Anger Management Step 2 - What Am I Feeling?

This is where I get to ask, how have you done with recognizing the emotions that came before anger? 

If you have been able to sort it out and recognize the emotions that occur before your anger, CONGRATULATIONS!   You are well on the road to anger management.  You are several steps ahead of the place I began my journey.  You can skip the rest of this blog and catch up to us down the road.  

For those of you who just felt confused as you tried to figure out what you felt before anger,  let me reassure you by saying I was right there with you a couple of decades ago.  

When I first started to try to recognize what came before anger, I discovered I was incapable of sorting out my feelings.  I wrote in a journal that my emotions looked a great deal like a delicious stew that had been allowed to cook for too long.  For those of you who do not cook, let me explain.  I love a good beef stew.  You have tasty morsels of steak, potatoes, carrots, peas, and whatever else you want to throw in the pot, in a rich, savory, saucy kind of broth. However,  if you leave it bubbling on the stove too long, the ingredients begin to breakdown into unidentifiable bits of mush. The flavors absolutely disappear.  You occasionally see a flash of color and imagine, "ah, that must have been a carrot", but mostly its has just all melded into something not very tasty and impossible to sort out. In my case, that mush of emotions came out too often as anger.

If you would like to, and I assume you would or you would not be interested in a blog about anger management, you can rediscover your emotions.  When you were young, you knew what you felt easily and quickly.  You had not learned to try to bury, minimize or explain away your emotions.  You had not yet been trained to believe that emotions were nice or not nice. You just felt what you felt.  I have a two year old grand daughter who is very good at knowing what she feels.  When she is sad she cries, when she is hurt she acknowledges it, when she is happy, well, she makes everyone happy.  

She knows what you can relearn.  She knows that her feelings are not good or bad, they are just feelings.  How she expresses those feelings will result in different reactions from those around her.   When you stop judging your feelings they will be easier to sort out. Begin to tune into what you are saying to yourself about that tear in your eye, or that excitement about meeting a new person who might turn into a friend.  Self-talk makes or breaks us.  I used to blink away my tears, always.  I judged sadness as making me weak.  Now I let however many tears out that want to come out.  Fear restrained them.  Freedom to express emotions in a "do no harm" manner sets us free.

Stay tuned for more about "Self-Judgment" in our third installment.