S2 EP190 – Healing Anger - Inner Bonding Hub

Episode Summary

Your anger can teach you many things if you choose to learn from it rather than use it as a means of controlling others. Anger at others is often a manifestation of a lack of self-care. Is your inner child angry at you for your lack of self-care and then projecting this onto others? Discover a powerful process for learning from and healing anger rather than dumping it on others or suppressing it.

Transcription:

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding podcast. Today I’m addressing the issue of anger – why we get angry, the underlying causes of anger, and how to heal anger.

Many of us will do anything to avoid another’s anger, yet we may be quick to anger ourselves. Many of us dread another’s anger yet continue to use our own anger as a way to control others.

So let’s take a deeper look at what generates our anger and how we can learn from it rather than be at the mercy of it.

The feeling of anger can come from two different places within us. Anger that comes from an adult, rational place can be called outrage. Outrage is the feeling we have when confronted with injustice. Outrage mobilizes us to take appropriate action when harm is being done to ourselves, others, animals, and the planet. Outrage is a positive emotion in that it moves us to action – to stop crime and violence, clean up the environment, and so on. Outrage comes from a principled place within, a place of integrity, caring and compassion. Outrage has nothing to do with dumping anger on others or trying to intimidate others into doing what we want. Outrage fuels loving action.

Anger acted out at others come from a fearful child or adolescent place within – from the part of us that wants what we want and that fears being wrong, rejected, abandoned, or controlled by others, and feels intensely frustrated in the face of these feelings. This part of us fears failure, embarrassment, humiliation, disrespect, and helplessness over others and outcomes. When these fearful feelings are activated, this child or adolescent part, not wanting to feel helpless, may move into attacking or blaming anger as a way to attempt to control a person or a situation. Blaming anger is always indicative of some way we are not taking care of ourselves, not taking responsibility for our own feelings and needs. Instead of taking care of ourselves, we attack another for our feelings in an attempt to intimidate another to change so that we will feel safe. We have only to look at the current level of violent words and actions, in both our society and government, to see the difference between people acting as rational loving adults, and people acting as out of control angry children or adolescents, just bent on trying to control with no caring about the consequences of their actions on others and on our planet.

I hope you can see the vast difference between the outrage that fuels loving actions, and the blaming and intimidating anger intent on controlling.

Blaming anger creates many problems in relationships. No one likes to be blamed for another’s feelings. No one wants to be intimidated into taking responsibility for another’s needs. Blaming anger may generate blaming anger or resistance in the other person, which results in a power struggle. Or the person at the other end of blaming anger may give in, doing what the angry person wants, but there is always a consequence in the relationship. The compliant person may learn to dislike and fear the angry person and find ways to passively resist or to disengage from the relationship.

When blaming anger comes up, the healthy option is neither to dump it on another in an attempt to control them, nor to squash and repress it. The healthy option is to learn from it.

Our anger at another person or situation has much to teach us regarding personal responsibility for our own feelings and needs. As part of the Inner Bonding process, we offer a three-part anger process that moves you out of feeling like a frustrated victim and into a sense of personal power.

I offered our anger process a few years ago in a previous podcast, and I want to offer it here again. It’s a very powerful process for managing anger and I hope, if anger is a problem for you, that you learn and practice this healing process. It’s not only a healthy way of releasing anger without hurting others, it’s also way to learn from your anger rather than suppressing it. Our anger has a lot to teach us if we open to learning from it rather than dumping it on others, dumping it on ourselves, or suppressing it.

Releasing your anger will work only when your intent in releasing it is to learn about what you are doing that is causing your angry feelings. If you just want to use your anger to blame, control and justify your position, you will stay stuck in your anger. This three-part anger process moves you out of the victim-mode and into open-heartedness.

The first step is to imagine that the person you are angry at is sitting in front of you. Let your angry wounded child or adolescent yell at him or her, saying in detail everything you wish you could actually say. Unleash your anger, pain, and resentment until you have nothing more to say. You can scream and cry, pound a pillow, roll up a towel and beat the bed. The reason you don’t tell the person directly is because this kind of cathartic, no-holds-barred “anger dump” would be abusive to them.
The second step is to ask yourself who this person reminds you of in your past – your mother or father, a grandparent, a sibling? It may be the same person today as in the past. You may be mad at your father now, and he is acting just like he did when you were little. Now let your wounded child or adolescent self yell at the person from the past as thoroughly and energetically as in part one.
Then, in the third step, come back into the present and let your angry inner child fully express his or her anger, pain, and resentment toward your wounded self for your part in the situation or for treating yourself the way the people in parts one and two treated you. Let your inner child get angry at your wounded self for all the ways you abandon yourself when your intent is to control and avoid rather than learn about loving self-care. This brings the problem home to personal responsibility, opening the door to exploring your own behavior.

