Ep 03: More Awareness Behind the "Why"

In the previous episode, several listeners requested that I demonstrate how to use the Uplevel Your Awareness Around Anger worksheet with an example. I thought this was a fantastic idea, so in today’s episode, I’ll do just that. I’ll show you how simple and effective these questions can be for enhancing your ability to observe your own mind and body, helping you make meaningful changes.

We’ll explore how we tend to react, avoid, or resist anger and how to develop awareness of the underlying emotions driving these responses. I’ll also share tips on managing anger from a more intentional and responsive place in challenging situations, particularly in relationships where feelings of disrespect might trigger immediate reactions.

Join me as I guide you through additional steps to build awareness around your emotional patterns, helping you manage your reactions more effectively and approach daily interactions with greater calm and intention.

What You’ll Learn:

• Utilize tools such as the anger worksheet provided in the show notes to identify and reflect on your anger activators.
•  Recognize and interrupt automatic thought patterns that lead to anger reactions.
•  Understand the role of mirror neurons and cultivate self-compassion to better manage anger.
• Identify and address reasons why we have become quick to anger, why they make sense, and the first step to change.

Featured on the Show: 

• Watch Arpita's introductory webinar on how to Uplevel Your Awareness Here
• Download Arpita's worksheet on Uplevel Your Awareness Around Anger HERE

• 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 back to another episode of From Pissed Off to Poised. I hope you all have had a restful week and had a little chance to do some reflection around the questions that I brought up at the end of the last episode. Just to recap, those questions were, in what situations do you find yourself to be activated? And then, what cues do you have in your body that alert you that you're starting to become angry? 

So, I hope you had some time. Like I said, I am going to really drive this home. It's going to sound like I am a broken record, but that first step to change is awareness, and that is always where we need to start, and that's why I'm drilling you with these questions and really encouraging you to spend some time reflecting there. 

Because that's the first step to changing your life. We talked a lot about why we show up angry and how we try to avoid feeling other negative feelings by choosing anger instead, because that's become our kind of go-to habit. 

And you know, when I first realized that I was doing this, it totally blew my mind. I had no awareness whatsoever that this was the pattern that I had developed. My brain had figured out that it didn't like me feeling sad or disappointed or under pressure or like I wasn't contributing. 

And so, instead of feeling any of these crappy feelings, my brain decided to protect me by choosing to feel the anger instead. Because even though that anger didn't feel great, it certainly seemed to feel better than those other shitty feelings and it let me feel like I had some sort of control over the situation, even though I really didn't. And it helped me feel like I was retaining some form of power in that situation in some way, even though I probably really didn't. 

So, since that episode, some of you have reached out and asked that I go through the worksheet questions using one of my examples. I thought that was a great idea, and then I'm going to go ahead and try to do that for you today. 

So, if we go to that worksheet, number one list your most common anger triggers or activators, situations that set you off, and so I'm going to use the example that I gave about anything that reminded me that I was not practicing clinically or playing doctor anymore. 

Okay, so those situations, anything with the flavor of that or what my mind was making out to mean that would start to get me in that anger spiral. And so, this did require a lot of self-reflection, and that's what I did with my coach. Because that's when I figured out that when any of these scenarios would pop up, it would make me not feel good about myself, make me feel like I wasn't contributing, I wasn't valuable, I wasn't worthy because I was no longer practicing. 

And so, situations where I was with my parents and they might have asked me like, “Are you going to go back to medicine” or “Are you practicing in any way? Is there any other way you could do the doctoring too?” Those situations made me feel like I was a disappointment. And it really wasn't the situation itself. 

As we teach, it was my thought that I am disappointing my parents that would make me feel disappointed. Anytime somebody asked me “Are you ever going to go back to practicing clinically? You're not leaving that job. You've got to do something. Once your kids go off to college, what are you going to do if you're not practicing medicine?” 

So, any situation where people would ask me what do I do. Even meeting new people. They ask “What do you do for a living?” and I would be ashamed to say “I'm not really practicing, even though I am a doctor”. So those scenarios would make me feel ashamed of myself or make me have thoughts that would make me feel ashamed about myself, and so I had to be cognizant of that. 

