Episode 258: Understanding Your Emotions for Emotional Resilience: Mastering Anger - Part 5
Episode 258: Understanding Your Emotions for Emotional Resilience: Mastering Anger - Part 5
Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast.
This is the last of the 5-Part Series on Creating Emotional Resilience.
This series was created from a class I took, you’ve heard about it in all the other episodes - in it we practiced different skills like healthy thinking patterns, managing stress, overcoming anger….all the good stuff. Take from it what resonates with you, that you may navigate your life with a bit more resilience. One step at a time. These are muscles we are trying to develop. Emotional resilience muscles.
Today’s episode is about one of our strongest emotions. Anger.
It’s a real emotion that we don’t want to deny, but that we need to learn to navigate and choose thoughts and actions that create more peace in us rather than feed the anger beast. Stay tuned.
As I am writing this episode we just completed the April 2023 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. As I sat and listened to the prophets and leaders I was surprised at how many talks were about not being contentious. Even the prophet himself focused his primary message on the topic of being peacemakers.
In 3 Nephi 11:29-30 the Savior taught the Nephites: “There shall be no disputations among you…for verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another behold this is NOT my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of men with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.”
Anger is something we all feel. It’s an emotion that rears it’s head when underneath we really feel resentful, disappointed, ashamed, hopeless, guilty, our expectations are unmet, we are embarrassed, frustrated, anxious, threatened, rejected, hurt, offended, heartbroken…there are a lot of underlying emotions and situations that trigger anger.
Emotional resilience means that we are able to more effectively understand our emotions and manage them. This is a life-time of work, but a very important part of our work. This is part of living with awareness and moving toward higher ways of being.
Let’s consider a couple ideas.
1. Anger comes from lots of various emotions, as I’ve just mentioned. Understanding that can help us get to the bottom of an angry situation so we can deescalate it and understand ourselves better. What I mean by this is that when you feel yourself getting angry, stop and consider what’s causing the anger. Are your feelings hurt? Are you disappointed? Are you embarrassed? Once we understand what has us so upset we can navigate the situation better - sometimes even just understanding that can help you better communicate with the person you are angry with. For instance, let’s say you’ve asked your husband to do something numerous times and he doesn’t get around to doing it. You can spiral in the “Why doesn’t he listen to me? Why can’t he help? Why can’t he see the wisdom in doing it this way?” etc. etc. or you can identify that perhaps you’re feeling disrespected, resentful, unappreciated, hurt. With this knowledge you can then open a conversation, “When I ask you to help rake the leaves up over and over and it doesn’t get done, I feel unheard, disrespected, hurt.” This approach shares a vulnerable insight into your feelings that focuses on you and doesn’t focus on making accusations toward him At the very least this opens space for communication. People talking things out and striving to understand another’s position on something is a tool to choosing peace and peacemaking over anger and contention.
2. Understanding that anger escalates and how to manage anger, or cool down can be a life-saving tool. Things that make anger escalate: making accusation often gets people’s blood a pumping; continuing to argue once you’re angry; yelling or screaming keeps things escalating; dwelling on the hurt and planning revenge will escalate a situation; and of course, any kind of violence will escalate a situation.
On the flip side of the coin, what are ways to de-escalate an angry situation - One of the most powerful is to give the other the benefit of the doubt. One of my friends created a story in her mind that I was stabbing her in the back. She created an entire false story and then destroyed the relationship because she didn’t bring her fears to me or give me the benefit of the doubt. I can’t help but be so sad that she didn’t give me that benefit of the doubt because it would have changed everything. She had completely misinterpreted all kinds of things.
Sometimes postponing a response until you have time to think through your thoughts and say the right thing/ say what you really mean. Sometimes just getting out and burning it out of your system with some exercise. I used to hop on my bike and ride3 15 miles when my kids were young and I needed a break.
Meditation, prayer, relaxation, calming music, humor - you can’t really laugh and be angry at the same time, so this can definitely cool your blood.
Find a way that works for you to navigate your emotions, and help your family members find a way that works for them. What a great healthy, resilient strength to know how to navigate tough emotions.
