Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
Being angry may be a dimly lit, cold, hard, small place…….turn it into a sanctuary by following these simple tips: plan to avoid things that make you upset by dealing with them from the ground up, learn to curb your desire to tell everyone you come into contact with all about your pain, and learn to give yourself a break from re-traumatizing yourself by not emotionally reliving your own pain every single day. Let’s get started.
The first step in learning to keep the wolves at bay is to stop feeding them. If it totally pisses you off to look for your keys, your wallet, your glasses, your handbag, your tools, or whatever it is that sets you off, designate a place where all of your stuff goes and learn to put it there so that you will know where it is. Getting organized on this primary level is the most immediate way to stop getting angry about your routines. Get a big wooden bowl, and put all of that stuff in it whenever you empty your pockets or enter the house. Keys, glasses, wallet…whatever it is that you hate looking for. Take responsibility for your stuff so that it does not kick you in the butt all the time. Deal with it from the ground up.
This is also true for appointments; use sticky notes and calendars to keep track. Tie a note on your keys to remind you about today’s stuff. Use your cell phone to make notes that remind you by sound. Write down what you do by the day in a diary notebook. Use several ways to document your exposures to things that light you up so that you can get a handle on them, even if it is just a scale of one to ten on how well the day went, “Today was a 6.” Over time, you will point out to yourself what it is that is really going on. If you had 25 notes this month on lost my keys again…..wouldn’t that be helpful to know that this is a major stressor?
If the people in your life have this issue, and that lights you up because their emergencies become your emergencies, get them a wooden bowl and make them learn how to deal with their own junk. If it is toys, then get a big box and have the stuff put in the box. Simply clearing your space so that you don’t stumble over your life is a really big help. Your peace of mind is hidden under the debris that is covering it up.
One of the first ideas that comes to mind when we get angry is what it is going to take to get people to listen to us. Some people are deaf, emotionally stone cold deaf, and they will not hear us no matter how many times we scream at them. If you find yourself threatening, “This is the last time I am going to tell you,” then you have to listen to yourself. If you say it again, then even you did not believe you, so why should your kids, spouse, employees, or students? This means that your threats HAVE to be something you CAN carry out. If you have threatened to chop someone’s leg off, it was a joke and you were never going to do that. This is why they laugh at your threats. If it was to take the big screened TV back to the store if they fought over the remote one more time, take the cursed thing back. It is not bringing the promised joy and entertainment into your house as promised by the commercial. Your family did not really appreciate it. You will not have to do this many times before they get the message. If you want to be heard, say it with a calm voice and mean exactly what you say. Don’t be a liar. Do what you say and say what you mean to do.
That being said, let’s be honest with ourselves: How many people in the world are really going to listen to your sad story? If you have tried to explain your life to your family members and your spouse and your boss and your friends and your congregation, and your bowling team, maybe you have been milking that story long enough. More likely, you never really got anyone to listen to you at all and you may never get anyone in your immediate circle to do that for you. Yes, that is totally messed up! Why won’t anyone listen to you? Maybe they can’t really listen to you. They hear you shouting at the top of your lungs, but they can’t understand a single word you are saying. Try hiring a professional listener. Counselors are professional friends we hire to listen deeply to our inner story so that they can act as sounding boards and help us communicate our truths to ourselves. Hire a new best friend whom you can trust to do that job willingly and on demand. Get your real needs met.
Who cuts the barber’s hair? You are busy all day long making sure that everyone else gets their own personal needs met, and at the end of the day, you are drained and just need to relax. Can’t your family understand; do you have to tell them every day, “I am exhausted and I need some rest just to recover.” Well, the truth is, you do such a great job doing everything for them that they have literally grown dependent on you. You have spoiled them. Then need you to do everything for them. If you find yourself saying, “I worked hard all day and I just need some peace of mind,” then you have over-spent your energy. Back away from working so hard. If you say you can’t, then you are headed for burn out. If this leads you into anger or panic attacks, then you are the source of your stress yourself. You have to know when to say when before you go into critical. Do you think they will love you more if you go into a full blown rage over your having been stressed out? Will it kill anyone or will someone be absolutely disappointed to death if you do not do that extra 500 things? Relax before you get to the boiling point by knowing how far you can bend before you break.
Lastly, let’s think about what your anger costs you and how much you get out of it. If I told you that your water bill was going to be a $1000 dollars, you would be fine with that if you were filling your swimming pool, because it was for a good cause. But if this were unexpected and went on like that every month, you would really question the need of that. You might get upset. You might go ballistic! You might feel financially devastated. When we face risks, there are real costs that we might incur. If these are necessary, or if they are acceptable risks, then we take it in stride. Many times we take risks but we will only accept ONE outcome: Perfect success. What are the chances that EVERYTHING will turn out perfectly great every time? No flat tires. No medical problems? No changing economy? And yet, we plan for everything to go absolutely perfect with no margin of error. And so we have a failure! And we feel like it only happens to us. Everyone else gets a break and we get stuck. If you are a low risk person, that is, you do not tolerate mess ups or failure very well, then you have to play your cards closer and take less chances. If you find yourself screaming, “Oh, NO!!!!!” more often than a few times a year, then you are not very risk tolerant and you are taking too many chances. More often than not, we are not super- careful in our analysis and planning. We have a messed up plan, and it increases the chances that things will fail. Stop doing that to yourself. You hate failure! Make a plan that is so sound you can hear success. Not a roll of the dice or a luck of the draw. Work smaller and do more with less. If you put all your eggs in one basket and it drops, you are done and this will totally piss you off…at yourself!
Anger is manageable, but more than that it is treatable and curable. Am I saying that anger is a disease? In a way, “Yes.” It’s a dis-ease of the mind and heart, and I think that we can do a lot to calm ourselves down without suppressing ourselves by clamming ourselves up. Lay your cards on the table of life and play the game with an open hand. Stop betting the farm, and let’s see if we can’t have a little piece of heaven right here, with some peace of mind.
runningturtle87
