Do You Control Your Anger or Does Your Anger Control You?
This is more of a choice than most people recognize.
Emotions come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. They can be so small that they seem nearly invisible or so large that they seem unstoppable and overwhelming. Despite the idea that Star Trek’s Vulcans are emotionless, the truth is that they train tenaciously to tightly control their emotions.
One of the most dangerous traits of toxic positivity is the denial of negative emotions. Toxic positivity puts on blinders and actively works to avoid, ignore, and deny negative emotions. This does you a disservice, as the negative is just as important and necessary as the positive.
One of the most troublesome and infuriating emotions, at least for me, is anger. There are a lot of reasons why anger is especially complicated, not least of which is that it can manifest in such incredible, diverse ways.
The many faces of anger
How anger manifests in me is not the same as how it will manifest in you. There are lots of reasons why this is so. Some are environmental, some are interpersonal, and others are strictly self-inflicted or self-directed.
When you get angry, whether over something internal and/or external, the face anger wears will be dependent on all kinds of unpredictable factors. Who, what, where, how, and why are ever-present. Then you need to factor in past history, memories, beliefs, values, and even habits. Couple all this with environmental factors, other ongoing present and past experiences, other emotions, and it all gets super convoluted.
As such, anger can manifest in totally opposite ways. One face might be red-hot, feel to you like a burning, gnawing, overwhelming sensation of fire and fury. Then, another face might be ice cold, feel to you like a chilling, hungering, overwhelming sensation of ice and distress.
These are some of the opposite extremes that anger can present. Between them, there are variable degrees of fury and calm, chill and burn, instant and slow-moving, and almost anything else you can think of.
Anger tends to manifest physically in different parts of your body. It can ring like a bell in your head, burn like a flame in your gut, chill your heart like an ice bath, and all sorts of other similar and dissimilar physical representations. How it presents in one situation today might be utterly different in the same situation tomorrow. Anger is a complex and difficult emotion to fully define.
It can feel like it’s out of your control. Which it can be. Yet you have the power to control your anger. When you don’t, it can (and will) control you.
Who’s driving the emotions bus today?
When you’re driving down the road, singing along to your radio, enjoying the sun and the feeling of the freedom of the road, getting t-boned by a careless other driver can instantly snap your mood. Visceral reactions happen and are not in your control. That’s why some people react fearfully to getting into a car accident, others simply sigh and start collating necessary data for insurance purposes, and still others get angry in one form or another.
You can’t control visceral immediate reactions. There are things you can do to steer these toward the most neutral settings you can think of, but that takes a lot of time, focus, mindfulness practice, and discipline. And given the nature of immediate visceral reactions, that might not work at all.
Again, situation matters. If a sweet grandmother, stung by a bee, lost control and t-boned your car, you’re probably less inclined to a deeply angry reaction than if a hapless teen boy who was paying zero attention to his surroundings caused the accident. This will temper your visceral immediate reaction.
Not long after this initial occurrence, you get to choose where to take it. Do you allow anger to be the driver of the emotions bus? Or do you seek reason and logic to shift your emotions to something less volatile?
You have the power to choose. However, it won’t always feel that way. Especially when something you’re angry about – but have no control over – is gnawing at your conscious mind from your subconscious.
Anger unbidden
I spend far less time on social media nowadays than I used to. That’s because between all kinds of craziness in the world, the US election, and the seemingly growing number of willfully ignorant people, I get angry all too easily.
I feel like I might Hulk-out at any time over this stuff. “That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always angry.”
That’s just the impersonal, utterly out-of-my-control stuff. Other, semi-personal issues will also raise my hackles. There is a group I very much want to be a part of that I’m being kept out of. There’s a lot of hypocrisy involved and even my allies within the group I can’t talk to without causing trouble. If I start to give this too much energy, a deep, seething ire takes root. Before I know it, I’m ranting and just pissed off. This, of course, is no good to anyone and helps me not at all.
There are other personal matters, people, and things, that set off a similar anger in me. Things that will impact me directly, but are either of the past and (of course) unchangeable, or otherwise outside of my control.
Ah, but there is one more layer here. It’s the most pernicious and difficult to deal with. Self-anger. When the above makes me angry that can, in turn, get me angry with myself for getting angry. What the hell, dude? Why are you wasting this energy on this shit out of your control? This can be quite a distressing cycle to experience.
Anger will arrive unbidden, like it or not. You have a choice, however, as to whether you take control of it or allow it to control you.
The dark side of the Force is a choice
While you can’t control that immediate, visceral reaction of anger, you can and do control where you take it. Or where it takes you.
When people don’t control their anger, that can lead to some pretty dangerous places. The least destructive (but still damaging and unhelpful) are hateful words, fear of the “other”, and closing off kindness, compassion, and empathy – within and without. Then, it might start to turn destructive, involving getting into physical altercations, smashing inanimate objects, throwing things, and similar outbursts. The worst and most destructive involves intentionally hurting people via violence, murder, arson, and the like.
Before your anger evolves (devolves) into any of the above destructive levels, you can take control of it. You have the power to recognize and acknowledge anger. From there, you can decide how to work with it, release it, express it, then let it go.
Anger held will eat away at your mental, emotional, spiritual, and even physical health, wellness, and wellbeing. Unchecked, allowed to fester and spread, anger will overwhelm you in one or many ways. This is a choice.
Mindfulness – active conscious awareness – is how you know your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. With that knowledge, you gain the ability to change any of the above.
To change anger, you can pause, reflect, and do things such as a few minutes of deep breathing, screaming into a pillow, meditating, exercising to release brain chemicals, or any combination of the above.
Whether you control anger or anger controls you is a choice you get to make after any initial visceral reaction.
Anger isn’t easy to control
This takes concentrated effort. Because anger takes on so many different sizes, shapes, colors, and forms, what lets you control it in situation “X” might not work at all for experience “Y”. The frustration that comes with this can add to the challenge of taking control.
You can and do have this power, however. No matter who you are or where you come from, you can choose to control your anger or let your anger control you.
What you cannot do, and shouldn’t do, frankly, is disregard, ignore, or pretend things don’t make you angry. Denial of anger is unrealistic. As a human being, you will be angered by things along the way. Nobody lives in a perfect bubble, unaffected by things that happen to and around them.
Finally, it’s important to recognize and acknowledge that anger isn’t entirely negative. That’s because it can spur you to action. Angry about that horror-show running for office? Organize the opposition. Annoyed by that inefficient McGuffin? Create a better one. Pissed off by your job? Go out there and find a new one.
Anger can feel all-encompassing and overwhelming. Sometimes it is. Yet no matter what sparks it, you have the power to control it rather than let it control you. The choice is yours. Please recognize, acknowledge, and know this: you deserve to be in control rather than be controlled by it.
Do you control your anger or does anger control you?
This is the six-hundred-fifty-seventh (657) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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