I never knew how to handle anger.

Not the one about being stuck in a traffic jam, or against life events that seemingly don’t make sense.

The anger that would be felt against people, the anger which signals to you something is wrong and you should bring it up and make decisions for a change.
It felt like it was sliding through my fingers, and I didn’t understand why people were telling me that I should get angry.

Anger wasn’t safe. I learnt anger was the highway to not being loved. So I bottled up this anger and only allowed myself to feel sadness about the situation. I became so good at that that anger wasn’t even sliding anymore – it wouldn’t even manifest itself.

Something else was happening though – alongside my sadness, there was a movie playing in my head. A movie of a young version of me trashing the room with a baseball bat… So disturbing, I would just ignore it, pretending it wasn’t happening.

It took me quite some time to understand this mechanism. Acknowledge that this did wonders for me when anger wasn’t safe – it kept me from not being loved.

It came with a high price tag – low self esteem, fear of abandonment, and prepared the perfect ground for autoimmune diseases.

And then came the time to thank this “stupid friend” who is still trying to help me as if I was 5.

To connect to the anger, look for it when I thought it should rationally be present.

The more I could do this… the less the young me had to take the baseball bat.

It still is work. And I am still experimenting with ways to express it.

It happened today. I could feel the anger was probably somewhere. I sat with my journal. Sat with my thoughts.

And there it was. I could connect with it. I could stay with it. And yet it is so new that I googled right away “How to express anger ?”- because I just didn’t what to do do next. 

This came up :

10 Healthy Ways to Release Rage

I danced it out. For a good 10min ! And there are other options I will definitely explore another day…

I does feel like such a progress. It does feel empowering. It is not finished, I will have to seat with it again, until it becomes a beast I can befriend.

This is what I use Compassionate Inquiry for.

Join me ?✨