Ep 01: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Welcome to the first episode of From Pissed Off to Poised! 

If you’re a busy woman—whether you’re juggling a career, saving lives as a physician, or managing the chaos of motherhood—this episode is designed just for you. We’re diving deep into how to transform that all-consuming anger into mindful control.

Anger can feel overwhelming and, at times, it can become our automatic response to stress and frustration. In this episode, I’ll share my personal journey of how anger crept into my life, becoming an unwelcome habit that colored my interactions and decision-making. I’ll discuss how recognizing what activated my anger was the first step in understanding my emotional landscape and how self-compassion played a crucial role in my transformation.

Together on this podcast, we’ll explore practical tools and techniques to help you reduce reactivity and cultivate a sense of calm amidst the chaos. You’ll learn how to acknowledge your feelings without letting them control you, paving the way for more balanced and joyful experiences in your life.

Join me as we kick off this empowering journey toward emotional resilience. And if you know anyone who could benefit from these insights, please share the podcast! Let’s support each other in embracing a more poised and peaceful way of intentional living.

What You’ll Learn:

• How anger can become a habitual and automatic response
• Why mindful awareness is the first crucial step towards reclaiming a more joyful life
• Why self-compassion is essential in addressing and breaking the cycle of anger, regret, and repetition
• Building awareness around what triggers anger and practicing steps to regain control

Featured on the Show: 

• Learn about Arpita's next Circle of Six Small Group Coaching Cohort HERE.
• Learn more about Dr. Arpita Gupta DePalma's programs with Thought Work, MD, including 1-to-1 coaching for individuals, group coaching cohorts for organizations, and her online self-study courses HERE.
• Transforming Your Anger From Reaction to Response Online Self Study Course with Dr. Arpita Gupta DePalma.

Transcript

Hi friends, this is Dr. Arpita Gupta DePalma and you're listening to my podcast From Pissed Off to Poised. This show is for busy women physicians and professionals just like you who are ready to take control of their emotions while learning how to excel in juggling all the things they are responsible for in life. 

It's for overextended mamas who are trying to figure out how to work smarter, not harder. 

It's for multitasking women who are tired of playing the role of the angry and resentful air traffic controller, who simply want to learn how to create a life that is more calm, intentional and joyful for themselves. 

My goal is to help you learn how to eliminate the overwhelm and maintain your composure in high stress situations that you face with the demands in your day-to-day life. Because, I get you guys. This was totally me. 

You are not alone. I invite you to embark on your journey of transformation with me. Enjoy the listen. 

Hey there, friends, welcome to episode one, and thank you for joining me on this journey. I am going to teach you, or try to teach you, a little bit about anger and how it kind of can become all-consuming and how it can become our automatic go-to habit over time, when that has really evolved into our way of handling things in life. 

And you know, without going into too much detail in the beginning, my story. I just want to let you guys know that I've been there and I've done that with regards to showing up angry, having all the emotions that come with it after the fact: the shame, the disappointment, the regret and really want to give you guys some tips and tools on how we can start to first just build awareness. 

I always start by telling everybody in my talks and my audience that awareness is the key to making any change and that's why I really like teaching people about this first. So I'm going to give you a little bit of background so you can kind of understand where I came from and what was happening in my life (not too much detail right now) and then start diving into telling you more about anger and how it kind of shows up for us, how it becomes this little bit of an addiction in a sense, and how we can start to be a little bit more mindful of why we're showing up that way.

So, going back, as you know, I'm a physician. I'm a retired pediatrician. My husband is an interventional spine physician. We own our medical practice in Virginia and things for my career path did not follow what I would have anticipated had you asked me back in residency. I knew back in residency that I only wanted to work two to three days a week so I could take care of the kids and be present as a mom as well. 

But if you told me that I would shift careers and stop practicing clinically altogether, I would be managing a medical practice and owning a building to house that practice, as well as taking care of all the kid things-- showing up pissed off, angry, not happy, every single day, I'd be like “What are you talking about? That's not me. I'm such a happy-go-lucky person. I'm fun, I enjoy being with people.” And so, I really wouldn't have pictured myself being a very angry, resentful, frustrated person. But that's what happened after we started our medical practice back in 2011.

