In an article entitled, “Anger 101: Making Peace with Your Angry Feelings” by Lillian Rozin and featured on Good Therapy, Lillian writes about our lack of formal education when it comes to our emotions. She states, “We are rarely taught about our feelings with any intention. We learn emotion by observing our families and by experimenting in our relationships, mostly without anything that could be construed as constructive feedback.”
This is especially true when it comes to anger. Being our safest emotion, anger allows us to skip over any preceding emotion and instead, step right into defensiveness and denial; moving us into a need to be right, not into process, which includes compassion and compromise. The article features three key points in making peace with our anger; one that resonates with me and is a great starting point is to “examine the messages you received about anger – spoken and unspoken- you received growing up.”
When we can reflect upon the messages we internalized, we can begin to understand how we became informed as to how to handle anger being directed at us, but also how we learned to deliver it as well. By understanding its roots, we can begin to make peace with our anger, allowing us to choose process over past.
To read the full article: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/anger-101-making-peace-with-your-angry-feelings-0825155
Photo credit: http://Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
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very interesting. the 1st thought i have in my older years is decipher quickly and fight or accept. In the youth years, its fear.