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:
I have just left my dojang after an intense lesson in frustration. I 'felt' inadequate and incapable of defending myself from the attacks my instructor was administering. Out of this feeling, I began getting annoyed and frustrated and started to try and 'hurt' him. I too became the emotion rather than separating myself from it. The reality is that holding on to that emotion led to my frustration and having a closed mind than an open one. It had become very personal.
After class, my instructor gave me a pep talk and sent me on my way. Now that I am past it, I can begin to grow. But he also said that I can expect to have a few more of those 'tutorials'in my future...oh, joy! But it was a good thing that I learned that in the dojang and not out 'in a supermarket car park'.
The Supermarket Man and sensing the truth and reality and the lines that blur between them ring a definite echo in my mind.
Sublimation of Anger and Ego, Pride and Blame is, as you have described, a dispersion; a quelling of the flames by alteration of the fuel or catalyst.
Sometimes this is by removing something, others by adding.
Either way is an expression of an internal, emotive process - externalised so that it can become real...
Though not in the form it may have been originally.
A complex emotion such as Anger can manifest itself, as an expression, in as many forms as there are in an imagination. Something that only requires an awareness, which we all possess and the desire to create.
To Create even Destruction.
I have always found music and dance - Martial Art having it's own, internal rhythms and undulating technique - to be particularly effective if ever I have allowed myself to embody Anger and become Resentful.
A single sound: One note can change everything.
It can start crass, enharmonic and distorted yet through the listener's ear find form and meaning that is beyond it's singular self.
It can be joined or It can remain alone; It can change or the ear may change.
Even if the note remains the same, one thing that always is in flux is the sustain - time.
The note may swell or it may fade. It is still the same note, but different meanings are brought upon it now.
They may be real meanings or imagined. True or not.
What matters most is that there has been the change.
The Anger may have become a Climactic crashing of waves of energy - floating through the air - to a single violin, singing it's peace and harmony as it fades into nothing more than a memory of that sound...
The same tone, the same ear, what has changed is it's perception.
Beethoven was Deaf and he created works of auditory masterpiece that I shall never forget.
I can feel their pulse in my fingertips as I raise my hand in the Martial Dance.
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