Anger is energy. It’s a feeling that’s part of our life. Anger can become your biggest enemy, painful your health and producing negativity. When anger is understood and transformed it can become your best ally toward recovery and finding personal peace.
What is Anger?
Anger is one of the most misunderstood and commonly repressed emotions. When you understand the real nature of anger, you can start to harness a lost power of your will. Will power is the trick to create permanent and positive changes in your life. Everything hinges upon how you relate to your emotions. Before we explore transforming anger it’s necessary to clarify “favorable” and “negative” emotions.
Emotions are a feedback system that provides advice in our everyday lives. They inform us of what we will need to do so as to feel secure and calm. In youth we learned to judge our emotions and put them into two categories, positive (good) or negative (poor ) emotions. We have a tendency to label any feelings which are constrictive like guilt, anxiety, and isolation as bad and negative. The expansive emotions such as love, joy, and happiness are thought of as positive (good). The challenge for you is to redefine your relationship with your emotions and change how you relate to them. Here is how to do that.
You’ll encounter an empowered relationship with your emotions when you redefine them. Negative feelings are any emotion (fear or love) which you ignore, deny, and repress. No matter their names, all emotion becomes negative once you refuse to feel and express them.
Eventually, all repressed emotion explodes into a rage, either inward or outward rage. It’s the repression of emotion which triggers its destructiveness, not the emotion itself. Likewise, love that’s repressed can be just as damaging as anger. Emotions are energy that should be felt and expressed respectfully.
Positive emotions are any emotion that you honor (own), feel, express and release, appropriately. When you respect your anger as much as your love, you’ll have improved your emotional intelligence and start to take dominion over your lifetime.
We’ve been brain-washed from youth to judge anger because a terrible emotion. Like all emotions, anger is supposed to be felt, expressed and published… appropriately. Repressed anger always has negative effect in our lives. Addictions, worry, self-doubt, and powerlessness growth when anger is repressed. When anger is discharged these negative experiences will decrease quickly. Also, within all anger there’s a hidden source of willpower. The energy required to end procrastination and take control of your life, are available as soon as you tap into and release your anger.
How to Create a Healthy Relationship with Anger
It’s important to recognize the value of your constricting and enlarging emotions. Anger’s purpose is to provide you with feedback. Anger is a messenger communication to you that change is required. As an example, if you’re feeling angry with a person then something about that relationship should change. You may be not being respected or understood. Pretending you aren’t angry only compounds the negativity.
Being honest with yourself is vital to harnessing the power of your emotional nature. When you let go of your judgment and frankly feel your constricting emotions you will quickly express and release them. Then, the energy trapped inside can become a constructive force in your life.
Four Steps to Transform Repressed Anger into Willpower
The 1st Step: Take responsibility for your anger (own it) and start to feel it. This permits you to connect with it and start transforming it into a positive experience. By realizing this simple fact you may start to lift anger from its harmful and repressed state.
The 2nd Step: Express your anger in writing. Take some paper and write on top of the page, “Me and My Anger”. Write the first thing that comes to your mind about anger. Write in a free association style. Don’t be concerned about grammar, sentence structure or spelling. Express your anger by writing down your thoughts and feelings.
For example you might begin to write: “This exercise is dumb. I don’t believe I’m doing this! Trying to write my anger is so frustrating… I feel trapped, like I’m back in fourth grade… blah, blah, blah.”
Let the thoughts and feelings roll from you! Don’t access or judge your own words. It might feel awkward at first, but soon it will begin to flow from you in a stream of consciousness. Before you know it, you’ll tap into the anger trapped within your subconscious mind and launch it.
After 20-45 minutes the constricting feelings will change and lift to a peaceful feeling inside of you. When that occurs ruin the paper, tear it up, burn it or flush it down the toilet. Next take a rest and go do something you like. Relax in a hot bath, go for a walk, enjoy your favourite movie, do something interesting. This can allow you to lift these atmosphere into a more expansive space. Give yourself at least two hours and up to 24 hours to relax before you proceed to the next step.
The 3rd Step: Express your anger imaginatively. This is a significant thing to free your mind. It involves using your creativity to unhook the negativity from the subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind doesn’t understand the difference between something you envision and something that actually happens.
For instance: Have you ever sat in a movie theater and watched scary pictures on the screen that caused you to twist up with fear and become anxious? Logically, you knew you were safe you’re surrounded by a hundred other men and women. However, your subconscious mind did not differentiate the images on the display from what was actually happening to you. This is the way the body-mind connection functions. Your subconscious mind does not understand the difference from what you imagine to what actually happens to you, physically. It reacts the same
Guided Imagery Technique to Release Repressed Anger
Close your eyes and imagine the person you’re mad at position before you. This individual may have expired long ago it may be a boss, a parent, someone who pissed you off. Let them know in your mind how angry and upset you are. If you will need to act it out, then act out it – imaginatively! If you were so mad you might have kicked and spit them, then on your creativity, spit and kick them! Play it out, now is your opportunity to vent the pent up energy out of your subconscious mind! Don’t hold back. The more vivid you envision this with honest feelings the more effective it’ll be.
Tip: If it is hard for you to express old anger out of your youth then let your inner child express their feelings. Let the mad part of you, your child, adolescent or adolescent express the feelings that they had never released.
You might be worried that in the event that you vent your anger in meditation, you are somehow sending negative energy into the individual. Remember, your intention is where energy flows. Your purpose is to transform anger into a positive energy. Once your subconscious mind has vented your anger, it is easy to forgive and let go. Let the mad part of you act out their feelings do not hold yourself back. Respect the mad part of you and it’ll set you free.
The 4th Step: Forgive whoever angered you. Forgive them and let them go. You can do it on your imagination, simply imagine them in your head and tell them, I forgive you. I’m letting you go. You don’t need to speak to them but you can efficiently forgive them in your head, where it actually matters. Forgiveness will come easily after the anger gets cleared from your mind.
If you have difficulty forgiving them, then go back and see if there’s more anger you have not let go of. Once you’ve forgiven yourself and them (for bringing this negative experience) determine what positive energy you want to experience more of in your lifetime. Do you need greater self-determination, discipline, and creativity? Visualize how you want to feel and be. Imagining yourself back in the stream, empowered and feeling great with a renewed ability to be focused, creative and productive
Internal power
When you release repressed anger you automatically strengthen your internal power. Your life gets rich and full with higher love, happiness and peace. You’ll feel more in control of yourself and your life. The more anger you are feeling and release the clear, joyful and living you’ll be. Your health can improve quickly and you’ll have an unstoppable will power to produce the changes in your life you have always desired.
