Are you overextending your claws lately?
Maybe it’s the fire of anger you need to enlighten your life.
The thing with anger is: that if it’s uncontrolled, it spoils relationships, and restrained anger also makes people sick. BUT if you look at it without judging it, it turns into creative energy. How? Continue reading.
The chronicle of anger is more or less this: If you manifest it all the time, you are annoying and not fun to be around. If you hold it back for a long time and eventually explode, you risk doing severe damage. If you conceal and hide it, you become passive/aggressive, complaining about every smallness, weighing it on others like a boulder. If you hold it in, you risk becoming ill, i.e. turning it into a psychosomatic disease, often affecting your stomach or skin (colitis, gastritis, reflux…). If you finally remove it, you get panic attacks.
Long story short: Anger is a feeling that, if not treated in the right way, always ends up causing problems both for ourselves and those around us.
Still knowing all this, we are not able to manage it sometimes. Poorly managed and badly expressed anger is one of the main problems of our time.
The first thing we are taught is to hide anger.
The problem lies first of all in the fact that many people have not learnt from an early age how to deal with the usual anger that arises when faced with the inevitable conflict with the world.
Anger carries an important message: listen to it! Anger is not a bad thing in itself; on the contrary, it is the final expression of various states of mind: prolonged impatience, hidden discontent, over-restrained pleasure, the feeling of not being loved or heard or considered, a strong sense of injustice, unexpressed resentment, wounded narcissism, suspicious brooding, denied affirmation and much more all end up in anger.
Anger collects all this and wants to shout at the world in this sentence:
Finally, I can’t take it anymore!
If you look closely, it is always a ‘no’ to a specific situation: a ‘no’ that was not expressed at the right time and in the right way, for a thousand more or less valid reasons, and that has now swelled up to become dark, evil and powerful.
Beware of automatic mechanisms. The astonishment is because, if we think carefully about anger, we discover that it often comes from the past, even the very distant past. Those who are always angry or get angry quickly could not or did not manage to defend themselves from situations that made them feel alone, prevented, or inferior. The event that triggers your anger today is a kind of echo of that hurt, and this must be recognised as soon as possible.
This should be acknowledged as soon as possible to identify the patterns and areas that make you ‘go off the deep end and to be able to learn more direct ways of expressing opposition. Please look to anger, recognise your needs, and consider and respect your opinions.
Channel anger in sports, dance and fun.
Anger well channelled into a play or sport, even with the element of healthy competition, can become a motivation to improve, and dancing can also have a therapeutic healing effect.
Try giving it artistic form. Ever since cave inhabitants, the strongest emotions, including anger, have found the possibility of overcoming their destructive component and calming down through creative expression. Try it.
And please, don’t use your anger to provoke. Be clear and specific in your statements and requests, don’t discharge your anger by pressing those around you with constant provocation and criticism.
📸 Pascale Weber for Nala Chocolates