The Wisdom Hidden in Your Anger

I don't know many people who enjoy being angry. And yet it's a perfectly human emotion that most of us feel at some point or other. And given what's going on in the world at the moment, probably a lot of the people who are listening to this feel it quite often.

And it can be tricky when we have these big emotions that we don't really know what to do with. Anger is a part of the human state. It is a part of the human existence. It just happens to be one of those parts that we are quite often taught we shouldn't have, that we should try and get rid of as soon as possible, or we should pretty up, tie up in a nice little ribbon.

And that means if we're not able to do that, quite often when anger does arise, it's often met with shame. And when we feel shame towards something, what we do is we try and squish it down with as much force as possible, hoping that it's going to disappear. When emotions aren't like that, in fact, very little is like that.

The truth is that when we try and squish things down, they get bigger. They get bigger because we're not listening to them. Your body is giving you a signal about something that's going on. A thought that you're having a circumstance out in the world that you are processing. And if you're not listening, quite often that anger is there trying to give you a signal that it thinks is very, very important. And when we squash things down rather than allowing things to be processed, what happens is that it's going to come out in all kinds of other ways that we may not be ready for or willing to process or frankly, have the time for, to come out in areas such as, let's think, our relationships, our home life, our work life, all of those juicy, juicy places where anger is really, really not the most useful thing to come exploding out in the middle of a working day.

Anger is trying to give you a message. And if you are someone who has anger towards things, I wonder if there is some place and curiosity that you could hold for it where it doesn't feel like such an enemy, where you're not condemning yourself. Because when we try and shove anger away, what we're actually doing is missing the lesson. We're missing the lesson as to how to deal with our own emotions. And we're missing the lesson as to how we can treat ourselves when we are having a response to something that we don't feel particularly proud of or that we don't like very much. We miss the opportunity to experience our full human life and our full human existence as to who we are and how we want to process things.

When we ignore big, strong emotions that our body is trying to give us, we also alert our bodies, our nervous system, to the fact that we're in danger. Your body is trying to give you a signal and you're like, "no, not listening today". So it's like, of course it's going to try and make that louder. Your body is just trying to keep you alive. It's not really interested in you feeling nice. And thank goodness your body is not also that interested in socialisation. It is just here trying to keep you functioning. And part of that functioning at some points is going to involve anger.

So I just invite you to have a little think this week about where is the wisdom in any kind of anger that you might feel? Where has there been wisdom in the past in anger that you have felt that you've tried to push away, but actually that anger was trying to alert you to something very important that you really needed to know.

And also to ask yourself, what is the other side of anger? What could be here waiting for me if I'm willing to sit and process this emotion that is in my body, in my life and in my environment?

If you're not sure how to praise those emotions, what that even means? You see cute little sound bites on Instagram sometimes. I've got a brilliant course called "How to Feel Big Feelings Without Feeling Like Shit", which is available over www.selfcare school.co.uk and if you'd just like to drop me an email or reach out, I'm thrilled to look at some of the resources that we have that are available to try and help you work through some of the stuff that this might bring up for you.

If you are someone who experiences anger, that is, if you're human, the chances are that you are someone who is out there living a life, breathing, full of flesh and bones and blood. And that's all it means about you. You're out there humaning.

Congratulations. Congratulations on all of your humanness. I'll speak to you next week.

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