Compassionate Conflict Resolution - WK 6 Managing Anger
Meditation - Healing and growth involve learning to send kind compassionate to yourself and to those around you. We might take in good energy from watching a sunset, walking on a beach, watching children playing in the snow (just snowed 7” in Nashville today) or just gently stretching and breathing. That good energy might take the form or feeling grounded or feeling joyful or feeling a sense of wonder or perhaps a sense of gratitude or even a good belly laugh. Think of what type energy you would like to take into your body right now. Give that energy a form, a shape, a color, sense the vibrations of that feeling in your body. Take a deep breath in, inviting that energy into your body, seeing that form spread through your body with good warm energy, spreading through your body until you can imagine wisps of light making your body actually glow with good energy. Notice what that feels like, Notice that feeling growing with each breath, releasing any negative energy as you release your breath. Continue to take several slow breaths in and out, allowing this energy to circulate in and around your body and give you whatever your body needs in this moment.
This exercise can help ground us and prepare us to enter into a difficult discussion. Often times, the biggest barrier to having a good discussion in the judgment and anger that we direct at the other person who then reflects it back at us and we send it back to them and so forth, each time increasing the negative energy we are both carrying and at the same time destroying any possibility of a good outcome.
By grounding ourselves (as we might with the above exercise) and also becoming aware of the words or actions that trigger our anger, we can learn to manage our emotions and stay more grounded in kindness, compassion and curiosity.
While anger may keep us alive in a real battle, in a discussion with someone that we care about, it will only serve to destroy our relationship and destroy any chance of getting a good outcome.
How do we manage our anger? How do we even understand it?
In the simplest terms, our anger is our child self (often teenage self) attempting to protect us from others that make us feel unsafe or unloved. The people that are the quickest to anger are also the quickest to judge themselves as they carry the message “I am broken” or “I am not lovable” or some similar untruth. When we discover our triggering message and can work to understand why we have that message, we can begin the process of healing our wounds and releasing our anger
When we get angry at someone else, they are not making us angry, they are just triggering us to release the anger we carry all the time. It is only by healing our wounds and releasing our anger that we can most effectively love ourselves, love others and work to have truly effective conflict resolution skills.
Self hate, anger, feelings of being worthless are all trauma lies that feed our anger.
The truth is that “you are enough”, “you deserve to be kind to yourself” and “you are lovable just the way you are right now”. Being lovable is not an award to be earned. It is a gift that we are given as part of just being a human being. Every child is lovable. Trauma just makes us forget that simple truth. “I am lovable” and “I don’t need anger to prove it”.
For more, see Crisis to Calm, Ch 10.