The other day, I was thinking about anger, and it struck me that there is a huge discrepancy between the emotion itself and how we deal with it. It seems that everyone wants positive emotions like happiness, love, peace, amusement and cheerfulness, and we stay away from negative emotions like sadness, loneliness, fear, sorrow and grief. But anger is different.
It’s a negative emotion, we all recognize it as a negative emotion, yet we don’t treat it as a negative emotion. We try to escape any other negative emotion. We run into the nearest open arms when loneliness visits. We flood our minds with happy thoughts when we are drowning in sadness. We grab at what we don’t have to sooth ourselves when jealousy strikes. But not so with anger.
Anger is a parasite.
It stays with us and grows the longer we let it take refuge inside. We want to believe that we deserve to feel that way. We search for reasons to prove we are right so we can become even more outraged. We hang on to it as long as humanly possible and pray it doesn’t leave. We want to use it as a weapon. We must realize that we shouldn’t try to escape our negative emotions.
Have you ever met someone who was happy all the time…to the point where it’s kinda scary? You start to wonder if they’re some kind of machine…or maybe a human body that was probed by aliens and is just gathering information about Earth to forward their plan of global domination. No? Okay. Maybe that last one is just me, but you get the idea.
It’s because we all experience both negative and positive emotions; so when we see someone who doesn’t seem to, it’s a bit jarring. It’s actually healthier to feel both negative and positive emotions because life isn’t always good. If you move away from all your friends and family or experience the death of someone close to you, you need to grieve.
In that moment, trying to stay happy will only result in bottling emotions, experiencing denial and searing your own sensitivity. When we allow ourselves to feel both, we grow in maturity, because it forces us to integrate what we feel with what we experience. At that moment, expectation and reality collide without any serious casualties.
So, shouldn’t we allow to ourselves to experience anger? Yes. However, we cannot mistake “experiencing” with “indulging.” Experiencing the emotion of anger helps the maturing process I spoke of before, but indulging in anger fosters bitterness and causes us to act out of that emotion. Anger, as a unique emotion, must be dealt with differently.
Because of the unique qualities that anger has, we do not embrace it. We battle it. It takes realizing that the person who made us mad isn’t the enemy: the anger is. We need to immediately look at the anger itself and eliminate it. Take time to breath and have a mental war within yourself. Fight anger and win.
Image Credit: cover.