anger management | Evening Light

Okay, so definitely winter, or as nearly so as makes no difference, now. We’ve a winter storm warning for freezing rain, maybe mixed with some snow, definitely mixed with some local panic; we don’t do snow and ice well, here. The local transit is in chains – snow chains – but for now that’s more ‘just in case’ than actual weather. Weather forecasting has come a long way since I was a child, too, there’s real weather coming, and the storm shows in local radar. Do I go into the office, or not? That’s more complicated. This morning, I am inclined to go in to work in spite of the weather. Staying home doesn’t sound pleasant; everyone else is already committed to working from home, and I’m already feeling very irritable after an unpleasant start to the morning. I guess it will ultimately depend on whether the weather is worse than my mood. I keep checking the reports, and the transit web page; when local transit starts shutting down, it’s definitely time to heed the storm warnings.

Heeding storm warnings has great value. One of the small things in life I find most easily irritates me, personally, is when people close to me ignore my ‘storm warnings’, or treat me dismissively, or with a parental demeanor, when I am annoyed or angry. Mockery when I’m angry is the high-speed bullet train to the deepest longest-standing chaos and damage. Stoking my anger when I also feel helpless – or creating conditions wherein I feel helpless when I am already angry – is Plan A if the goal is to see me at my worst. Pretty nearly everyone has ‘tells’ – warning signs – that they are being pushed into their emotional ‘badlands’. I would expect that this being the case would make it so easy for everyone to be mindfully considerate of each other, sharing feedback in gentle words, delivering concerns or complaints with consideration and awareness that the person being spoken to is also human, and probably doing their best, generally. Being aware that the person we’re speaking to has their own issues, their own baggage, their own ‘soft white underbelly’ has so much potential to foster great experiences among beings built on respect, appreciation, affection… We don’t use our awareness that way very often, do we? I definitely have room to grow in that area. So does everyone I know. Hell, I can’t seem to reliably take advantage of my awareness of my own emotional state moment to moment to treat myself genuinely well, and with great fondness and tenderness – and I totally know me, and all that I need to thrive. It’s puzzling and frustrating and the result tends to be that I’d rather be at the office, where the expectations of me are very clear, and emotions don’t generally come into it.

I’d like to just coast gently from moment to moment with profound awareness, and great consideration for all my fellow travelers. Somehow, I keep finding myself pissed off about some small thing, or feeling hurt… It is a challenge to be ‘above the bullshit’ long enough to evaluate circumstances with reason, untainted by the hurt of the moment, to make the best possible decision which will meet my needs best over time. If I gave in to myself right now, I’d be storming around the place, stomping, slamming things, swearing… it wouldn’t help at all; it would merely serve to attempt to communicate to the household that I’m pissed off and hurting. If they don’t already understand that from my demeanor, and my words, they are not going to understand it through being obnoxiously loud, either; they aren’t listening. So. I sit quietly, seething alone, waiting for the storm to pass and hoping that the weather outside the house remains safe for travel. It’s best that I take this side of me to the office where I can harness the fury to a good cause without hurting anyone.

I feel angry this morning. I’m struggling to make peace with myself and the circumstances. It’s an enormous effort to practice practices I know ‘help’ – anger is an emotion that tends to want a specifically satisfying outcome, and seems to have the will to feed itself to stay alive. Knowing this hasn’t made it any easier to undermine my anger with wholesome emotional support based on self-sufficient practices. I dislike feelings in this range of the emotional spectrum, and a lot of my baggage is ‘about’ things colored by these sorts of emotions. It’s hard to make the choices that ease my suffering, sometimes. It’s hard to let go of wanting to be heard, and understood, and treated well, so I can rest comfortably on self-care practices that have built up my emotional resilience over time. It’s easier to yield to the misery, and give in to the suffering; but the outcome of doing so is predictably unpleasant. The outcome of good practices, emotional self-sufficiency, perspective, and a willingness to care for me with the same enduring strength and commitment I would bring to caring for any loved one is worth the effort, if only I can make the effort. There are verbs involved.

