Whether or not we recognize it, each of us constitutes an organic whole. We can’t somehow separate out our emotional pain from our physical being, our mental acuity, and our spiritual focus. When painful emotions overtake us, we can expect to experience physical discomfort (that ‘heartache’ again), mental dullness or confusion, and spiritual aridity. The entirety of our personhood goes into retreat from a condition we might call ‘feelings deprivation.’ Pain is big. It’s so big that it fills our inner space to the breaking point. It leaves no room for anything else. Ordinarily, we have room for many emotions at the same time: joy, excitement, anticipation, intimacy can all together share the same emotional space and still leave room for more, like anxiety or fear. Not so with pain. When it settles in, there’s no room left for any other feelings. We are joy-deprived. What can we do then?

Emotional pain, stretching our endurance to the breaking point, needs to be released. It needs to be let out and given its freedom. So long as we keep it pent up inside, it festers and begins to consume all our resources: our energy, our attention, our time. Emotional pain is corrosive. So long as it’s kept captive, it eats its host alive from the inside out. The ‘good news’ is that no powerful emotion (and this is no doubt the most powerful of all) can be sustained indefinitely. Eventually, even pain will wear itself out and go numb in time. However, while we’re waiting it out, real damage may be done to our organism. What price are we willing pay in terms of stress and in lost productivity while we wait for our feelings to subside? And what about the emotional cost? Even after the sharpness of pain and anger have subsided, they can still remain sullenly in the background, blocking out the emotions that we long to experience again, like joy, enthusiasm, and intimacy.

We can speed up the healing process. There are a number of approaches we can take, like talking openly and honestly with a close confidant or a therapist or mentor. Letting other people know who you are and what you’re going through is an essential part of the healing process. It’s at least one step beyond the limits of the playground of your own mind: a very dangerous place to spend unsupervised time, I’m afraid. And yet, merely talking about how you feel, difficult as it may be, has drawbacks. If you’ve been lying to yourself or deluding yourself about what’s been going on, you may succeed in convincing others to join you in your distorted view of the facts. After all, if you’ve convinced yourself of the truth of your illusion, how hard will it be to convince others? True, a very perceptive person who knows you intimately may call you on your ‘stuff,’ but, maybe not. There is a better way.

If you’re experiencing emotional pain and you’re not journaling, you should be. Thinking and talking employ similar regions of the brain (where that dangerous mental playground can be found). Writing engages different mental faculties and generates electrochemical changes. It’s much harder to lie on paper, where, no sooner have you set the words down, they stand as not-so-silent witnesses against you. Did you ever wonder why ancient societies (like the Babylonians and Hebrews) carved their laws on stone tablets? Once carved, those tablets stood as witnesses against the very people who carved them. That’s the magic of the written word. Once you’ve written it, you no longer own it. It becomes the exclusive property of the reader. If s/he doesn’t understand what you meant, or, for some reason misinterprets your meaning, that’s just too bad: it’s theirs to do with as they choose.

Writing creates a mystical dialog between the writer and the reader. This remains true even when the writer and reader are physically the same person but separated into two by the passage of time (no matter how short). The writer remains locked in the past, powerless to influence her/his work in any way. The reader lives in the flow of the present, deriving meaning from what s/he reads not only by absorbing whatever experience the writer has entombed in the words, but also creating new meanings by means of the interplay of the words and her/his own experience. That’s why foundational texts (like the religious Scriptures) can be read over and over again, and, each time, the reader will learn something new. Your writings not only stand as a witness to the person you were, they also generate a brand new truth every time they are read even if the original text was born in self-delusion. In time, a perceptive reader (even when the reader and the writer were the same person) will discern what is honest and true from what was illusion.