Other areas that brought up the anger is, you know, these again are just scenarios that my brain would create that weren't really true. I would be worried about what people would think about me, about me not working anymore. Had I been terminated? Did patients not like the care I was giving? Did I make mistakes? 

So, all of these crappy scenarios that my brain would think up, imagine up, would lead me to feel ashamed again and concerned and worried about what people would think about me and I would be just, in general, angry, frustrated, irritable. So those are some scenarios that kind of are more ideas and thoughts that came into my head and that is one way how your anger can show up for you. 

Another way for me with this same scenario was specifically in the office with my husband. I remember before I had any sort of coaching or guidance that you know, as I had mentioned, I had become more and more enmeshed in my husband's practice in that admin role and I was working a lot with him and, mind you, we did med school together. We were gross anatomy partners and so we've worked together for a very long time and really never had issues. 

But in the office, whenever I would be interacting with him, what I started honing in on and seeing / finding confirmation bias in was the fact that anytime I would offer an idea or anytime I would make a suggestion, my husband would unintentionally cut me off at times. Not every time, but sometimes, and I would make that mean that he didn't respect me, he had no interest in what I was bringing to the table and that my contribution was no longer valuable because I wasn't practicing as a doctor. 

And that really, as you can imagine, was not very helpful, because that's what sent me down the anger spiral. Because my thought when he would cut me off is that he doesn't respect me, and that ultimately led me to have an outburst, storm out of the room, not engage, shut down, and have arguments with him at home afterwards. 

Essentially, all those ways that I was showing up resulted in me behaving in a way that I did not respect myself. (I would never act like that with any other supervisor.) It's just because he was my husband. And, in actuality, he was dealing with his own shit, his own urgency for getting things done, his own air traffic control, stress ball situation where he's managing all the things and you know he's the owner, he's a researcher, he's a fellowship director, he's creating his own integrative med practice, all the things that he was doing. 

He really had his response because in his mind he might have been thinking “I get what she's saying, I understand where she's going with this and that's not going to work for me here”, and that's why he cut me off. It really had nothing to do with me, it had nothing to do with the fact that he didn't really respect me. And so, as I started doing my work with this and starting recognizing the situations that were setting me off, I remember my coach asked me “Arpita, when he cuts you off like that, do you truly believe that he doesn't respect you? 

Do you truly think that he doesn't value your input?” That made me think, because I knew in my heart that he had nothing but respect for me, nothing but admiration for me, and by all means, would never, ever even want to do this without my support and my assistance as well. 

It's just that when those situations came up where he cut me off, my brain commonly would remember the situation or the thought that I would have that he doesn't respect me. It would go to this false belief that I had created over the years and that would send me down the anger spiral, and so that's where I had to become much more intentional about saying “You know what? I know, with true fact in my heart, that he loves me and that he respects me and he values my contribution.” 

And I have to put the pause on when these situations come up and recognize that it really has nothing to do with me. And that's what I did and that's how I started to halt or pause that automatic response down to anger that was stemmed by this false belief that he didn't respect me. I had to say “You know what? You know that he really does. He's dealing with his own things right now and it has nothing to do with you.” 

That was hard because, as you can imagine, it had become so automatic and on top of that, it's so much more saucy and fun and dramatic to believe the false thought that he doesn't respect me and get all pissed off and worked up about that. But it's more factual and relaxing to believe that he's not coming from ill intent. It's a little bit boring and that's why we don't tend to go down that pathway, because it's boring and after a while we actually have to work hard to go intentionally down that way of thinking instead. 

So, I want you to go back and reflect on your situations where you're showing up with anger that you might have listed out on that worksheet, and I want you to think about if those scenarios have now just become automatic pathways for you which aren't really true. Which, in your heart, you know you would enjoy and relish being much more peaceful in. So, to go back to the worksheet, the recap my most common anger trigger is when anything set me off in the office where I didn't think I was valuable or worthy or contributing. 

And what do I notice myself thinking as soon as I encountered this situation, i.e. my husband cutting me off?

He doesn't respect me; he doesn't think I'm valuable or worthy anymore because I'm not practicing. 