At that point in time, I had stopped working clinically due to an ultimatum to go full time and I decided that I'd keep looking for something else part-time in peds and in the meantime, I'd help out at my husband's new practice as the administrator, kind of making sure things were set just so and put on the right path to have a successful medical office. 

But what I really didn't realize at that time is that I had a belief that everything that I and my husband had created with regards to the practice, with our household, with you know just the impression that we were giving off to the world was that everything that we created had to be perfect, because it was reflective of me and it would impact my reputation in the community what people would think about me. 

And so, specifically with regards to the practice, this led me to working crazy hours every week. Mind you, when I was doing peds, I was working two days a week, so it wasn't too much. I was still able to balance home life and take care of the kids and be present where I wanted to be.

But when I left that practice and then I was taking on more time at the medical office, I found myself not trusting other people's work product. I always thought I was the only one who could get things done properly, especially the first time, and I kept working harder and harder. And despite how hard I tried, I really wasn't satisfied with the results that I was creating, because nothing ever was really good enough, nothing was perfect, right? And so, I had to keep working harder just to get things to be better. 

And I didn't really see that this bar that I had set for myself and my husband and this practice was simply unrealistic and I couldn't rest and these beliefs and these thoughts about how much we had to work, how hard we had to work, how it always had to be perfect, really was taking a toll on me physically. 

This went on for 10 years and I can tell you by the time I started to have some awareness about it and started making some changes, my blood pressure was through the roof. I'm slim, I'm pretty active, but my blood pressure was out of control.

I was stressed. I was constantly in an activated state where we'll talk about, where you sense this kind of buzzing in your body, where you just can't relax and settle that glitter. I had headaches. I had body aches. I had trouble sleeping through the night because of all the urgent thoughts of the things that still had to get done and I didn't want to forget them. I remember waking up multiple times and getting up and going and writing things down on my table because I was so stressed that by the time morning came, I would have forgotten what needed to be done. 

So unhealthy.

I was always on edge. I was irritable. I had this increasing frequency of anger outbursts at home with the kids, with my husband, with the vendors that we worked for, with the contractors at the house. I really started to notice that I felt like shit. I was unhappy. 

I didn't even notice that I was unhappy until I sat with it for a moment and that hamster wheel of constantly doing and running and feeling that urgency led to this underlying resentment, frustration, anger. That was always there and that looked like me having outbursts with the kids, being unhappy. You know, just never really thinking things were good enough. I started to realize that I didn't like the way I was showing up. 

I think it was before COVID that I started noticing that I wasn't happy, and I even remember my husband saying to me you're not happy anymore. And I just was like what is he talking about? I don't know what he means by that. I'm happy. I'm fine. Things are FINE. I'm just like going. This is what happens with life, right? This is what happens when you have kids and you're busy and you're doing all the things. 

And then COVID happened and with COVID it forced us to have this hard stop where I was really truly able to reflect. And what I realized was I didn't like the way I had been showing up. And even though I realized I didn't like the way I was showing up, I still would be doing it.

It was like it was giving me this false sense of power, this sense of control over situations that I didn't feel I had any control over. I felt like my voice, every time I got angry or loud or screamed or yelled, that it would get people to listen to me. It would make people listen to me. It would make people do the things that I wanted them to do, primarily my kids and my husband. And it was kind of actually kind of weirdly creating this dopa hit for me. 

So, even though it didn't really feel great that I was angry, even during and after the fact, it was creating that sense of pleasure,(false pleasure), by hitting me with that dopa hit, with making me feel like I had that control or power in the situations where I didn't. And this type of feeling good, which is kind of ironic there when I felt angry, felt better than whatever other crappy feelings I was feeling at that moment.

So, it was making sense why anger had become this habit, because every time something came up that set me off that surge of dopa with the false sense of control that I received when I got angry was the drive to keep doing it over and over again. And don't get me wrong. I've said it. I regretted the way I behaved. And, I promised myself that I wouldn't do it again. Next time I would handle it differently. 