For most people, doing Step 3 is the hardest part. It’s easy to blame others for their unloving behavior toward you, but much harder to take responsibility for all the ways you abandon yourself that are actually the underlying causes of your anger. Your anger at others is generally a projection of your inner child’s anger at you for not taking loving care of yourself.

By doing the anger process instead of trying to control others with your anger, you de-escalate your frustration while learning about the real issue – which is how you are not taking care of yourself in the face of whatever another is doing or in the face of a difficult situation.

Whenever anger comes up, you always have the choice to control or to learn.

Research on managing anger indicates that just dumping it out by hitting a pillow with a bat or fists can actually generates more anger. It’s only if you do Step 3 of the Anger Process that you move beyond blaming anger and into learning and taking responsibility for your feelings.

In order to take responsibility for your own anger, you need to accept that you, like all of us, have a controlling ego wounded self. The wounded self doesn’t want to be unmasked because it just wants to continue to try to control getting love, avoiding pain, and feeling safe with its various learned forms of control, including anger.

Our wounded self is our dark or shadow side, not because it is bad but because it is cut off from the light of the love that is God. It lives in the darkness of fear and the heaviness of false beliefs instead of in the light of love and truth. Moving toward healing and becoming a loving adult is moving into the light of truth, which means learning to be guided by our higher self rather than by our lower self. Being on a healing path means that we are open to learning about the fears and false believes programmed into our wounded self and open to bringing the light of love and truth to our shadow side.

Just as the light and love that is God enters our hearts when we choose to open to learning about loving ourselves and others, the darkness of fear and lies enters when we choose to close our hearts and act from anger, fear, shame, judgment, or hurt. If you’ve seen the original Star Wars series, you might remember what happened in The Return of the Jedi, the last of the original Star Wars series. In this movie, the emperor, who was the epitome of darkness, was trying to get Luke to join the dark side. He knew if he could just get Luke angry enough or frightened enough, he would want to kill his father, Darth Vader, and then the emperor would own Luke as he had owned Luke’s father. The emperor knew that anger and fear were the doorways to darkness.

Our anger, fear, shame, and judgment are the cracks in our energy field through which the darkness enters. The darkness can also enter when we cloud our energy with drugs, alcohol, nicotine, sugar, and processed junk food. Do you recall the trial in San Francisco that employed the infamous “Twinkie defense”? Many years ago, the mayor and a city supervisor were shot down inside City Hall and their killer got a short sentence because of his “diminished capacity” due to having eaten a diet of only junk food.

In one of my dialogues with my spiritual guidance, she challenged me about darkness. She said, “Margaret, you have worked for many years to be physically healthy. Not only that, continually strive to be immune to illness by continuing to educate yourself about what creates health and longevity. Likewise, for many years you have sought to become a more loving person. Now your task is to become immune to darkness.” I was blown away. Becoming immune to darkness means never acting out of my wounded self’s feelings of fear, anger, shame, judgment or hurt but always moving into an intent to learn about these feelings as soon as they come up. I can tell you, it’s quite a challenge! I don’t know if I will ever accomplish this, but it certainly is a worthy goal!

Through raising your frequency on the physical and emotional levels by eating well and doing your healing work, you can reach a place where your frequency is high enough that you can hear your spiritual guidance at will. Being in conscious connection and dialogue with both your inner child and your spiritual guidance at all times is one of the goals of Inner Bonding. By practicing Inner Bonding, you begin to heal the cracks in your energy field through which the darkness enters, and you shine the light of truth into the wounded self’s fears and false beliefs.

Your angry feelings, as well as your feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, depression, aloneness and emptiness, are letting you know that your wounded self is in charge with your intent to control rather than to learn. These painful feelings come primarily from your own unloving behavior toward yourself. However, when you have been operating most of the time from your wounded self, you cannot suddenly become a loving adult in order to do the Inner Bonding dialogue processes in Steps 3 and 4 of Inner Bonding. Often, your early dialogues may be between one aspect of your wounded self – for example, the part that chooses to indulge in binge eating, and another aspect of it like the part that is furious at being overweight. Since dialoguing between two aspects of your wounded self won’t get you anywhere, you might conclude that Inner Bonding doesn’t work.

