Do You Know How To Use Your Anger?
Like a fire that grows beyond what you need to give you warmth and light, anger can grow beyond its ability to serve you. You can choose to use it or extinguish it. For some with ADD, anger can get in your way. Don’t let anger get in your way!
Anger Is Useful
Use it first! To be human means to feel anger at injustices and wrongdoing. Anger, the feeling, is not bad or good. It just is… an emotion. An emotion that can give you information, if you choose to listen.
Hopefully, you will choose not to run away from it because you fear the way you may act on your anger. It will come oozing out sideways, until you decide what to do with it.
Do you know what I mean? Have you ever tried to ignore your feelings? What happens?
What you choose to do with your interpretation of the feeling, the information, can serve you and others. So, listen to it, and then choose.
What Can You Do With Anger?
Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy. Aristotle
Being intentional about what you do with your anger allows you to be in charge, instead of your anger “running” you.
1. Choose not be angry, if you can. How long do you want to hold on to the anger when someone cuts you off in traffic? Learn from your reaction. Practice responding how you would like, instead. Go for a run, and get rid of the visceral feeling that may well up inside of you.
2. Choose to act and address the wrong doing or injustice. Speak out, work for change, ask for what you want!
3. Choose to be angry for a time, allow it to dissipate and then forgive. This is, perhaps the hardest! It is not about condoning or forgetting. There are some acts that will never be right. Remember and learn from what happened.
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. Buddha
Choose not to let it consume you in its flames. Forgive so that you can be whole.