But inevitably, when that situation came up again, when the kids brought home a bad grade, when they didn't do their chores, or whatever it was that set me off with the office people not getting their work done or doing it incorrectly, inevitably I wasn't really able to control that urge to be angry and it happened again. All over again, and then I felt worse. So, it became this vicious cycle of having the anger reaction, and this became my habit, and I didn't even realize that the anger had gradually become my way of avoiding things that I didn't enjoy dealing with.

So, this is kind of the cycle and I don't know if it sounds familiar to you guys, if you've kind of felt this “Why can't I get out of this?” This vicious loop of being angry, regretting it and then doing it all over again despite promising ourselves that we wouldn't do it again the next time. 

It was especially problematic and painful for me because I'm a pediatrician and I'm a mom and it's so counterintuitive to what you would expect a loving pediatric mom to look like, right? I was super ashamed that I was showing up this way at all, much less with my own kids. 

So, I want to just pause here before we go on, just to let you guys know that this is the part where we have to give ourselves compassion, we have to give ourselves grace, because it happens to all of us. 

Anger is a secondary emotion for the most part. It's also our body's way of alerting us that something is threatening us, that we're in danger. So, the reason we have anger makes sense. It's all part of our evolution for keeping ourselves protected and safe and it can get a little bit excessive if we've fallen into the habit of anger. This is where we're going to pause and just have the opportunity to build the awareness around how we are currently showing up and how we want to change, if we want to change, to show up in a way that's much more productive. 

For me, this awareness came after COVID, when we had that pause, when the kids were home, when I realized that I had a year and a half left with my daughter being at home before she left for school, for college, and I was driving her farther and farther away with these reactions that I was having. And, yes, we were all stressed. We all were dealing with COVID and the stressors of it in different ways. 

We had to shut down our practice for eight weeks and when we reopened, within three months, we lost almost a hundred percent of our staff. The kids felt that. They felt our frustrations at home. So, it makes sense why everybody is impacted by various stressors in life, and we can show up in a way that actually doesn't cause more of a trickledown effect. 

But for me, my drive, like I said, was my daughter leaving and I wanted to make sure that I was cultivating a relationship with her where she actually wanted to come home and hang out with us when she didn't have to. And so I started talking to my friend from residency, Melissa, about all the crappy thoughts that were going through my head how I was showing up at home with the kids, how I was tired of my dependability being dependent on that of other people, i.e. our staff members, who were not showing up for us, and I really started to recognize that, how I was thinking about situations in my life was creating, ultimately, the results I was creating in my life. 

And for me, that powerful moment was realizing that my thought that “My dependability was so dependent on other people”, and I didn't like that, was causing me to show up in a way that was not dependent on my way with my kids at home. 

It was causing me to show up in a way that was leading me to be angry and frustrated and not supportive of my kids at home and they couldn't depend on me. So, this is where I started my journey with coaching, and I'm not going to dive into too much about coaching today other than just kind of giving you guys a little bit of an idea of how it impacted me and how it can impact you.

With coaching, I realized that my worth was not tied to the products I was creating with regards to my work and my career. That I was already a hundred percent worthy and valuable, just as I was, with regards to my work and my career. That I was already 100% worthy and valuable, just as I was, for being who I was, with all the mistakes that came with it. So just because I wasn't a doctor didn't mean I wasn't worthy. Just because I wasn't practicing as a doctor didn't mean I wasn't worthy anymore. I had to shift that thought, because that had become so ingrained with me, to how I was brought up from childhood. As you know, “You have to have an honorable, respectable career, you have to work hard, you have to study hard. You got to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer”, whatever it was. These thought errors that I had from childhood in my brain were leading me to believe that the only way I was worthy is if I had become one of those things. So, I had to unwind all that stuff in my brain. 

Number two, it doesn't matter what people think about me. It didn't matter what I had to show for my success. What really just mattered was my belief in myself that I am invaluable, as I showed up perfectly imperfect.