Is that thought you noticed really true? 

No, I knew for sure in my heart that it wasn't. 

Is that thought serving you? 

Hell, no, it's not serving me. Obviously, I was showing up as a raging bitch because of it and it really wasn't founded. 

If I could remove my anger, how would that thought make me feel? 

“He doesn't respect me.” 

That would make me feel hurt, that would make me feel sad. And again, those are emotions that we don't necessarily want to feel. And on top of that, it wasn't even true. 

Is there another perspective you could consider that makes you feel less angry? 

And yes, it's possible that he's dealing with a lot of shit on his plate, and this has nothing to do with me, nothing to do with what I'm contributing, nothing to do with what he thinks about me. 

So, I hope that gave you kind of a good framework for how you can use your situations and this worksheet to kind of create the scenarios around building the awareness of where you're getting set off. 

Why? 

If you want to continue doing that? 

If not, how you can change by considering other perspectives?

Okay, let's shift gears. I want to draw attention to why, then, it makes even more sense that anger is being felt and expressed so much more since COVID happened all over the world. 

Covid made this disparity in available resources even more evident across all the populations. People stopped refraining from discussing forbidden topics out loud and they instead started to speak up more about their beliefs and their viewpoints. And these voices were powerful and began to spread easily across the world with the expansive span of social media. 

And just as that exposure disseminated factual information at lightning speed, it also led to the dissemination of conjecture, opinion and fake news. Oftentimes, many people mistakenly took these tidbits on as facts, and that lack of discernment when listening to the constant chatter and noise over all of the ways media reaches us, led to chaos. It led to false ideas and opinions being perpetuated as facts. 

It created havoc and, as you'll see, there's a difference between what facts are and the stories we create in our minds about the facts. Because when we tell ourselves the same story over and over and over, it becomes a belief for us, and when we have beliefs, they're often hard to differentiate from the facts. 

So, when we expose ourselves to the opinions and stories and perspectives of other people constantly via the news and social media and all the outlets, it creates an immense opportunity for blurring of the facts, and this blurring leads to miscommunication, doubt, mistrust and eventually it builds an environment of anger. 

And the more it happens, the quicker we become angry, further strengthening the neural pathway that's getting more and more established, and this is why some people are quicker to react with anger, with subsequent exposures to activating circumstances. 

That being said, living in an environment where anger has become so prevalent doesn't release us from the responsibility of managing our emotions, being adults about the emotions we're having. So how can you start to take back the responsibility? 

How can you start to really show up in emotional adulthood where you recognize that the emotions that you're having are solely being created by the thoughts that you're having about the situations and ultimately, you are the only person that can put the thoughts in your head. You're in control of that 100%. 

So how do you take back that responsibility? Number one, turn off the damn television. Okay, it is so hard to decipher what's fact and what's not. So constantly being on the TV news and the talk shows and all the things is not necessarily helping us. 

Can you stop your scrolling or at least limit it significantly, giving yourself a certain amount of time and researching which news outlets are truly relaying the facts? Can you turn away from gossip when people are chattering and talking and just run in their mouths? Can you just turn away from it and not participate? 

Every time we expose ourselves to these scenarios, where other people's chatter and opinions and perspectives are constantly being fed into your brain, you are giving yourself the opportunity of taking on other people's anger and emotions as your own. Can you ask yourself how often do you get swept up into it? How often then do you add to the environment of anger once you've gotten swept up into it? 

These are simple ways that you can just build awareness and change the things in your environment that tend to lead you more towards that reactionary state. That's a huge one for me and I will say I get my news and the things I need to know now occasionally from social media. When I do a scroll, I figure out what's happened and then I go do the research on my own, if it's something that I really need to learn more about. I don't listen to it constantly all day to get the input from some other person's opinion and some other person's perspective. I just want the facts so I can create my own opinions about it. 

So why else do we become quick to anger? There are two other ways, two other reasons that we kind of become quick to anger, and I'm going to tell you some stories here with this because it's kind of funny. 

The first one is we're empaths. We unconsciously tune into the moods of other people and take it on for ourselves. 

