Anger Welcomed Here
ANGER WELCOMED HERE!
Anger welcomed here? What kind of a place would that be? What would it look like? How would it feel? Would you feel comfortable in such a place? I challenge you to consider these questions. When was the last time you were angry? How did you handle it? Did/do you feel comfortable being angry?
All emotions are necessary on the spectrum of being human, including anger. The fact that most of us don’t know how to feel, express, work through, or manage feeling angry is mostly what makes it so dangerous. You may have heard, “Don’t get mad.” “You mad?” Or teasing statements like, “You don’t have to get mad about it.” When that is exactly what the teaser was pushing your for.
When you have been discounted, neglected, abused, looked over, shamed, humiliated, and the like, anger is a fine emotion to feel, own, and work through. But how do you do so?
Tips for handing your anger include:
Intense physical activity that will wear you out. Things aerobically inclined like running, kick boxing, martial arts, tennis, soccer, basketball, football, rugby, lacrosse, volley ball, bicycling, dirt biking, and racing to name a few. Several of these you can do with little to no equipment and on your own.
Writing it out. Write every fucking terrible, awful, hateful, disgusting thing that comes to your mind. Pen down all the shit. The unfavorable. The gross. Then leave it, burn it, cross it out, hi lite it, underline and make it bold. Get it out all out of your mind and off of your heart so you can move forward. Thinking it is not alright to express your thoughts and feelings and then hiding them or bottling them up or stuffing them will allow them to grow, fester, build and do more damage.
Cry it out! Cry like there is no tomorrow and no more tears that you will ever have. Cry until your eyes ache, your noes burns, your chest aches and your heart is broken in half and bleeding through the soles of your feet. Cry until your eyes are so damn swollen you feel they may never open on their own again.
Seek shelter. Seek friendship, support, understanding, a listening ear, an animal to pet and lay with. Seek safety from the storm of your own anger and let the thunder clouds build and unleash their fierce wrath. Give in to it in in a safe place and let it go.
How do you get angry? Were you taught how to be Angry? Or were you just taught how to be kind, and sweet, and passive, and merciful? What do you wish you would have been taught about your own anger and how to manage it? Can you teach yourself those skills now? Do you need to hire a professional to guide you on this process?
What is true, is: anger will grow the more you resist it. The more you are encouraged to not talk about it or acknowledge it, it will grow like it is being fertilized with the neglect. “Maybe what the world needs now is not sweetness and light — but rather more righteous anger, more functional anger.” as author Wendy May says in the article published linked above on Huffington Post.
“Anger as soon as fed is dead-
‘Tis starving makes it fat. ”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
Feed your anger and set out the anger welcomed here welcome mat. Share with me some of your best practices for healthy anger now.