Another area that I really worked on a lot for myself was this urgency that I was creating in my life day-to-day. The need to get things done with perfectionism tendencies. Because, I had again created this belief that I was only valuable when I made things spot on and perfect. Because everybody in the world had to think that I was doing things well. And that positive reinforcement, that external validation, is what made me feel good. 

I slowly started to recognize that I needed to create internal validation. That's all that I really needed to do, and with that I started to let things go. I started to learn that what mattered most was loving yourself first, taking care of yourself first and allowing your crappy days to just be crappy without having to fix everything, because we're all human and we all make mistakes. 

And this transformation didn't happen overnight. It took time and practice. I had to really practice being the observer of my own mind, noticing how I was choosing to think about things that I was facing each day in the world, and then deciding intentionally what viewpoint and perspective I wanted to take on that would no longer lead me down my usual path of anger.

So, I'm going to talk a little bit about anger itself. When anger is present for us, when we feel anger, it's usually because it feels better than some of the other crappy emotions that we're feeling. And so, what do I mean by that with anger feeling better, even though anger doesn't feel great? Once we start feeling angry and we have anger reactions to situations in our life, we kind of know what to expect, we know what's coming next, we know how it ends up, and a lot of times that comfort of the familiarity of anger is what becomes our go-to. Because some of the other emotions that we can feel, such as sadness, disappointment, shame, all the other negative ones, we don't always necessarily know what it's going to feel like. 

We don't know how bad it's going to feel, how long we're going to be stuck in it, or any of those factors. And so, once we've started jumping to anger instead of avoiding those other emotions, we kind of get used to it and we just go with the path. That's predictable, and this is how it becomes a learned habit over time. When we have recurrent exposures to the things that tend to set us off, it becomes familiar, automatic, comfortable. 

It becomes this automatic neural pathway that gets stronger and stronger, and it's simply easier to do this than to feel any of those other negative emotions. And so that's why I talk about anger never being the most important emotion or the most relevant emotion, because it's really the very outer edge or the top layer, covering up a much deeper feeling. And that much deeper feeling oftentimes is just fear, including the fear of feeling other negative emotions.

I think we all are familiar that anger is nature's way of giving us an alert, of telling us that something is off, that we're under attack or that there's some sort of threat. It's telling us to watch out for our safety, and this can be a normal, basic response because it's the brain is doing its job with regards to trying to keep us safe, and so we have jumped to anger as the alert system for us. 

And when we lose basic trust in other people, when we feel like people are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, when we feel like things are not going our way, it threatens our security, it threatens our survival in a sense, and that's how we start to go down that pathway that something is off, it's an indicator that something isn't right. 

But unfortunately, when this becomes out of proportion and in today's day and age, the anger that we feel is a lot of times out of proportion to the actual issue at hand. There's not a face eating bear coming to attack us, and we don't need to be angry to respond back. Anything that's in our environment, physical or emotional, is responded to with the same intensity, and that's where anger can become a hindrance. 

Okay, because when we are angry and it becomes a habit to get angry, we start to believe that the things that we are perceiving in our world are factual and true, even when they're not. We kind of get the skewed sense of reality.

My path led me to focus on this work after I realized that my time was running out with my girl and I was saying that with regards to her going to college, I wanted them to come home and be with us, and I didn't really think that I was fostering an environment where that was going to be automatic. I felt embarrassed. 

After I had these outbursts, I noticed I would not hold back when I had a situation that set me off or activated me, and that's what started my journey towards building my awareness, to learn more about why anger was there, what was setting me off, and then how I could make a change. And that's what I want to focus on with you guys, a change.

I want to focus on my episodes teaching you how to practice to control your anger reactions, but not only practice that to really number one and, first and foremost, build your awareness on when and why you get activated or set off. And then we will work towards putting steps in place that will help you take back your control. 

And this work it's not easy. It's hard on multiple levels because, number one, we have to admit to being angry and that requires us to be vulnerable and it requires us to feel maybe some feelings of shame or disappointment that we have with that. So, there are multiple steps to doing this work and they're going to be difficult, and you can do it. It's not easy and, you can do it.