But here’s what’s really not working: We cannot bring light to darkness with darkness. In other words, we can’t heal our darkness by being furious at it. We can transform darkness into light only by learning about and loving the darkness. We heal darkness only with light – the light of love that comes through us from our spiritual guidance. Our challenge is to love the part of us that we judge as bad, unlovable, or unworthy, and it’s a challenge that calls for the loving adult.

But how can we have a dialogue between our wounded self and our loving adult or between or inner child and our loving adult when we haven’t yet developed a loving adult? Here is where your imagination comes into play. You need to imagine that the dialogue is between your wounded self and your personal spiritual guidance, or an older wiser part of yourself. You ask your inner child and wounded self questions and offer comfort and help, not from your own thoughts, but from what you would imagine your loving, wise, and powerful spiritual guidance would say and do. Or, if you know a person who you experience as loving, wise and powerful, you imagine that person in dialogue with your inner child and your wounded self. Either one is a good stand-in for your loving adult.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous podcast, Susan Sarandon, in the movie Dead Man Walking, is a wonderful role model for being a loving adult. She plays a nun who has been asked by a murderer on death row to help him avoid execution. The murderer, played by Sean Penn, is a despicable human being. Not only did he rape and murder in cold blood, he is a racist and he continues to avoid responsibility with his blame, lies and manipulations. Almost no one in the nun’s life supports her efforts on his behalf. They accuse her, blame her, shun her, yet never once does she lose her connection with the love that is God. She tells the murderer that he is a son of God and therefore greater than his worst acts. While never condoning his acts, she never condemns him as a person. She lovingly confronts him with himself. Although she does not like him – no one likes anyone’s wounded self, she loves his essence, his true soul self. She becomes the face of love for him, and through her love, he opens his heart and is redeemed and goes to his execution with peace and remorse. Penn’s character is very dark, the worst of the wounded self, while Sarandon’s is very light, the best of the loving adult.

Given that you might not have role models of loving behavior in your daily life, you can use your spiritual guidance as your role model to emulate and assimilate. Eventually, when you do this long enough, you begin to take on the qualities of your spiritual guidance. This is how you develop your loving adult. It takes practice. You need to learn to focus during this imaginative process and to trust what you hear.

When clients of mine first start to do this, I generally hear them say, “How do I know this is real? It feels like I’m just making this up, that it’s just my imagination.” Do you believe that when you create – whether it be poetry, a painting, a song, a musical score, a book, a screenplay, a theory – you bring these things forth from your own mind? You may believe that you actually have the capacity to be creative all by yourself, but the truth is that creativity flows when you are open to your higher self and use the gift of your imagination.

I no longer believe that my theories, my writing, my art or even the words that flow from me when I am working with someone or leading a group or workshop or my Masterclass, come from my own individual mind. I experience my mind more as a receiver of Divine information, which I can then transmit through my writing, speaking, and creative projects. Just as love, compassion, truth, peace, and joy are not feelings or experiences we generate from within our own small selves but are gifts from spirit, so too are our imagination and the creativity that flows from it. We all have the capacity to learn to access our source of wisdom and creativity.

It has taken me time and practice to trust the information that comes through me. I have learned over the years that when I do not trust my spiritual guidance, bad things often happen.

So it takes a lot of Inner Bonding practice, yet practicing seems to be difficult for many people. If you were determined to become accomplished at a particular skill, for example playing a musical instrument, you would think nothing of practicing every day. In fact, you would know that you needed to practice daily in order to become skilled and then continue practicing daily to maintain your skill. Becoming skilled at Inner Bonding is no different. You will become skilled only by ongoing practice, and you will continue to reap the benefits only by ongoing practice. It is only through ongoing practice that you will learn to consistently hear and trust both your inner and higher guidance. The problem is that the wounded self won’t practice, so unless you are determined to heal your anger and other painful feelings, and you consciously shift your deepest desire from controlling to being loving, you will not have enough of a loving adult to override the wounded self and make the decision to stay conscious of your intent and to practice Inner Bonding.

Many of my clients, coming in for help because they are suffering, find that they start to feel better within days of starting to practice Inner Bonding. Then, as soon as they feel better, they stop practicing and go right back to feeling badly. Sometimes they then conclude that Inner Bonding doesn’t work. This is like saying that if you have a young son and you give him love one day but ignore him for the next few days, he should continue to feel happy because of the one day you did give him love. This doesn’t work with your inner child any more than it does with real children. Just as babies need you to be constantly tuned in to them, your inner child needs you to be constantly aware of your feelings and needs. Becoming this aware and maintaining this awareness takes ongoing practice.

