I always have this mental picture when I hear that someone went to “anger management” – a picture of someone gritting their teeth, panting, and trying their hardest to “control” themselves from bursting out in a fit of rage.
Fingernails clawing the ledge of a rock for dear life.
I guess it’s good that they’re trying, but this method unfortunately does not work very well according to the latest research. Here’s the thing: What we really want is to not feel angry!
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Imagine the following situations:
- You walk into the house and your partner is on the phone and doesn’t even say “Hello.” That would probably make you angry, right?
- Your spouse comes home very late for the third time this week and won’t tell you why. I would assume that would make you angry, too, right?
- Your spouse has spent more money than you have and now you can’t pay the bills. Surely a reason to get angry, correct?
And the anger is this awful feeling building up in inside of you. You really, really want to suppress it. You try to. And for a day, you succeed. You throw yourself into something else. You get your thoughts re-directed. Until something reminds you….Then…BOOM! The explosion. The explosion that you did not want and tried to avoid.
Oh, man. These things take the guts out of you. You feel so bad, so ashamed. A failure. It happened again. When will it stop?
And the worst is that you do not want to think about how badly you feel about that….until the person you love, whom you blew up at, reminds you. Grrrr. Oh, man, you are so angry at that.
What right do they have to throw it in your face? You’re already feeling like #$%^. Man! Don’t they see what they’re doing to you…?
And on and on. The never-ending cycle of pain, anger, stuffing the anger, exploding, pain, anger, stuffing the anger, exploding.
The person you hate most is not them. It’s yourself. But that’s really painful to admit.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
The happily married people know how to do it. They have the same stresses – sometimes more.
But they just don’t get angry. They’ve discovered the secret sauce. And no, it’s not smoking weed either. No drugs necessary.
So, What’s The Secret Sauce?
The secret sauce has three parts.
First, they bypass their conscious mind. They do not rely on willpower. They work with the unconscious to rewire their brains. They use meditation, imagery, and other powerful tools. I call this part of the plan Taming The Triggers.
The second part is they go from self-hate to self-love and Self-Validation.
Now, you’re going to go, Whaaa? Why would that make a difference?
Good question, so let me explain.
You know the story of the straw that broke the camel’s back, right? Someone who didn’t know the story would wonder how a straw could possibly break a back? But see, we know that the camel was loaded and loaded. He was so loaded down that his back was just about to break from the heaviness of the load. So it only took one straw.
The person with the anger problem has a much bigger problem lurking underneath: Self-hate.
Yes, in part it comes from his not being happy with his or her anger problem. But it goes deeper than that. The self-hate came from a long time ago and is stuck there gnawing at his innards every second.
So anybody walking around in that much pain which is all turned against the self, would really have no more places to put their self-blame when something new comes up. Like the straw that broke the camel’s back, it’s the “one more thing” principle that causes the blow-up.
When you remove, completely, the self-hate and replace it with self-validation, the “one more thing” becomes “no big deal.” You can tolerate it because it’s not resting on a frothing sea of toxic feelings. So that’s the second part in the secret sauce.
Now, if you compare – self-love and taming triggers – to the white-knuckling control of anger management, which would you prefer?
The truth is that most people drop out of anger management programs; they can’t complete them. Others leave with a new skill: being demeaning and sarcastic to the people they would have exploded at.
Well, gee.
If you are tired of being angry, tired of hating yourself, tired of the lousy way you feel about life in general, contact me at https://drdeb.com/book, no charge. Let’s explore the things that make you angry and how you’ve tried to prevent those blowups. Let’s see how we can apply my secret sauce to work for you.
Whether we work together or not, the call itself will reveal things about yourself that you didn’t see but will recognize immediately as true when you hear them. https://drdeb.com/book
To get deeper into this information, please join my private group on Facebook and get a free gift; https://www.facebook.com/groups/LoveYourselfLoveYourMarriage