anger… what it really means

Anger.

It’s a very misunderstood and an emotion that people are often scared to talk about. It’s one of the many range of emotions we get to experience and feel as human beings on this Earth. And a very very, if not one of the most important ones.

Through my own experience of it and also witnessing friends, clients and romantic partners experiences of this emotion, I would like to expand and share a bit more about it today and my personal opinion plus what I’ve learnt.

And perhaps shed some light on whey it is not to be feared or afraid of but rather embraced and used as a catalyst, tool and agent in healing.

If we’ve grown up in violent or abusive households, it’s normal to feel that anger is something to be feared.

Maybe we were involved directly in the violence or abuse or a bystander watching it happen. Either way, it’s not very pleasant and we learn from then to have a rather volatile relationship with it unless we learnt to accept and understand it.

Anything, which is looked at curiously, understood and fully seen, heard and expressed without remorse or judgement I believe will ultimately be healed over time.

Like with trauma, sometimes if we don’t feel or move through it fully and get to it’s “roots’ that it has a hold of us, then we will stay in a constantly perpetuating a vicious cycle or in a loop of experiencing the same pattern or behaviour.

Anger is no different.

I get it though; I’ve experienced anger A LOT in my life.

As a kid I was fiery, things would be very quick to upset me. I would go from 0 to 100 in a second and the fire would rage in me for what felt like days and lifetimes.

I usually would try and suppress it and push it away but this just made it worse.

As the saying goes, anything that we suppress tends to resurface in other ways and what we resist persists.

In society as a whole, I see anger come out in dark and suppressed ways, as we don’t have a healthy relationship to and with it.

Of course in my household, I saw anger frequently.

My Dad has a very unhealthy relationship with it and of course, I modelled off him at a very young age.

I thought it was ok to have tantrums, fly off the handle when things weren’t going my way, etc. The list goes on.

It wasn’t until I started doing deeper healing and realising at the age of 28, that my relationship with anger started to change.

Of course I have a few teachers and healers help me with this and slowly when working with it I started to become less reactive, agitated and I could instead harness or feel the anger to then have it dissipate quickly.

I’m writing and actually inspired today to write about anger, because it’s been very present in my reality and body today.

Anger as I understand it and one of my wise teachers once told me, is when things happen beyond your control.

You feel “out of control” so to speak and you want others to behave or act in a certain way.

I know this is true for me in the moment for sure.

So when we lessen control around a situation or person, we can start to have the realisation and acknowledgment and the anger lessens and eventually goes (or maybe there are more layers).

Anger also we feel is towards another person generally, but it is never about them.

The sooner we realise this world is a reflection of ourselves and take responsibility to heal and show up in a different way, the better.

Take it back a bit… so why are you exactly angry at the person?

Let’s say for example, you are angry someone lied to you about something.

And be really truthfully honest… there is generally somewhere in your life you’ve been lying to yourself…

Is it about your job or relationship or house that you’re happy and you’re really not?

Did you know better and chose to take a different course of action anyway?

Generally the anger is at ourselves, that we didn’t speak up, we didn’t protect ourselves or we did something that we knew wouldn’t work out in the best way for us.

Lastly, anger is also how we protect ourselves in some measure…

When we are angry, it could be because we are sick of giving to others, have over given or let ourselves be taken advantage of.

Now this is a bit tricky and I will mention in regards to abuse. I am not saying this about that as sometimes things happen outside our control that anger is valid and a useful tool for expressing, in this case.

So when we have overstepped our own boundaries or had them overstepped or taken advantage of by another, anger is a useful way to letting us know that.

Anger is giving us this expression that perhaps something is not balanced or “feeling right” within our world (not that there is a wrong or right).

But it is a useful emotion and tool in guiding us to look beyond the surface and let anger tell or show us what it is really trying to tell us and share.

Also usually beneath anger, there is always sadness. I have found this to be true.

There is sadness that something seemingly ‘bad’ happened to us, that things didn’t go our way, that we didn’t get what we wanted or that things are out of our control.

This almost always dates back to our childhood and the wounds that we had imprinted growing up, not only on this lifetime but other lifetimes.

So anger, as painful and as hard and challenging as it may be to sit with and feel in the body sometimes, is a necessary tool for alchemy and transformation.

If we look at it, anger is related to the element of fire.

Fire is necessary for burning the old residue for the new growth and fauna to be birthed and it is no different for us as humans.

Sometimes we need anger to let it burn down everything to the ground to then create a fresh pathway or state for what is to come and what remains to flourish and grow.

If we can instead befriend anger instead of run and be scared of it (which only perpetuates it anyway).

Next time it does come up for you and is present in your body and field, I would encourage you to be curious rather than banish it to the depths and never want to see or look at it again (I know this well because I used to do this).

I would encourage you to see what it’s trying to share with you, sit with it, and see if you can be with it instead of run.

It is there for a reason, it always is….

I hope just from these few pages and sharings, that maybe you can change your relationship with anger or start to…

And maybe we can even tap into what is underneath that anger and start a whole new relationship.

You deserve to know yourself better and anger may just give you that chance x