I use my setbacks, even today, that I still have. Yes, believe it or not, I still get angry, I still lose my cool, I still lose my shit with my kids here and there. But I use each one of those opportunities as chances for me to grow further, for me to build my awareness, to kind of start to notice why that situation in particular set me off again to old patterns and habits. Because even though I don't like the way I'm showing up in the heat of the moment, after doing this work for all these years, I know that it's going to be a learning opportunity for me so that the next time it happens I'm going to be maybe less reactionary and a little bit more in control. 

I know I've talked a little bit about the underlying feelings and for me- specifically I've mentioned the urgency of getting things done, the perfectionism, the shame around not practicing, disappointment and things not happening my way. Those are my most common underlying feelings that I was trying to avoid when I became angry and no one wants to admit it. We've talked about that. No one wants to admit that they're angry. Everybody's embarrassed and hopes the windows are closed so nobody could hear them yelling inside when someone’s standing outside on the sidewalk.

And I'm going to just offer to you that the first step for you is just acknowledging that it's there and giving yourself love, compassion and grace for doing the work and being interested in making a change. I remember I had one client tell me that she was super scared of her own self because she was yelling at her husband, and she could not believe how quote quote “demonic” her voice sounded when she was yelling at him. It scared her. When she was yelling at him, it scared her. 

And so, for her to be comfortable to tell me that story, to explain to me how she was feeling in that moment and how she was feeling now when she reflected back, really required her to be vulnerable and open and be willing to share. And so, I commend you, as I commended her, for being able to do that, for having the courage to say something isn't good here. I don't like the way this is. I know I can do better. I'm going to admit that this is something I want to change.

It's uncomfortable work. It can be super, super gratifying once you get it done. All right, you get to choose. Do you want to stay in the discomfort of having the anger reactions over and over, or do you want to opt into the discomfort of doing the work, being vulnerable and working through all the other emotions that are going to come with this work to get to a place where you're able to be your best self? 

I want to remind you that my goal with this podcast is to shed some light on why some of us have become so quick to anger and how we can start to build awareness around what is setting you off or activating you when you begin to hand down those anger spirals, so that you can be more intentional with how you want to show up rather than reactionary. So, I want you to maybe spend some time thinking about the past week, maybe the past month, where you showed up angry, and what the situation was and what you were thinking when that anger popped up for you.

I'm also going to talk a little bit at the second half of this podcast series about time management. Because one of the things I realized was that the urgency or time scarcity sensation was really what was causing me to get angry at times like that. I had to hurry up and get everything done. So I've also created this time management course where I want to share this with everybody. Because once I figured out how to keep my things on my schedule and get things done and be realistic and kind to myself as well, I was able to honor all of the commitments I was making, including the commitments to myself, and it just felt so much more peaceful. 

I was in a much more relaxing space. This is how we're going to create a life of intention and joy. We're going to work on awareness number one. That's your first step. That's your homework. 

All right, I look forward to hearing more from you guys’ next week. 

If this podcast is resonating with you, please share it with people who think it might help- whomever you feel might really benefit from getting some tips on how to make a change. 

All right, Take care, guys. We'll see you next week.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode of From Pissed Off to Poised. Remember, transformation is a journey, not a destination, so enjoy the ride. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review from Pissed Off to Poised on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback supports my mission to get this podcast out to help other women, physicians and professionals like you on their path to creating a more peaceful life with more intention and more joy. I enjoy reading every message I get with your input and feedback on my journey, so keep them coming. And if you have a friend who might enjoy the listen, please share this episode and show with them. 

Lastly, if you want to learn more about my coaching programs and course offerings, check out my website at www.thoughtworkmd.com. Feel free to reach out to me to learn more about investing in yourself through one-to-one coaching so you can start living the life you've always wanted. 

This show is for general educational and entertainment purposes only. 

Life coaching is not a substitute for therapy or medical treatment.