Navigating anger ....

Anger is mostly seen as a negative emotion but it’s something we all feel at times. Most of us growing up never really learnt to process anger properly, so many people have a complex relationship with it.

It’s seen as a negative thing to be angry and we have all kinds of strategies with how to deal with it.

We either have no control of it or totally avoid it by stuffing it down and bypass it or by being numb to it.

It’s an emotion that will readily come up in all our relationships and if something goes wrong in our lives. Yet we struggle to navigate it and we just don’t really know how to process it in a healthy way.

And let’s face it too we live in a world where we are readily faced with injustice and some very dark truths that we should feel angry about, so learning to process it well is actually a positive thing.

Now, I’m no expert and like most people I find I have a complex relationship to anger myself, as I have had all those messages growing up about not being an angry person as it's not seen as very ladylike. Therefore, if I have expressed it I’ve seen it as a bad thing and no one wants to be labelled the crazy person. So in truth I tend to be someone that will turn the anger on myself and blame myself as I don’t want to be seen as an angry person. So it’s generally something I try to avoid and when I feel it as an emotion I find it very uncomfortable and struggle with it.

The truth is anger is just an emotion on a scale of them, but it tends to be one that’s very confrontational and feels aggressive in a way, which is why it’s often one that we struggle with.

However, it comes down to perception. The more I’ve learnt and worked with the emotion of anger on myself I’ve realised that if I can learn to feel it and not be afraid of it then I can process it in healthy way and move through it. We need to shake the anger out and know that it’s safe to do so in a healthy way.

So many of us have lots of stuck anger inside of us and I had come to realise that because I was didn’t want to be seen as an angry person I’d become afraid of anger, which meant it had become an unhealthy relationship so to speak.

I began the process of changing my relationship to anger and ironically what helped was when I found myself in a situation that wasn’t great and after it was over rather than feel any anger I just blamed myself. Ironically, I had no problem feeling any other emotion but I felt guilty for feeling angry.

It wasn’t until a friend and I were talking one day and she flagged this up to me. She told me, "You need to feel some anger about this and process it so it doesn’t get stuck in you. You can move through it or you’ll bypass it off as something else and you need to stop feeling so guilty about feeling any anger."

Let’s face it, the truth is, it's human to feel this emotion in situations.

It took me a while after the conversation and I had to sit with it, but I knew she was right.

I decided to go into what I was feeling, and trust me it took a while as that guilt was sticking with me, but the liberation I felt for feeling it and allowing myself too was good. A few weeks later I was sat chatting with a friend about what had been going on with me and what had come up and I allowed myself to truly express what I felt and hoped she wouldn’t judge me. She responded with thank goodness its a relief to finally see you expressing this I would feel angry if I was you too.

The revelation from that moment was a real turning point for me. I actually found that once I’d begun the journey of feeling it in relevance to the situation I was able to let go, move through it, free myself and able to heal on a deeper level.

Now don’t get me wrong I still have a level of complexity to this emotion but it’s much better and I even honour it as I move through my monthly cycle that I have an angry feeling day. I’m continuing to deepen my relationship with this emotion and I’m learning to use it a positive way for healing and to not let it get stuck in me until I explode.

I think it's something we all can do. I would suggest finding safe people in your life where you are able to discuss and process this with but to also make it your own sacred experience that when you are alone you allow yourself to really feel it.

I appreciate that this is a huge topic and almost triggering. There’s so much more to it, but I hope that my personal share will help someone who’s reading this and it may resonate.

Right now, we are times where many emotions are heightened and anger definitely being one of them. So, it’s an important topic to discuss and rather than it being seen as a negative one and we can ways to deal with it in a more positive way.

A good tool for processing emotions is meditation and one I use all the time.

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I Hope this is helpful read and I would love to continue this conversation.

All my love

Hannah X