Reacting with Anger / Identifying with an emotion
If an article catches my eye, I often will rip it out and place it in a huge box in my office. The other day I was flicking through the top layer and came across an article from last June.
The article talked about a man who had got angry with someone who he thought had been abusive to his wife in a supermarket car park. "That's the man", said his wife. Filled with rage the man lunged forward and attacked the wrong person. This innocent man later died in hospital.
Actually, what he experienced happens quite a lot. What I mean is that the man started to identify with his emotion… no longer was he, “I feel angry”… but he became “I am angry” – even the language we use shows the shift.
On a similar note – just because we feel something doesn’t mean it is real. Maybe your wife has been very busy lately at work and preoccupied at home. So you think, “Oh she doesn’t love me.” You feel it, but that doesn’t make it true. We must discover what is the reality? The reality is your wife is working too hard. What is important then is not blame or anger, or insecurity, but how can I help her? Also by understanding why I immediately jumped to thinking she doesn’t love me can teach us a lot about who we are, and help us become more mature.
As far as the supermarket man goes and anger as an example …. If we feel anger or a strong negative emotion, we have three options.
We can vent the anger, like this man.
We can suppress it.
Both these will cause problems. I don’t mean that venting is never right – sometimes in the right circumstance… but mostly it causes problems.
The third option is to disperse the anger.
To disperse the again you need to separate yourself from it, not identify yourself with it. Look at the emotion like it was a burning fire, and then stop fuelling it. As soon as we stop fuelling it, it won’t last.
A student told me that a young man had tried to spit at someone on a bus. He missed the person and the bus and instead the spit landed on my student. Most people would be angry… “what did you do this to me for!” But it wasn’t a personal attack – wrong place, wrong time. If we take it personally then we are stoking the fire.
The article talked about a man who had got angry with someone who he thought had been abusive to his wife in a supermarket car park. "That's the man", said his wife. Filled with rage the man lunged forward and attacked the wrong person. This innocent man later died in hospital.
Actually, what he experienced happens quite a lot. What I mean is that the man started to identify with his emotion… no longer was he, “I feel angry”… but he became “I am angry” – even the language we use shows the shift.
On a similar note – just because we feel something doesn’t mean it is real. Maybe your wife has been very busy lately at work and preoccupied at home. So you think, “Oh she doesn’t love me.” You feel it, but that doesn’t make it true. We must discover what is the reality? The reality is your wife is working too hard. What is important then is not blame or anger, or insecurity, but how can I help her? Also by understanding why I immediately jumped to thinking she doesn’t love me can teach us a lot about who we are, and help us become more mature.
As far as the supermarket man goes and anger as an example …. If we feel anger or a strong negative emotion, we have three options.
We can vent the anger, like this man.
We can suppress it.
Both these will cause problems. I don’t mean that venting is never right – sometimes in the right circumstance… but mostly it causes problems.
The third option is to disperse the anger.
To disperse the again you need to separate yourself from it, not identify yourself with it. Look at the emotion like it was a burning fire, and then stop fuelling it. As soon as we stop fuelling it, it won’t last.
A student told me that a young man had tried to spit at someone on a bus. He missed the person and the bus and instead the spit landed on my student. Most people would be angry… “what did you do this to me for!” But it wasn’t a personal attack – wrong place, wrong time. If we take it personally then we are stoking the fire.
posted by Tammy Parlour at 7:03 AM
2 comments