The good news is that practice really pays off. Clients of mine who have been practicing Inner Bonding for an extended period of time – and it varies for each person – find that eventually they do it all the time. They naturally stay tuned in to their inner child and their spiritual guidance, and they naturally dialogue with them whenever they feel anything other than peace and joy inside. They find themselves doing it in the shower, while preparing meals, doing chores, waiting in line at the market or stuck in traffic. After much practice, they are delighted to find that they no longer get angry. They no longer allow themselves to feel badly for any length of time. They are progressing rapidly toward the wholeness of having a strong, spiritually connected loving adult in charge of their lives rather than their young and controlling wounded self.

Does another’s anger trigger your anger? Does another’s controlling wounded self trigger your controlling wounded self?

My client, Jenna, was angry that she kept getting triggered into her wounded self when her husband, Seth, was in his wounded self.

“I work hard with my Inner Bonding process,” she said, “to get into a centered and connected place. I’ll be doing great and then out of nowhere Seth blames me for something and it all goes out the window. I get so angry at him for blaming me and then I feel off center and down for days. Maybe I shouldn’t be with him? Maybe my guidance is telling me that I’d be better off without him so I can stay in a good space?”

“No Jenna,” I said, “that’s not what your guidance is telling you. While it’s hard for you to see this right now, Seth is providing you with a wonderful opportunity to learn to stay centered and connected, even in the face of his angry wounded self. Can you imagine being able to do this? Can you imagine how good you would feel to not disconnect from yourself just because he is disconnected?”

“Is that what I’m doing – disconnecting from myself?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “Any time we are angry, blaming, distant, or acting out with addictions, we have disconnected from ourselves. You are getting triggered into your wounded self as a result of Seth being in his wounded self.”

“But how do I not do that?” she asked. “I feel so upset when Seth blames me. Shouldn’t I let him know that? Am I supposed to just be nice and hold in my feelings?”

“No, not at all,” I said. “Your upsetting feelings are very important and you don’t want to ignore them. But when you get angry at Seth, you actually ARE ignoring your own feelings. Take a moment right now to see what the deeper feelings are when Seth blames you, and if his blaming you relates to anything in your childhood.”

“My mother was constantly blaming me for her feelings,” she said. Everything was my fault.”

“How did that feel to you as a child?”

“I felt so unloved and unworthy – like I couldn’t do anything right.”

“Jenna, breathe into those feelings with compassion. See if you can connect with the core feelings.”

“….I felt crushed – just so crushed,” she said with tears running down her cheeks.

“Is that how you feel now when Seth blames you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

“Jenna, if you had a little girl who was feeling crushed, what would she need from you?” I asked her.

“She would need for me to hold her and understand her feelings.” Jenna knew exactly to do for an actual child.

“Yes. And this is exactly what your inner child needs from you when Seth blames you. But instead, you abandon her, completely disconnecting from her and then getting angry with Seth. This is why you end up feeling so badly. Next time Seth blames you, I’m hoping you will be willing to try something different.

“The moment he blames you, put your hands on your heart, breathe into your heart, connect with the love and compassion of your guidance, and bring that compassion down to the little girl inside who feels crushed. Let her know she is not alone, that you are here and spirit is here and you fully understand why she feels crushed. Hold the feelings with compassion and tenderness until they begin to dissipate. Then give them to spirit. Are you willing to try this?”

“Yes!”

Jenna reported in our next session that she was thrilled with being able to stay centered and connected when Seth blamed her. She found that if she just went inside, rather than outside to control Seth, she soon felt good again. And to her surprise, Seth seemed to be blaming her less and less.

Our inner child needs for us to stay connected with our own feelings in the face of another’s disconnection from themselves and from us. Anger heals when you learn to take loving responsibility for your own feelings.

Are you terrified of others’ anger? Are you afraid to open to your own anger for fear of getting out of control?

If you grew up in an angry or violent home, there is a good possibility that you have a fear of both your own anger and others’ anger.

I grew up with a very angry mother and I was terrified of her anger. Her anger was irrational, and it came out of nowhere. My whole body used to shake when she got angry.

For years as an adult, I continued to be terrified of anger, as I had no idea how to take care of myself in the face of another’s anger. When you don’t know how to respond to another’s anger, your fight, flight or freeze response gets activated, and for me it was freeze. I would become so frozen that I was unable to say much at all. When I could talk again, I would try to explain, defend, or scurry around trying to please.

Now I’m no longer terrified of others’ anger. I will never like it, and I still shake inside if the anger is irrational, but now I know the shaking is my inner guidance letting me know that danger is occurring, and I listen carefully to what my inner guidance is telling me. Irrational anger can be dangerous.