3. Anger is a choice. Let’s play with some examples. Lynn G. Robbins, in the May 1998 Ensign said, “Understanding the connection between agency and anger is the first step to eliminating it from our lives.” We will feel anger, that’s not bad, it’s just part of being here, but we can chose our response to that anger. We can feed it or we can chose something else - a management technique, a cooling down period, a different approach - like we just discussed.
Let’s do a few story problems?
- You are driving home from work and you’re tired and traffic is heavy. You’re late for an appointment and another driver almost causes an accident and then flips you off. Automatically you think “What? How dare he think that was my fault? What a total jerk.” Your underlying emotions at that point are fatigue, unjust accusation, stress. What are your options for managing this anger? You don’t want to keep the anger and take it home with you. You don’t want to give it any more space and time in your heart. Take a deep breath, maybe turn on calming music. Remind yourself - I can either make this better or I can make this worse. If I escalate things there could be an accident, I will end up taking home all the anger, things could turn violent. Will I stoke the fire or let it go? I’ve shared this story before, but it applies here: I walked up to the door of my Transendental Meditation seminar and the door was locked so another student and I were standing outside and started to talk. I’d had a rough week because one of my real estate client was having a tough life space and had been taking out her feelings on me with false accusation and bullying. I wanted to stay professional but I also needed to maintain boundaries in the way I let people treat me and it was causing me a bunch of stress. So I started sharing my frustrations with this other student. He was further along in the study of meditation than I was and he’d been around the world studying different styles. When I had completed my tale of whoa, he tossed his pen across the space between us and I instinctively reached out to grab it. He said, “You didn’t have to catch that you know.” “What do you mean?” I said. He responded, “People can throw anything they want at you and you don’t have to catch it. If you don’t catch it it falls to the ground. It’s like a fire. If you don’t add fuel to it it will eventually go out.” I’ve never forgotten that simple teaching moment.
- You told your son to do his chores before he left to hang out with his friends. He ignored you and just went and did his own thing. The feelings might be “Why doesn’t he listen to me? I’m so tired of asking him to do things and having him ignore me. etc.” As you consider your own feelings you may feel disrespected, disappointment, hurt that after all you do for him he can’t contribute just a little. What is a response that can cool the anger and thus you can deal with it in a more productive way when he gets home? Creating an intentional plan such as sharing with him why it’s important to you that he do his chores - to help the house look nice and create a clean environment, because he’s an important part of the whole and he needs to contribute. You can also create consequences when you have a cool head rather than when you’re mad. “If you choose to go play with friends again before you clean your room, then you will be choosing to skip a day of playing with friends, or you will lose a certain privilege, or you will lose $5 of allowance if I have to clean it for you. Once you’ve been clear with the consequences, he can make his choice and the consequence happens without anger. An important lesson in choice/agency and consequence.
We can choose to respond to anger. In the Emotional Resilence workbook Elder Robbins tells a story about an athletically talented young man who lost his temper when he made a bad move on the basketball court and missed an easy shot. He became angry, stomped and whined. The coach told him that if he did that again he wouldn’t be allowed to play. The young man made sure to control his temper throughout the rest of his high school basketball career. He learned that anger and acting out IS a choice and it can be controlled when we want to.
In an earlier episode of the LYS podcast, episode 158 -A Healthy Relationship to Fear: Interview Kristen Ulmer, a thought leader on fear and anxiety who draws from her tenure as the most fearless woman extreme skier in the world for 12 years, from intently studying Zen for 16 years, and from facilitating tens of thousands of clients on flow and peak performance,
She talks about her perspective on handling difficult emotions. While she is specifically addressing fear, the topic is really any difficult emotion. Here’s what she shared.
Tune into the show to hear this clip.
It was interesting to me that Katherine Reynolds, our therapist who spoke to us in these episodes and Kristen mentioned the same thing, about trying less to control with force our difficult emotions, and instead being aware and learning to navigate them. There must be some truth here.
This is the final episode in the 5-part series. Hopefully you’ve found some big take-aways, but all you really need is one. Share these episodes - with the people you love and let’s all work and support one another in improving our emotional resilience. I don’t think life is getting easier, we will just get stronger as we work the emotional resilience muscles.
Keep up the great work.
Listen On