By writing from within your emotional pain, and writing out your emotional pain, you give yourself the gift not only of emotional expression, but also of objectivity. By appearing in words, the cycle of self-deception and self-perpetuation that feeds the emotional pain can be broken. You not only experience the catharsis of pouring your emotionality out in an expression that’s both perfectly safe and uniquely yours, you also give yourself the gift of being able to resonate with what you’ve written, saying at one time, “this is so true,” and at another, “I was kidding myself.” As it emerges, your pain begins to gain definition and to retreat within much more manageable boundaries. It no longer expands wildly, threatening to overwhelm you. You get to choose what aspects of it to own, and which to dismiss as irrelevant to the person you are now, as compared with the person you were when you wrote those words . . . even if the time that has passed is only a few minutes. Change never pauses to take a break. That’s why, “This, too, shall pass.” Do you want to ride out the pain? Then write out the pain! It’s as simple as that.

See, I feel better already!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of  reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. It seems — to the best of my ability to understand the answer — that the universe and all it contains is nothing but a mega-University that’s only function is to educate Consciousness (in all its known and unknown iterations) in just two interrelated subjects: what I’m calling the Two Great Lessons of Life. I won’t keep you hanging there in anticipation. The First Great Lesson of Life comes down to this: learning how to love. The Second Great Lesson of Life is its complement: learning how to let go. That’s it. That’s all there is. Once you’ve mastered both subjects, you’re ready to graduate. If it were only that easy.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of  providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life,  Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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“There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories
Of Christmases long, long ago”

Nostalgia — the recalling of pleasant emotions from times past — is a wonderful part of the human experience, and imparts a wonderful warmth and intimacy to the close of the calendar year, especially in latitudes where warmth and sunshine are in very short supply. Nostalgia allows us to relive moments of our past with simplicity and purity, memories stripped of the inconveniences of real life that prevented us from fully enjoying those experiences at the time. Nostalgia is a creative enterprise, a cooperative effort of the memory and the imagination, that constructs a mythical world of times gone by out of fragments of events and wishful thinking.

As an emotional vacation, nostalgia is harmless enough. Only when it becomes a way of life — as it easily can — does it become a threat to our most precious gift: the future. Nostalgia the drug, when taken in too large a dose, can cause either a compulsive longing (when a return to the “good old days” becomes our fixation) or a sense of seething indignation (when we imagine the indignities and deprivations we once suffered), or both. When nostalgia in either of these forms becomes a way of life, particularly during the midlife transition, it can effectively lock the future in a stranglehold from which it cannot escape. Then hope — not wishful thinking, but the real hope that represents trust in a loving God — suffocates as well.

Each of us is engaged in a life-or-death struggle, and what’s at stake is nothing less than our very souls. If that statement sounds like religious fundamentalism, it is actually entirely the opposite. Our human souls are essentially creative, and meant to partner with a loving Creator to design and build a future of incredible possibility. We are expressions of the conscious driving force guiding and directing the evolution of the universe, no longer on the physical plane or the animate plane but in the realm of consciousness itself. As the mystic John of the Cross wrote allegorically about spiritual growth in terms of an ascent of a mountain (in The Ascent of Mount Carmel), after a certain level of growth, “beyond here there are no paths.” All the signposts of the past point us only to this decision-point. They can point us no further. Beyond this point, we walk only in blind trust of the Power that brought us this far. This is the maturity into which the midlife transition transforms us. Spiritual maturity is no country for the feint of heart.

Lurking in the background, calling to us ever more insistently, the voice of nostalgia warns us about going forward. If the creative Spirit is driving each individual forward in his or her personal evolution, then nostalgia, pulling us away from the unknown and back toward the safe haven of our imagination-scrubbed past, represents the forces of death and decay, masquerading as safety, security, self-interest, and even righteousness. Religious fundamentalism, whether represented by radical Moslems, Hindus, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, or free-market economists, represent men and women devoid of hope and without trust in Providence, however one chooses to define It. Rather, they represent humankind in midlife crisis, seeking quick and easy answers and emotional relief from the terror of the blank page that demands their writing on it in bold letters. Seeking refuge in nostalgic traditions can be the spiritual equivalent of writer’s block.