These are mirror neurons, okay. And this is where I don't know if you can think of a scenario where you walk into the room and you can feel the tension, or you can feel that the temperature is off. That's our ability as human beings to pick up on the emotions that are present with other people, and those are what we call mirror neurons. 

So, for example, you're sitting at home and dad gets angry and all of a sudden, mom gets angry and then the kids are mad too, and nobody knows what the hell triggered the whole thing. Does it sound familiar? So, I'm going to tell you a story that happened to us. This was in the heart of COVID. 

I remember we were doing DoorDash food delivery when it was being allowed to start doing that. So maybe a little bit, a couple of weeks into it and my husband tired, exhausted we're trying to get the practice up and running all remotely and doing all the things and all he was wanting was a bowl of hot chili from this restaurant down the road and we placed our orders for the family. 

Everybody got their order in DoorDash came, which was probably 45 minutes late because everybody was using DoorDash at that time. So, we're pushing 9:15 for dinner, which is late for us, and he opens the bag and there's no soup and I will say the man effectively lost his shit. There was no soup. The one thing that he had ordered and wanted so badly that night had been omitted from the order. And immediately when I saw him lose his shit about there not being soup in the order, I lost my shit. I was so pissed off that this man was pissed off. 

So, this is the example of a mirror neuron. Because it didn't bother me. It had no direct impact on me that there was no soup in the bag. But what had the impact on me was my husband being so upset about it and I took on that anger and I started becoming angry and had the outburst as well. “Why are you angry? What's the big deal? Why is this such a big deal? Why can't we control our emotions?” 

So, I want you to just recognize sometimes the reason we have a whole bunch of emotions come up for us is because we're just simply seeing somebody else have them as well and we're empathizing with them. 

Think about when you're with somebody that you love closely and you notice them tearing up about something or being super upset, and you feel your heartstrings pull and maybe shed a tear as well. This is normal human behavior, okay. This is why, when you walk into that room, you can feel the tension in the air. If it's there, all right, you have no idea what just happened, but you know people are pissed off or something's up. 

There's a variant with this as well. You know examples for how we're all empaths to some degree, but some people have this spidey sense to a much stronger level than others, and so having the awareness that you are an empath if you are one and that it does come strong for you, is super important. Because your mirror neurons can become activated and begin to fire just at the drop of seeing somebody else have emotions as well. 

So, building the awareness to know that that's part of your body's makeup and you as a person is important, because it'll help explain why you might get set off in certain situations where it really makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. 

All right, so why else do we become quick to anger? The second common reason are emotional projections, and these can be super potent anger activators. 

Emotional projections are when we assume someone, or something, will behave again in a manner that angered us in the past. Your projection of what might happen turns into an assumption that it will happen again, and this activates your anger, even if it didn't really happen yet. Most of these projections are based on our memory. Our memories tend to distort our perception of current events and the views of the future. 

So, I want to give you some examples of this. For me, I can think the biggest one are the presumption that new employees are going to behave in a manner that old employees, terminated employees, resigned employees, have. That really activated us, and so when I started having awareness that I was doing this, that I was bringing forward the assumption that this new person is going to behave the same way, that anger, the angst, the frustration that I was feeling before anything even happened was all being caused by this emotional projection. 

Emotional projections keep you looking at the future through the same lens you've used to look at past incidents. It's like a negative muscle memory. They don't give us or the other person a chance to act differently. 

So how exactly do emotional projections activate an anger cascade? As I said with the example, but now I'm going to spell it out a little more detailed for you. The situation comes up, you have a recollection of memory that you interpret in a certain way, and then you create a projection of what's going to happen. Now you assume it's going to happen, and then boom, you're angry. Once your anger reactions to your emotional projections get started, that emotional intelligence that you have is hijacked and you're no longer able to be open to what's really happening in the present. It's like you get this filter of anger there and you have these flood of thought errors and inaccurate beliefs that just come up, based on what you recall is happening in the past.

It's almost like a little mini trauma, okay, and then you assume what you're emotionally believing is true, even if it's not, even if it hasn't yet occurred. And the things you see in your environment become exaggerated and you see it in extremes instead of really in the balance or the lack of activation that is truly there. And the end result is you feel helpless, you feel out of control. You've gone down this pathway even though it really wasn't warranted. 