So. I guess today is a good day to practice good practices… and it looks like I’ll get a lot of opportunities to keep practicing. Today is a good day to attend to storm warnings, and take care of me. Today there’s stormy weather.

As days go, so far, today is neither here nor there, in the sense that I am calm, and feel balanced, and my emotions are just not stirred right now, one way or the other. The rainy morning pleases me, by wrapping me in a certain sentimental something that I feel on rainy days. I don’t know where it comes from. I feel it on rainy days. It’s not a good feeling or a bad feeling. It’s not an emotion I know how to name, but it is a comfortable fit, inasmuch as it feels very familiar and relaxed and centered. It is an experience I enjoy, although I have never examined it very closely. It was raining hard enough to decide to ride the bus to work. The rain spattering the bus windows, and the filtered gray light gave me a strange sense of emotional safety and this morning I had a Dave Matthews song stuck in my head, which sort of encouraged my thinking in the direction of mindfulness, emotions, and change.

I started thinking about ‘anger’. I regularly avoid the word, hoping to avoid the experience. I’ve had very bad experiences with anger, both other people’s anger and my own. I feel overwhelmed by anger, even to the point of frankly finding it hard to write about with candor. Fear of feeling it, fear of failing at it, fear of facing it, fear of being unable to contain it…anger is powerful stuff. I’d like to be more easily able to accept that I can and do feel angry sometimes, and just move on from it or let it go. I’d also like to be able to observe someone else’s anger without taking it personally, feeling defensive or blamed, or feeling responsible for ‘fixing’ it. (Seeing it in text, I see that some of those are choices I can make, and other bits seem relevant to mindfulness practices I am cultivating.) I focused on ‘going easy on myself’ for past anger, so I could more easily examine anger in general. Big Anger associated with ancient hurts and long-carried baggage is a wound I know I’m not quite ready to tackle, but I got to wondering if every day anger could be ‘practiced’ for skill building so that I could be ready to tackle it some other time? So… I considered something small I was angry about recently that I didn’t act on or attempt to resolve at that time, and allowed myself to acknowledge and feel being angry about it. Then one by one I put some of the specific mindfulness practices I am learning into action. I didn’t make assumptions about whether any one thing would or would not work. I just did steps, followed processes, pursued practices. I practiced. I practiced being angry without escalating. I practiced accepting the feeling of anger without acting out. I practiced allowing myself to ‘consider other sides’ of an issue in spite of an emotion of anger. I practiced letting anger go without compromising my values, or depriving myself of personal understanding or validation of my experience. I repeated the exercise with a number of small things I was angry about in a small way. I didn’t panic, have a fit, escalate, or feel hurt or damaged, and the anger itself didn’t do anything at all. Actually – I still feel good; calm and balanced. I even found myself understanding one or two small things differently, over which I had been harboring some resentment. The anger really just evaporated when I gained a somewhat different understanding of the circumstances through calm consideration of what I did and did not know, instead of struggling with the anger itself.

Anger is nasty stuff. I’d like to master it. Looks like I would do well to really understand what I mean by that, too, because apparently ‘mastery’ of anger is not about ‘making it go away’.

Mindfulness and emotion is more intense than I expected and less scary than I feared. Pleasant emotions, the ‘good stuff’, are actually very rich experiences, and I am learning to really savor them and take my time with life on a different level. Emotions that are often experienced as ‘bad’ or negative emotions are intense too, incredibly intense, and I am hoping to continue to learn not to be wounded by those experiences. I feel hopeful – and supported. It is easier to write about some of these things than to talk about them in real life with people I love and make my life with – because the conversation itself is so personal, so emotional, and so ‘right now’, for me; I easily lose sight of boundaries or limits. I sometimes cry when I’m trying to talk about things that are emotional. I’m learning to be ok with that, and to understand it more as an expression of intensity rather than an expression of a particular emotion. Adjusting my understanding of that experience has seemed, so far, to result in fewer tears. I wish I understood that.

So…Tuesday. It is a good one, so far. 😀

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