Accepting Anger As It Is
The idea of accepting our anger, especially for men, might be foreign, counterintuitive or just not helpful when it comes to doing something about it. In our culture, we tend to glamorize anger in movies, and then suppress it when we need to use it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with anger, except in how we use it. Anger is just a feeling and an experience, but the problem is when we react unconsciously on it.
Accepting Anger
Accepting anger as it is meaning having the strength and self-awareness to create space between ourselves and our anger. Creating that space, which is mindfulness, we can then become more aware of our experience of anger and not allow it to run us out of control.
Accepting it may feel counterintuitive, because as humans, we’re inclined to run from pain and painful experiences. Anger is painful, so we want to rid ourselves of it when it comes upon us.
In fact, through acceptance, it quickly starts to dissipate and fall away, although we have to be really present for it to do this. We have to stop running from it, and stand still to connect with anger. By this, I mean that we often experience our feelings from within through body sensations. Sometimes, we carry anger in our stomachs, hearts or other places in the physical body that need our attention.
Where Anger Is Located in the Body
By staying focused with our attention in our physical anger, it starts to fade and diminish, and often exposes deeper, more vulnerable feelings underneath our anger, such as hurt, loss, fear or sadness. It’s like peeling an onion with new layers being exposed as you unfold a top layer.
Getting in touch with these more vulnerable emotions, our anger cools, and we can better approach difficult conversations with those in our life, without putting them off with our angry responses. People usually will react negatively to outbursts of anger, but if we can learn to speak from the cooler, softer emotions in our vulnerability, those conversation will quickly transform for the positive. This is especially true in intimate relationships, which may trigger your anger or resentment more quickly than others in your life.
Being Afraid of Anger
For many men, the difficulty in accepting our anger is complicated because we’re afraid of it. I speak with a lot of men that are afraid of their anger, because they’ve seen what it does to people close to them when it becomes out of control. Maybe they’ve also seen anger be expressed violently, or used against them, as boys growing up with an angry father.
Understanding this idea, and seeing if you are afraid of your anger, we can then begin to address the fear before we get to dealing with the anger. If we’re afraid of something, there’s a good chance that we’re pushing our anger to the side, not dealing with it, or repressing it, only to make it fester and grow in the shadows. Dealing with fear also means accepting it as it is, not unlike acceptance of the underlying anger. It’s paying direct and nonjudgmental awareness to it, without managing it, doing anything about it, or pushing it away.
Accepting anger as it is takes time, and practice. We can’t learn to deal with our negative emotions if we’ve never been taught how to do this. Counseling or psychotherapy can help in a bug way, because it can teach you how to create a space and develop tolerance for distressing emotions like anger. It may be difficult to learn, but it’s a skill that can positively change your life for the better.
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