How can we move forward then into spiritual and humanitarian maturity? Ironically, it means recapturing our lost past. The ancients well understood that all ‘history’ is a distortion. As we have often heard, ‘history’ is the story as told by the winners. All memory is distorted by the same selective memory and enhanced by a similar imagination. The ancients realized that facts are of little consequence. Only their meaning really matters. To the ancients, myth — the attempt to distill meaning from the ‘facts’ — was what had importance, the ‘facts’ were simply an assemblage of meaningless data. If your personal evolution cannot be enhanced by your experience lending some significance to the present, then your experiences in the past has become little more than an emotional tranquilizer. Rather, the lessons of the past are what they are because they have the power to challenge and drive us beyond our reticence to face the terror of the unknown, the void, our future.

Sacred Scriptures are recognized as such not because they were dictated by an executive Deity to a dumb but faithful scribe. Humanity acknowledges writings as ‘sacred’ because those writings refuse to stay frozen in the past like some engraved tablets of stone, serving only as silent witnesses against an errant population. Rather, we recognize their Divine authorship because they stubbornly refuse to stay safely boxed up in the past. No, they live and breathe and enter into dialogue with us continually. What we see there today will be different from what we saw there yesterday, because we have evolved, and the world has evolved. The Word of God cannot be nostalgic, because it constantly challenges us onward toward our destiny to become hour by hour and day by day the image and likeness of our Creator: co-creators of something (our future) out of nothing (our past). Our hope embodies our commitment to become the people that we were always meant to be: regardless of whether or not we have any conception at all of who or what that may be.

It’s the holiday season. Go ahead and take your rest with smoking jacket and slippers, a pipe, a snifter of brandy, and a sentimental old book before a roaring fire, if that’s the form your reverie takes. Saunter down the path of nostalgia and, like Scrooge on the arm of the Ghost of Christmas Past, look in on happier times and enjoy the glow of fond memories. But come back to us. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come may be fearsome and shrouded in darkness, but that is the one in whose dread eyes you will see the reflection of your true Self. For in those eyes, terrifying though they may be, you’ll find real hope. Happy holidays and God bless us, every one!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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Still, the more I experience anger in myself and others, and the more deeply I consider it, the less certain I am that anger should be classified as an emotion at all! Instead, my observations seem to indicate that anger is a pseudo-emotion, or, rather, an emotional substitute.  It seems to me that we use anger as a cover-up to hide what we’re really feeling — whatever our true emotion(s) may be. When you use anger as a mask to keep people from seeing what’s actually going on emotionally with you, it provides you a secondary (but equally important) benefit: it also hides what you’re really feeling from you. When abused children (who stuff their emotions for survival) are later taught how to identify feelings, professionals often use a simple “mad, sad, glad, scared” chart to help them. Often, this chart has drawings of faces to assist in the identification. I wonder what would happen if we simply removed the ‘mad’ category entirely. I have good reason to suggest this, even for you and me, and whether or not we were ever abused as children.

I was taught a simple but profound truth when I sought help during my own midlife crisis: that anger — particularly repressed (or ‘stuffed’) anger — blocks all other emotions, positive ones as well as negative ones. That’s why, if you ever visit a psychologist who does somatic or gestalt work, you’ll invariably find a padded bat and cushion. People store repressed emotion in the very cells of their bodies. You may not be consciously aware of the emotions that are hiding there, but your body is. Very often it will tell you by aches and pains, or by succumbing to frequent illnesses or disease (note: ‘dis-ease’). When, under the supervision of a professional, people are allowed to let their body really go in a safe environment, whacking the stuffings out of the cushion with the padded bat, the first ‘emotion’ to come pouring out is generally anger. Once the anger has been released, the emotions come unblocked, and all sorts of unsuspected feelings come pouring out.

There are many ways in which we can stuff emotions. In most cultures like ours, the show of emotion can be taken by others as well as ourselves as a sign of weakness or being out of control. For many reasons, emotions are suspect, and therefore uncomfortable. Rather than identify them, face them and express them openly, we find it easier to medicate them whenever possible. These days, our choice of anti-emotion medications is very extensive, from legal and illegal drugs and alcohol, to gambling, shopping, eating, and, our hands-down favorite, TV. From our apartment window in DC, we can look across the courtyard into the building next door, and we see a huge wall-mounted TV that is running when we get up in the morning, and it’s still running when we go to bed at night. It’s never off. These days, we can scarcely go anywhere where there’s not a TV staring us in the face. Even my cell phone a TV function on it! I think we need to face the facts: ‘information’ has become simply an excuse for providing entertainment for ourselves during every possible waking moment. Why is this so necessary, if not to avoid uncomfortable feelings?

