Our polite society views anger as an unacceptable emotion. One CRPS patient kept reassuring me that he was not an angry person – until he started sharing stories about getting angry, without even realizing that he was, in fact, very angry! I could sense his anger as he described his experiences, but he was unaware of it and refused to acknowledge it. It is hard to blame him, as being angry is stigmatized.
Meanwhile, anger is a specific biological mechanism needed for our survival. Let’s be honest, anger happens! However, you don’t have to be an angry person (a person who acts angrily) to experience anger. Moreover, the more you push your anger inside, so that you do not act angrily as polite society expects you to do, the more your suppressed anger affects you negatively.
So, the million-dollar question is what to do about anger? Act it out and earn a reputation of an angry person, or continue pushing it inside? The answer is very simple – neither one of the two. There is a third way, a mindbody way.
Like any emotion, anger is a flush of hormones in your system, your body’s response to a situation in which you were treated in an unacceptable way. But that was in the past. The incident that caused your anger had already happened, and you cannot change your past. What you can change is your present and your future. You can develop strategies to avoid or prevent similar incidents in the future, but that would be a long-term strategy.
As for the present flush of hormones in your body, you should employ a mindbody approach. It works for me most of the time, and I am happy to share my experience.
In the past, I had a lot of bottled-up anger towards several people in my past life, and it was boiling inside me, day and night. Until I realized that forgiveness is not about me giving those people permission to hurt me, it is about me giving myself permission to let go. Especially after I realized that some of those people were already dead, but I was still chewing on my hurt feelings! That realization lifted an enormous weight off my chest, because allowing past injustices to trigger us all the time is counterproductive and detrimental to us in the first place.
This is how you let go. If anger rises in you again, never shove it under the rug of subconsciousness; instead, feel it dispersing through the physical sensations in the body. For me, anger oozes down my neck and upper back, and then fades away. Try to find your own sensations and observe how they disperse in your body. Being mindful of your anger and letting go of it takes practice, but it liberates you from the rage boiling inside.
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