Anger Management
3 Steps to Effectively Handle Anger
The other day a friend of mine asked me how I managed anger. I thought it was kind of funny, because underneath my apparent sea of serenity I have quite a lot of anger waiting to burst. A lot of moments in my life I felt like Ember in Elemental, doing my best not to explode, but ending up erupting like a volcano.
It was also funny — or at least contradictory — that the more I embraced my zen-like-life-style, the more my surroundings seemed to provoke these outbursts in me.
As soon as you start going into some sort of a mindfulness path, you soon realize that a lot of pent-up emotions start coming into the surface. And the main emotion we have repressed and suppressed is anger.
We can accept sadness, grief, shame, frustration, irritation. We may even accept envy, and jealousy. But we have a really hard time accepting and dealing with our anger. It is so ingrained that anger is wrong, that we are not able to face it and handle it cleanly. We toss it aside like it doesn’t exist until it bursts in the most unpredictable moments when our body can no longer take it.
No wonder there is no other emotion that needs more of an escape goat than anger. We can not be angry unless we have a good reason to feel that way. We always need to find something or someone to…
