The Problem of Unhelpful Anger and What We Can Do About It
Like all emotions, anger is a useful tool for helping us determine what we prefer and what we should avoid. We could think of righteous anger as an energy that is meant to move through our body, a helpful messenger that signals our soul’s awareness to sit up and take notice and change or shift something.
Anger tells us that a person, group, condition, relationship, dynamic or event is out of alignment with our safety, our heart’s desires, our sense of justice or our moral compass.
Anger tells us there is some threat to wellbeing.
But what happens when we have moved from a state of temporary—you could say useful or purposeful anger that directs us to make a better choice for ourselves—to something more long-lasting? Like those periods of our life when we wake up with some amount of simmering (or boiling) anger within us, or when we can’t remember the last time we were happy or at peace?
And what do we do when we are angry about things that happened in the past or things happening now that we have no control over?
What are we supposed to do when anger as an emotion becomes an angry mood, morphs into an angry temperament, to when we (or others around us) become an angry personality?
Anger can become a habit or a habituated response, and that’s when anger is no longer useful. That’s when we are in danger of losing our sense of self-determination to the energy of anger.
Years ago, I had a dramatic experience with anger that changed my life.
The Biological Cost of Habitual or Temperamental Anger
When I was in my mid-thirties, long before I knew anything about energy healing, heart-brain coherence or emotional self-regulation—in fact years before I even knew ANYTHING about tuning into the information my body was offering me—I had a very dramatic understanding of what unresolved anger does to my body.
I’d gotten into an argument with my husband.
Standing there in my kitchen, I was hollering out my frustrations about familiar fight-inducing topics, when suddenly I felt a fiery explosion burning its way upward through my belly and solar plexus. As it moved through my chest, I felt a tightening and a pressure that was so intense it made me light-headed.
The light-headed feeling caused my sense of sight to narrow into tunnels that flickered alternating light and dark. My sense of hearing faded in and out, and it felt like I was listening through a tin can.
I felt a lifting sense as I began to dissociate from my body. I was truly en-raged…Diana was losing her identity to the energy of rage.
Suddenly, I felt my tongue swell to what felt like twice its normal size over the course of just a few seconds. It was only then, when I felt like I was about to choke on my own tongue, that I realized my present and unresolved rage was at life-threatening levels.
Then, thankfully, I had a life-changing thought, “If I don’t do something about my anger, it will kill me.”
That thought—that awareness—changed the whole course of my life. The quest to resolve my anger led me to the writings and work of Louise Hay, the practice of transformational wellness, a life beyond habituated anger, to healing.
Habitual Anger Depletes Us
It’s not life-giving to us to be angry all the time, day-after-day—or to be triggered habitually by the same stimuli that causes the anger response within us.
The problem with anger is that it can make us utterly incoherent. In that state we can’t think well, can’t focus, are apt to make poor decisions and are unlikely to perceive creative possibilities.
Habitual anger can cause a biological, biochemical phenomenon or pattern in the body that IS the stress response we call fight or flight. Fight or flight is meant to expend unhelpful energy to save our life, but if we stay in that state for too long, our system will feel depletion, exhaustion, depression, anxiety and more.
We aren’t angry for no reason. Anger is trying to teach or direct us to something better.
The trouble is that the triggers that stimulate our anger might come from outside us…those frustrating and unjust things that we have no control over. Or they may be triggers within us—unresolved or unaccepted realities of our life that we just don’t want to—or more often, I think, don’t know how to—face, deal with or heal.
The art of resolving anger is to identify the stimuli that are causing the stress response and to decode the deeper underlying reason for our anger. Then, it’s incredibly useful to have a mental plan in place for how we will change our relationship with those stimuli so we can cause a new, more desirable response in our body the next time we interact with those stimuli.
You probably know what makes you angry, but we are all invited to ask ourselves…
Truly, Why Am I Angry?
Getting down to the REAL root of our anger is important for us. It’s critical to decode the information contained in anger by identifying the emotional feelings and the bodily sensations related to anger. (To do this for yourself, consult an online image of a feelings list or emotions wheel.)
When we drill down into the emotional cocktail that is anger, so many of us identify that we experience anger when we feel hurt, threatened, powerless, vulnerable, or overwhelmed.
Anger moves through us when we observe injustices, feel a loss of control, a narrowing of possibilities for our future, a missed opportunity, or when we just know there’s a better way.
In this way, anger can actually fear, disgust, pain, hunger, guilt, shame, disappointment, grief, resentment, moral indignation, frustration or other more specific emotions or needs.
In the body, anger can manifest as gut unrest, a sick stomach, a lump or fiery feeling in the throat, or a headache.
The Role of Radical Acceptance
I really don’t like how challenging it is and how much awareness it takes to practice radical acceptance, but I have learned that it is a critical part of resolving anger. Without some amount of radically accepting that the past, others, and so much more is truly out of our control, we may have no peace.
Our peace, renewal and well-being, therefore, is dependent on breaking the vicious cycle of habitual anger by telling anger the truth. Radical acceptance is a tool that can disrupt unhelpful patterns and cycles and move us beyond our anger to an emotionally empowered, more creative, more life-giving state-of-being. Coupled with heart-brain coherence practice, it can support our seeing possibilities where we couldn’t before.
For me, the internal dialog that creates this shift usually sounds something like:
- I see you there anger, yes, I am disappointed and now I am going to use that disappointment to…
- I see you there anger, yes, you are really grief and now I’m going to sit here and watch that grief pass through, knowing I can’t change the past. That happened to me and now I know better what/who I DO want in my life.
- I see you there anger, and yes, I am so mad and sad and disgusted that things are happening that way, but I am using my time/body/money/talents/gifts in this life to make things better when I…
- I see you there anger, and I am remembering that I have a choice right now to not turn myself over to the rage, but to take a moment to breathe into my heart and remind myself of what is truly important to me and act from that more loving and self-loving place.
Renewal: The Life Changing Practice of Heart-Brain Coherence
We restore states of energetic balance in our body when we:
- Feel into the space of our chest
- Imagine we are breathing into this space
- Slow our breathing to a cadence that is comfortable for us
- Experience emotionally (rehearse or practice) a feeling of care, love or gratitude.
This practice of heart-brain coherence conditions our body neurologically and biochemically to balance, harmony and optimal functioning. This is much better for us than conditioning our body to depleting emotions like anger.
The nervous system of our heart (the heart brain) will memorize this new, peaceful baseline, and it will be easier for us to return to optimal functioning and peace if we do get agitated. Coherence helps us recognize and change unhelpful habits and patterns without blaming others or shaming ourselves.
An important and life-changing phenomenon happens for us when we spend time conditioning our body to coherence rather than incoherence.
Our heart brain, in concert with the neurological hardware that communicates energy and information from our heart and body to our brain, is regulating how clearly we think, how focused we are, the quality of our decisions and our capacity to attune to our intuition.
Moreover, when we are in a state of heart-brain coherence, we are able to see possibility where, in a state of anger or incoherence, we were unable to perceive potentials.
Come explore more how to heal anger with sound healer Jacqueline Campbell and me at this upcoming healing event. Register via email Diana@DianaMariaChapin.com
