“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
Dalai Lama
“Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.”
Emma Goldman
“Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.”
Jack Kornfield
In my practice, I have learned a few things about anger that I’ve found helpful for me and my clients.
1.Empathize, don’t personalize. Other people’s behavior is always about them. It isn’t about us. We make it about us because we experience it in our person and it feels personal. But their behavior comes from their minds and is a result of their choices based on their values. It affects us, of course, what other people do, but we get to choose what it means in the end. Skaters skate and make noise when they skate and sometimes that noise happens where I can hear it. It may annoy me but it is not about me and I can empathize with the young men who seem to be enjoying their curious craft. Same with the driver of the truck that crushed me. He did not intend to nearly kill me. I don’t believe that was his plan. Regardless, his life journey intersected mine for only a few seconds and everything that has happened in my life since that moment has nothing to do with him. I refuse to give him anymore of my life, time or mental energy besides telling this story here.
2.Pay attention to trigger thoughts. Or in other words, we need to mind our minds. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy differentiates clean discomfort from dirty discomfort. Clean discomfort is life. It is what happens. And because we are on the Earth, some of what happens, happens to us. It is clean in the sense that it just is what it is. It is reality. We might also call it natural pain. Our clean discomfort can become dirty with our thoughts. For example, in Matthew McKay’s Anger Control Workbook, he points out that trigger thoughts arise from a perception that I’ve been harmed, the belief that the person who harmed me did it on purpose; that he was wrong and bad and should have behaved differently. Forget true or false, these kinds of thoughts do not help. Letting go of useless hate and revenge helped me to not care about the guy who nearly killed me and freed me to get my life back. The Buddha talked about the first and second darts. The first dart is what we experience in life. The second dart is the self-inflicted wound we get when we are unwilling to have the first dart.
3.Seek understanding, not blame. Most of our problems come from the judgmental, evaluative, comparative mind. If I blame someone for my pain, I am abandoning my personal responsibility to take control of my healing. There are reasons things happen. People do what they do as a result of their own intentions. The more we understand, the more we learn; the more we learn, the more we grow. In When Anger Hurts, another book by Matthew McKay, he said it is more important and effective to focus on what we can do about our pain than assign blame to someone for it. Blame does not work. It never works.
4.Refuse victimhood. When I view myself as a victim, I am giving my power away. In Forgive for Good, Fred Luskin suggests that when we see ourselves as a victim and hold someone else responsible, “we grant them the power to regulate our emotions.” At each moment we can choose whether we are weak or powerful. We all ultimately decide what our experiences mean. When we choose to be angry and see ourselves as a victim, our message is that we are not in control of ourselves. Someone else is. When someone is out of control in expressing their anger, they are telling everyone around them, “I am choosing to be weak and powerless right now and holding someone else accountable for my pain.”
5.Be selfish and forgive self and others. People who cannot forgive make themselves sick. Literally. Luskin tells us that the more we forgive, the healthier we are and the less stress we have. Our risk of developing heart and cardiovascular disease and cancer is lower as we forgive others and refuse to blame them. Not forgiving raises blood pressure, increases muscle tension and lowers our immune response.
6.Retain your peace and power. An old Cherokee parable tells us that we have two wolves fighting in our heart. One is a wolf of peace, love and forgiveness and the other is a wolf of anger, hate and blame. We decide which one wins as we decide which one we feed. In Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson tells us “The wolf of love sees a vast horizon, with all beings included in the circle of ‘us.’” When we feed the wolf of anger and hate, our circle gets smaller and we get smaller. When we push people out of our circle, we become locked into an “us and them” mentality. Hanson cites neuroscience research in pointing out that the human brain tripled in size over the last three million years of evolution as we fed the wolf of love and became more altruistic, fair, empathic, cooperative, generous and forgiving.
7.Find what works. I think we all know that being angry does not make us happy. It does not work. We don’t like it when others are angry with us and others don’t like it when we are angry. There are more effective methods for resolving conflict. In Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, he describes a proven four-step method that allows us to avoid anger in our interactions with others and instead give and receive compassionately from the heart. The first step is to articulate an observation without judgment, bias or blame. We merely describe what we see happening around us; what people are doing or saying that is relevant to the concerns before us; the concrete actions we observe that affect our well-being. Next we describe the feelings that are present within us in response to what is happening. The third step allows us to describe the needs and values that create the feelings we’re experiencing about what we’ve observed and in the final step, we make a request. What do we want? What concrete actions are we requesting from our loved ones, friends or associates that we believe will benefit us and enrich our lives?
8.Disarm those we love. In David Burns’ Feeling Good Handbook, he provides one of the best methods for calming down an angry person. Agree with them. Find some truth in what they are saying, regardless of how crazy, outrageous and ridiculous it might sound to us. Our tendency in arguments is to play ping-pong with a hand grenade. We react to statements from our “opponent” with counter-arguments and then they do the same and so on, getting us nowhere. What do we most want to receive in these exchanges? Obviously, we want our partner, loved one or associate to listen to us, open their minds and hearts to us, respect, affirm and validate us. This is what we want but we’ll be damned if we’ll give it to them first. So instead, we play the blame and defend game, neither person getting their needs met and both feeling more angry and frustrated. Burns points out when we agree with our critic, we prove them wrong and when we disagree, we prove them right. When someone criticizes, blames or attacks us and we respond with non-defensive empathy and understanding, we show ourselves to be the opposite of what they are claiming about us. However, when we disagree, defend, deny, justify and attack them back, it only confirms in their minds that they are correct. Our truth is our enemy and blame is a weapon that hurts the one who uses it.
9.Connect to your values. I’ve already gone too long here so I will keep these last two short. When we connect to our values and act on them, we are choosing our relationships with others over our need to be right or to win. What is most important? Is there anything more important than our connections with our fellow human beings? Is there anything more important to our relationships than to be seen as a force of love and forgiveness? When our first move is to win an argument or to hurt someone or to lash out in anger, what does that say about us and our values? When we connect with and act out of our deepest values, our lives go better.
10.Finally, let yourself be healed. We are not alone; we are not separate fragments of human life. We are much more. It is true that most of us wander through this life unaware of our purpose and our essential unity with all things in the universe. We fall for the illusion of separateness. We do not see the infinite, perfect puzzle that connects all of us – each of us a divine, sacred and special piece of the larger self – to one another. When we identify with the wholeness, the deep, common soul we all share, our differences sink into the background where they rightfully belong. When we meditate on what we most want to receive and then give that generously to others, we begin to heal. Everyone benefits. We wake up to our next right move. Our anger is seen as a liability. It threatens us and those we love. If we do not understand it; if we fail to “tame the beast with love,” it will attack us and potentially everyone we know. There’s a better way. That which we seek, we already possess. Feel it inside and let yourself be healed. Why not now?
