Anger blog

We aptly refer to a certain stage in infant development as “the Terrible Twos”! There is a logjam of passengers waiting to return to their seats on the plane while the young Mum handles with a superb gentleness, the raw expression of rage and anger in her little two year old daughter.

I make a special effort to try and store away in my memory a recording of the sound of that wise Mum’s voice and her words. My hope is that just before I am about to go into my own next meltdown and the next time I desperately need to embrace and contain my up-surging anger then I will be able to replay in my head her soothing calm voice:

“Okay. You are just about to have a melt-down”.

Followed by her little commentary on the circumstances:

“Here you are on the station platform and Northern Rail have once again, cancelled the 8.23 train!”

There is an extraordinary serendipity about the scenario that has just played itself out before me on my plane journey to Granada. I have been sat here in my seat and writing in my notebook about the nature of anger. These enquiries have become an intellectual exploration in part about the nature forbearance. Wow! The young Mum’s handling of her youngster’s rage has just shown me the emotional expression of such forbearance.  What I had jotted down in my notebook was headed: ”Nowhere to hide”. These thoughts explore the possibility that negative feelings like anger and rage do not necessarily have to be expressed in angry words and gestures for them to affect others around me. There is really nowhere to hide: our inner states are albeit, subconsciously, registered and known to others. I had reflected on the way that anger is usually mirrored back to us and I had just written in my journal that it would take a higher human being not to react back with counter-anger and who could, by holding back from their own reactivity, maybe help me to contain my anger and perhaps then, to move the energy of that anger in a less self-destructive and positive direction.

In my recent writings there was at least a glimmer of understanding and appreciation of the huge effort of attention required to bring myself to focus and to consider what are the payoffs for my own ego’s emotional reactivity. To have an ego is the necessary qualification to be human. It is oh-so-easy to be led by the ego’s manipulative and controlling ways. It is a huge effort to step back and observe its machinations. Frantic efforts to use anger to manipulate and control had just had a very raw expression in how when the controlling human ego is first newly formed, such anger unfolds early in life. How it is handled at an early stage must be crucial. If the manipulative, controlling intention pays off and, if it gets the attention, if it gets the reaction, if it achieves the result, then patterns are laid down for life. I have a dim but developing understanding and appreciation that looking directly at the manipulative intent and the anticipated payoffs of my ego’s emotional reactivity is a very Big Call indeed. I have begun to understand that to move on from such limiting patterns requires a huge nonjudgmental forbearance and understanding. The bitter truth is that I cannot fight and resist these patterns, and neither  can I bring a heavy judgment to bear down on them. If I do it will only make the reactivity stronger.

I am considering what might have happened if the young Mum had in the trying circumstances “lost it” and responded angrily to her youngster’s Terrible Twos outburst. The situation rapidly becomes an out and out war in a battle of wills. Willfulness is such a really important issue here. It seems that only a different expression of human will: Willingness can open up to real change. Such a willingness to embrace and contain anger leads to the obviously higher positive quality of forbearance and self-understanding. What had just played itself out before my eyes was an even higher positive human expression: that of unconditional love.

Something has just lit-up my ruminations! The truth of it is that I had pushed the possibility of developing a constructive relationship with anger to a remote and distant place and time. I had been considering it as a higher capacity, one that belong to a higher being. I am caricaturing a little here but I had placed these higher possibilities in the hands of some distant Sage, a man with a long grey beard in a very remote Temple somewhere in the Orient. In its perfection the Universe has presented me with a very different teaching: that it is something that is as close as the young woman sitting three aisles back who has being struggling in the last hour with her tetchy and over tired youngster.

Bring it in even closer: perhaps it is in the person alongside with whom I showed 50 years of marriage. The trip is part of our Golden wedding celebration.

Bring it even closer again: maybe it is beating in my chest directly beneath my head full of tussling thoughts about anger in my life. It seems that a liberated future free of limiting negative emotions begins in two places: here and now!