Ingredients of "Anger"

[irina]

   a. Unfairness – We believe that we have been treated unfairly. We tell ourselves that we deserve more, and we buy into this story that someone has wronged us.

   b. Lost - We feel that we have lost something that we have identified ourselves with. Feelings, pride, money.
   c. Blame – We blame other people or external situations for having caused our loss, for taking advantage of us unfairly. The blame often only resides in our heads and is a product of our imagination. We fail to see things from other people’s perspectives. We become deeply selfish.

   d. Pain - We experience pain, mental distress, and anxiety. The pain causes physical responses in our body, which disturbs our natural energy flow and state of well-being.
 
 e. Focus - We focus on the thing we don’t want, and energize it by complaining about it passionately, and repeating it to as many people who will listen. This creates a downward spiral of anger.

The interesting thing is that if there are two angry people unhappy with each other, both people feel a sense of loss, unfairness, pain and the need to blame the other person. Who is right? The answer is.........What?

[irina]

Have you ever noticed how quickly we can fall into a negative state of being? A split second, maybe. By the same reasoning it should take us the same amount of time to shift into a resourceful state of being. The challenge here is that we have been conditioned from a very young age to remain in an undeclared state. Nobody gave us the tools to shift our state into a positive one. Often, our parents didn’t know how, and still do not know how.
When negative feelings arise, we have two choices,
1.   To follow the habitual pattern we’ve learned since we were young, to react and allow the negativity to consume us.
2.   Or, to interrupt the pattern we have been conditioned to follow, and in doing so build new neural pathways that allows for alternative possibilities.
There are essentially three ways to interrupt a behavioral pattern:
   Visual -        Change your thoughts.
   Verbal –       Change your language.
   Movement – Change your physical position.
         Okay, let’s dive into the practical stuff…

[irina]

There are many ways to control anger so that you don't become angry in the first place, but even the calmest of us lose our patience sometimes. So what do you do when that anger has already developed? How do you release it without hurting others or yourself, emotionally, or physically? Here are some ways to take off the edge.

1. Calm down
a.  Breathe deeply from your diaphragm. Breathing shallowly from the chest won't help you relax.
b. Tell yourself, in a soft voice, to "relax" or "take it easy" as you're breathing deeply.
   Close your eyes and visualize a setting or memory that calms you, like lying in bed,     or floating in water.
c.  Avoid extreme words. Avoid words such as “always” or “never” . “They are always  finding fault with me” or “They never even helped me once before”. These words are usually not true and using them can amplify the anger and cause the situation to worsen.