People use medications like this to avoid having emotions. Strangely enough, that’s exactly the effect that anger has on us. Anger blocks other emotions. Furthermore, anger masks what’s really going on. I invite you to take a few minutes to think about the last few times you can remember getting really angry. Can you remember the event(s) that triggered your anger (many times, the anesthetic nature of the anger itself will cause us to forget even what made us mad)? Anger is a powerful reaction. Can you think back to what you were reacting to? Now, I invite you to ask yourself, “What was causing me to have such a strong reaction?”

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your last anger attack was a case of road rage. (Was I close?) Let’s say that you “saw white” when another driver cut you off in traffic. You know how you felt. Now, can you identify why exactly you felt that way? Was it because the other driver was ‘stupid’? No, not really. Was it because s/he behaved badly? Yet, we watch other people behave badly all the time and we don’t get upset by it. It must have been something much more personal. Did you get upset because the other driver got into your personal space? Did you see it as a personal affront and a case of disrespecting you? Were you outraged because the other driver took you for granted? Possibly. I do sometimes become annoyed when someone comes up from behind me just before a lane merge and pokes her/his car’s nose in front of me as if gaining that millionth of a second will actually accomplish something. But, generally speaking, most time you react to other people’s bad driving, isn’t it because it’s scary?

There’s my point, exactly (and it’s a point the Dr. Diamond makes really well in his book): anger is simply a convenient drug that people use to mask from others — and from themselves — what they’re really feeling. Somehow, it’s OK to get angry, when it’s not OK to feel scared, lonely, hurt, disappointed, or any number of other emotions that we’d rather not have. People in 12-step recovery are told that anger is a luxury that they cannot afford to indulge in. Evidently, derives from the fact that anger works just like any other drug: it covers up what’s really going on. And, whenever someone finds her/himself getting angry frequently, s/he will have to ‘detox’ (let go of the anger) before s/he will be able to identify what’s really happening.

Here’s something you can try, the next time you’re angry (or enraged, furious, outraged, or indignant): remove yourself from any and all distractions. Then, rather than stewing in it, use whatever methods you need to employ to release your anger (breathing deeply helps enormously). When you’ve calmed down sufficiently, get the anger-triggering event clearly in mind. Then, begin asking yourself, “Why am I feeling angry about this?” Clearly identify the new emotion that comes up. Then ask yourself, “Why am I feeling [new emotion] about this?” Do this until the real underlying reason and its accompanying emotion are very clear to you. You may not like what you find out about yourself, but that’s alright, too (we generally don’t need to mask what we find perfectly acceptable and allowable). You’ll probably come up with one of these: ‘I feel hurt’ or ‘I feel disvalued’ or (the most fundamental hidden feeling) ‘I feel scared.’

Whatever the source is, you’ll find that, once you’ve identified and faced the underlying cause and its accompanying emotion(s), you’ll no longer need to be angry and you’ll find that there’s something positive that you can do to address what’s really going on for you. Remember: nothing that you can do can change other people’s thinking or behavior. You only have the power to change yourself. By getting behind the anger, you give yourself the opportunity to do just that by identifying the underlying causes in you. In midlife, your perspective must shift from the effects that the outside world is having on you to what you need to do to behave more authentically. The most important step you can take in that process is to part the curtain of anger, annoyance and irritation and face head-on those personal issues that you might prefer not to have to face right now. I suggest that you do yourself the favor of dealing with them whenever your anger arises.

Sadly, hard experience teaches that issues left untreated remain not only to continue to haunt you, but, you pass them on to your loved ones: your spouse or partner, parents, siblings and/or children. As we enter the holiday season this year, perhaps the gift that your loved ones would most appreciate (and most benefit from) might be to stop the cover-up and to face courageously whatever issues your anger may be masking. Isn’t it worth a try?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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