Mindfulness and the Art of Managing Anger

Most angry people have no idea who they are, what they believe in or what they stand for.

Mindfulness is being completely in tune with, and aware of, the present moment. It is also being committed to a non-evaluative and non-judgemental approach to your own and another person’s inner experience. For example, a mindful approach to one’s inner experience is simply viewing ‘thoughts as thoughts’ as opposed to evaluating certain thoughts as positive or negative, good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. Adopting an attitude of empathy buys you time. Instead of creating a catastrophic result, you can approach a situation with a more open heart and mind, which allows for more solutions of mutual benefit to occur that may not have been considered before.

‘Compassionate detachment simply means we are not attached physically, spiritually, mentally and especially emotionally to the events, things, and people in our lives that we have compassion for. This does not mean we don’t care – because compassion is caring. It means we are not attached in a way that fails to serve the highest good of all.’

‘Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.’

My problem with the concept was that if one could choose to be happy, then one could also choose sadness, hurt, fear, shame or anger. The possibility intrigued me, but at the time I was too depressed to take it on board. I didn’t feel I had a choice about anything and this concept just felt too abstract.

It’s much easier for me today to embrace this concept. Years of personal development, therapy and training have enabled me not to be hijacked by my feelings. However, despite all this work, I now believe that the simple concept of having a choice as to how much energy I’m willing to invest in a feeling at any given moment is profoundly liberating.

Sound Investments
Taking responsibility for our decisions requires an ability to step back and be objective. If our anger is being triggered, we first need to accept responsibility for that fact and then give ourselves the chance to decide how much we want to invest in it.

It’s convenient to believe that other people make us angry. The number of times I have heard how someone else was responsible for making someone feel something they didn’t want to feel! It’s simply not true – it’s impossible. Only you can make you feel what you feel. There is no other you but you inside your head. Sure, others can emotionally manipulate us, but we still have the choice as to how much we will engage.

So if we can be our own masters and decide how much we will invest into any state of feeling, then happiness can become a choice. I do realize this is a difficult concept to accept and understand, never mind utilize. Some people may not even have access to the full range of their feelings yet. Angry people in particular suffer from the affliction of disassociating from their feelings and tend to default into anger. However, perhaps it’s useful to hold it in your awareness that you don’t have to fall victim to your own rage, that you can exercise choice and begin to move towards that goal.

Worshipping the Wrong God
What I became increasingly aware of in relation to this client group is that, for so many, their lives have no meaning – they followed the wrong god home. I don’t mean ‘god’ in the religious or even spiritual sense, but in that they have made their desires and attachments their god and they’ve been completely hoodwinked by ownership, status and materialism.
They were trained to believe that having possessions, status, influence and power would be their elixir of life – but ‘meaning’ is not something you can buy off the shelf. In my experience with this particular client group, their lack of humility prevents them from experiencing meaning in their lives. This type of angry person can be highly opinionated, arrogant with a self-serving skewed morality, have a distorted value system and an unethical framework. They’ve used anger as well as these mechanisms to propel them up the ‘success ladder’, and it’s only a matter of time until something gives. It can be the loss of a huge amount of money, career, position, wife, child, or just an intense sense of dissatisfaction or a feeling of losing control that brings them to sit in my office.
That Was Me…

‘Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.’
ANON
BEING PRESENT

Mindfulness is about creating a space so we can gain objectivity and come up with more effective solutions.

P ROFILE PAGES, SOCIAL MEDIA, ONLINE MARKETING and networking platforms demand that we stay on top of our game, keep up with the hottest trends and constantly update ourselves – they’re the modern-day vanity board. It’s an endless pursuit of perfecting our ego identity. We invest an enormous amount of time and energy into an ideal projected image of ourselves and we believe it to be true, even though it is inauthentic.

there has been so much fear and conflict across the world, not just across oceans and borders but across the breakfast table. In fact many now prefer conflict to peace, as they become addicted to the actions of anger and aggression, and the adrenaline rush that results. They don’t really want conflict to end, in fact, they will say that some conflict is good to get things done and stimulate change. They are not aware that they are killing themselves.