I’m no longer afraid because I know what to do. I know that I no longer have to stand there and take it like I did as a little girl. I know that I can either open to learning about why the other is angry or I can lovingly disengage – which means leaving the interaction to take care of myself rather than withdrawing in anger to punish the other person. It means keeping my heart open so when the other person is no longer angry, I can re-engage without resentment.

If I think the person might open with me, I gently say, “I hear that you are angry and I’d like to understand why you are angry, but it will be much easier for me to hear you if you stop attacking me.” If I know that the other person responds to touch, I can take their hand and let them know they are not alone.

If I’m quite sure that the person won’t open or respond to comfort, or if I’m not in a state to offer it them, then I say something like, “This feels hurtful so I’m going to take a walk. Let me know when you are ready to talk without blaming me.”

The fact that I can now do one of these loving actions for myself takes away most of my fear. I still get scared around irrational anger that’s coming from a very young wounded self, because that anger can get out of control. But now, my inner child knows that I, as a loving adult, am going to take care of the situation so that she isn’t hurt by it as she was as a child.

Are you afraid of your own anger? Many people who grew up with violence do not want to be anything like their angry parent or caregivers. They are afraid that if they get angry, they will become irrational and hurtful like some of the adults were when they were growing up.

If you have this fear, then here is where it’s so important for you to understand the difference between anger intent on controlling – which comes from an out of control wounded person and can be very scary – and anger intent on learning. When your intent is to learn from your anger rather than dump it on someone else in the form of attack and blame, then you embrace your angry feelings as information. Your angry feelings are telling you that there is some way you are not taking care of yourself – some way you are abandoning yourself. When you consistently move into learning from your anger rather than act it out on others, you lose your fear of your anger.

All our emotions are informational, and our anger is no different. When you open to learning from your own anger, and you open to learning with another who is angry or you lovingly disengage, you will heal your fear of anger.

Think for a moment about the last time you got angry with someone. At that moment, what was most important to you – getting what you wanted or being caring?

Obviously, at the moment that you get really angry at someone, it is more important to you to get what you want or avoid what you fear, than it is to be caring. Why is this? What is happening on the inner level that leads you to be more interested in what you get from the other person or what you can avoid than in being a caring person?

One of my clients, Jake, has an anger problem. Jake is a good guy who enjoys doing things for other people. The problem is that he rarely checks inside to see whether or not he really wants to be doing whatever he is doing for someone. Jakes tends to ignore his own feelings and needs. He doesn’t speak up for himself with his wife Karen, saying yes when he means yes or no when he means no. Instead, he stuffs his feelings and goes along with things that he really doesn’t want to do. But underneath his giving himself up, Jake has expectations of Karen. He tells himself that because he is doing so much for her and so much of what he thinks she wants him to do, she should respond in a particular way – such as being very appreciative, affectionate, or turned on to him. When Karen doesn’t give Jake the attention he is expecting and wanting, he explodes at her.

What is really going on here? What is going on is that Jake is not giving himself the attention that he needs. He is ignoring his own feelings and needs and instead doing what he thinks Karen wants him to do. And because he is not aware of his own feelings, he is not aware that his inner child is angry with him for not taking care of him. He then projects his anger onto Karen, making her responsible for his feelings of abandonment.

My client, Jessica, is a tiny woman with big energy and a back problem. Jessica has been told by her doctor not to lift heavy things. But instead of asking her husband or adolescent sons to lift heavy things for her, such as the heavy trash bags from her gardening work, she lifts them herself. She then gets furious at her husband and sons for not noticing that she needed help, and for not being concerned about her when she comes in the house in pain from her gardening work.

Jessica is not caring about herself and is then projecting her own lack of self-care onto her family. When asked why she continues to do things that are hurting her, she states, “They have to be done and no one else will do them.” Jessica makes taking care of the house more important than taking care of her body, and then gets angry with her family when she perceives them as not caring about her. She projects her own self-abandonment on to her family.

If you find yourself getting angry with others for their lack of attention or caring about you, you might want to look inside and see how you might not be attending to and caring about yourself. Others’ behavior is often a mirror of how we are treating ourselves, so if you feel uncared about by others, this may be reflecting your own lack of self-care.

You will find that the more you practice Inner Bonding and take loving care of yourself – staying tuned inside to your own feelings, staying connected with the love and wisdom of your guidance, and taking loving action on your own behalf – the less you will be angry with others. Loving self-care heals anger.

I invite you to join me for my 30-Day at-home Course: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from my recent books: