee that repressing anger or keeping it in can cause you lots of physical and mental illness, and emotional unbalance.
When you free yourself to express your anger and disappointment in a safe and mature way, you’re allowing yourself towards a new form of authenticity and vulnerability learning to express your feelings, and respecting yours and others boundaries.
How do we usually express anger?
Often in a very mechanical and unconscious way.
We use anger to avoid feelings…
To avoid feeling hurt
To avoid fear
To avoid sadness
To avoid a sense of unworthiness and/or incapability.
So, to cover up the real sensation and not feeling the discomfort that comes with it, we start getting angry, in order to feel more powerful or simply to keep control of the situation.
We can also use anger to wake up, to boost our system. Every time we allow ourselves to be angry the energy in our body increases, and we feel more in our body, we come alive!
Anger is something that can help us to be more present, to defend our boundaries and clearly state:“Here I am, this is what I am, and this is what I’m going to do…”
Sometimes we need this energy to really step into things, to commit and to be more alive.
When anger is not expressed in a safe, mature and honest way, we often get into toxic relationships where we risk to not take care of ourselves, we can get into deep depression, and we risk to enter in relationship in a co-dependent modality.
People who don’t express their anger can become depressed.
When we don’t allow ourselves to be angry and to express it, we might become passive aggressive, which means that we start to talk behind people back, become sarcastic, we can be poke and provoke and become very rude and disrespectful.
People relate to anger mainly in two ways:
1. They can express it in a healthy way. Feeling in their body their high energy sensation of anger and let them be expressed without arming themselves or others. Processing anger in a positive way requires that we be connected with both our physiology and the world around us.
2. Or they suppress their anger, to a point where they start to have physical illness, such as stomachache, headache, digestive problems. And then become more and more difficult for them to take life challenges and have healthy relationship. They often find themselves repressing their energy up to the point to collapse and start playing the “Victim role”.
Here there are 6 ways to calm your anger down:
1. Breathe and slow down. Wwhen we are angry we are activated and we hold a lot of tension that needs to be released. Breathe slow and deep all the way down to your belly. That’s going to help you to slow down and to focus on how to manage the situation without being overwhelmed by your anger.
2. Find a way to ground yourself, you can go for a walk, a run, or find any other good way to move your body. You should interrupt any activity and just allow yourself to say: “OK, I’m just going out for a walk. Or I will make myself a cup of tea”. Give your mind and your emotions some space where you can slow down and focus on what’s going on inside of you.
3. Express your feelings, owning them, and taking responsibility for what you’re feeling in that moment. In a very natural and spontaneous way take responsibility for how the other person behavior make you feel. I’m not making you wrong because I feel something that I don’t like.
It’s not pointing the index and saying: “is your fault, you are the wrong/bad one, you make me angry…”. It’s very important to have a conscious wording where you can express how do you feel, how the situation make you feel… and owning your feelings. You’re responsible for your emotional response
4. Create a safe space where you can discharge.
5. Meditate.
Allow yourself to close your eyes 5 minutes every day and just sit there and observe.
Train your mind to observe whatever is happening inside of you. And train yourself to create meditative state. A peaceful state that you create day by day, at least 5 minutes where you sit down, and no matter what’s happening, you just close your eyes, you breath and allow yourself to slow down, you listen to your body and emotions. You open a new door, a new way of conversation with yourself, that with the time being you, we can assure you, you will mirror out in all your relationships.
6. Another way of managing your anger is to use humor, not sarcasm, which is always pungent. Sarcasm is pointing the finger towards someone, and trying to put him down. Humor is totally different; it brings light in lightness. Humor opens the heart and allows ourselves to not take life too seriously.
Humor is a very important ingredient that you can put in all the six steps and will help you in calming down your anger.
Feel Free accepting and enjoying the energy of your Anger!
See you soon and feel free 🙂
Tyler and Paola
