For Anyone Whose Anger Controls Their Life

They said it again. A ripple of rage runs up your chest like a misplaced hamster. Then it spreads to your neck and arms. Your eyes dilate. You could crush a skull. Or maybe you’re angry at yourself again. You keep doing it, and you said you wouldn’t, and now you feel stupid. You could happily throw the table across the room.

Here’s the thing about anger: Regardless of where you think you might have picked up your rage, your anger is a response to a thought.

You don’t need to dive into your past and make friends with your inner child to move past anger. Anger is simply an angry thought that arises at the moment and is acted on right now. So when you experience anger frequently, you’re seeing a pattern of thinking. Something that returns over and over and over. Anger is, in this way, a habit; it has nothing to do with you as a person.

You are not an angry person. You have angry thoughts to which you’ve gotten into the habit of responding. You never take a breath. You don’t create a sacred gap between the irritating vision in your mind’s eye and your compulsion to slam fists and yell.

When we see that the emotion of anger is the flipside of an angry thought, we’re a step closer to something magical, A particular kind of control is within reach again.

We’re the ones directing the show. Not your irritating housemate. Not the dog who won’t stop barking. Not the impending bill. We can choose to breathe and let go if the anger doesn’t serve. Or we can use it. We can transmogrify into the battle-hardened outline of a warrior with a blood lust.

Using anger in the form of positive aggression isn’t something many psychologists or gurus often talk about — but this is how we can turn excited energy that sits at the base of anger into a positive.

Many people have an angry thought and are sucked into the thought out of a bad habit. They are seemingly controlled by their situation or their horrifying pasts, but they are governed by their inability to let go of angry thoughts. They are a loose canon. They act out in violence without pause, like a child. This is what it means to be controlled by anger.

But you’re different. While much of the world fears anger and cowers from it like pathetic, limp unwatered sunflowers, you have found a way to make anger work for you.

First of all, you must develop the gap — the space between angry thoughts and the need to act on said angry thought. You must breathe. When you nurture a large enough gap over time, you will rarely fall into the trap of being carried away in a rage that will put those around you in danger. It takes awareness and continually redirecting your attention away from your mind and towards consciousness. Once you’re better at this, you can start dipping into those energy resources more practically and empoweringly.

The wise carefully summon their aggression like a sharp blade. They make a plan, and they get excited about their futures again. Maybe they create a mission for themselves: to change, to use what previously made them angry as a springboard. They transmute potential rage energy into exciting projects, fitness, and elite mastery as needed, not because they have no choice.

For Anyone Whose Anger Controls Their Life

Find a way to make your anger work for you.

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