So, there are common anger projections that we can have, and I'm going to categorize these in three kind of different areas. 

There's some blending through it, but the first one is all or nothing thinking. And this is where you have a situation that comes up and your anger is activated, where you feel helpless. You don't see any other options for handling the situation. 

Okay, so a great example for me: We had an employee, within the first year of us opening the practice, steal from the practice and immediately what I noticed when I started doing this work about eight to 10 years later, was that I had this assumption that every employee is going to have the tendency to want to steal from us and that was impacting how I was showing up with them each and every day. 

So, I had to realize that I was carrying forward this trauma of an employee stealing from us in our very first year of practice to all the other employees that we were hiring. There was this mistrust, this kind of skepticism that “Is this person going to be a good human, have integrity, work with character and not steal for God's sake?”

So, once I started having that awareness, I really noticed how often the thoughts came up, how often the fear of this is this person going to steal from us? Are they going to do the same thing? And I had to say you know what I'm going to choose to believe that this person is going to do the best that they can, and this has nothing to do with what happened in the past. I had to be very intentional with it, so I wasn't showing up with the anger. 

The second common way we can project our anger is with blaming and accusing when we feel that we've been wronged or treated unfairly, which we then use to rationalize the feeling of anger. So, an example here is I put this party on for Christmas and my guests left early and my thought was they don't see how much time I devoted to this event. 

So, I was blaming them. I was creating the story in my head that they had no value for what I did, not really even knowing why people were not able to stay late. Okay, so when we start blaming and accusing people falsely, without really having the facts straight, we rationalize the anger that we feel and then we kind of sit in it and it spirals, and it grows, and it gets more and more intense. So just being aware of the stories that you're creating and then ask if they're really true. 

And the third common way we can project our anger is when we judge people. Judging kind of underlies the all or nothing thinking and the blaming and accusing, because when we judge other people, we actually might be tapping into what we might be feeling inside. 

Okay, does the situation remind you of your unease that you are feeling or give you a kind of a sensation of that anger, that it's something that you have either been hurt by before or have maybe a little envy or jealousy about? 

Okay, whenever we say I'm not judging or we find ourselves to be judging somebody else, there is always a negative emotion sitting underneath it and that is that disdain that we might have. So, I want you to just tap into that, to notice, when you are saying something about somebody or judging them for what they're doing or not doing, how you actually feel underneath as you're spitting out that venom.

Okay, so I think we've covered a lot today and I just want to remind you about the incentives that we have when we do this work for ourselves. 

Okay, as you guys continue to listen and implement the small changes that I'm giving you, the tips and the ideas for building that awareness, you're going to become more conscious of how you're spending your emotional energy throughout the day and you're going to want to start preventing that emotional drain from happening. 

You're going to recognize how much it's taking away from your ability to reach your full potential because you're emotionally exhausted the way you're showing up right now. So that's going to be an incentive right there that you don't want to have that emotional drain and so we're going to make a change. 

And on top of that, when you see how you can show up calm and in control and how you want to show up, that becomes the incentive to keep on doing it. Because when we start to make a change and people around us start to notice the difference and, in my scenario, specifically, when my kids started recognizing that we're actually fun to be around and that they want to be around us, that was the incentive for me to keep on going. 

I hope I am helping you, giving you some tips that are moving you from reaction to response. Next week I'm going to teach you about my mini anger protocol so you can actually start implementing this work into your day-to-day life. It's mini because I'm going to give you the short and quick bullets for what you can do and then in future episodes, I'm going to give you a little bit more in-depth explanation for each of the steps. 

Also, I'm going to try to add the anger worksheet that we've talked about to this episode as well in the show notes. So please check that out. If this episode and if this show is resonating with you, please share it with your friends people. This is so helpful for me. 

My goal with this is just to help my colleagues really recognize what has kind of maybe infiltrated their life with regards to anger and how we can kind of make a change, because it feels so much better, so much more relaxing, so much more at peace without the anger in our life. Until the next time, my friends, I will see you then. 

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.