Feeling On Purpose With Judge Lynn Toler

Mastering Anger: Taking Control of Your Emotions for a Purpose-Driven Life

• Judge Lynn Toler

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What if losing your temper means losing control of your life? Join me, Judge Lynn Toler, as I take you through my personal journey of self-help, motivation, and mastering anger management in this episode of Feeling On Purpose. Drawing from my years on the bench and the emotional wisdom of my mother, we’ll explore how unchecked anger clouds judgment and leads to some of our worst decisions. We’ll dive into real-life scenarios—from traffic court outbursts to tense interactions with law enforcement—that show how anger distorts our thinking and makes us miss crucial chances to de-escalate.

We’ll also uncover the striking similarities between anger and intoxication, both of which create a false sense of control while undermining sound judgment. This episode will touch on the influence of anger in public discourse and politics, revealing how emotions, when unmanaged, can be mistaken for true power. You'll learn why managing your anger is essential—just like fortifying a city with walls—to protect your emotional well-being and avoid leaving yourself vulnerable.

Additionally, we’ll discuss the impact of anger on society and the importance of teaching emotional control early on. Initiatives like Bloom 365, which educate young people on healthy relationships and recognizing the signs of abuse, will highlight how vital it is to instill emotional intelligence from a young age. Through my personal stories and proven strategies for anger management, this episode will motivate you to take charge of your emotions, ensuring your responses are intentional and purpose-driven. Tune in to reshape your understanding of anger, and transform it into a tool for empowerment rather than destruction.












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Speaker 1:

You know her as the longest presiding judge on divorce court, for more than 14 years. Marriage boot camp and many other programs. A graduate of Harvard, judge Lynn Toler is the author of my Mother's Rules Making Marriage Work and Dear Sonali Letters to the Daughter I Never had, all of which are dedicated to the proper emotion, what it is and how to find it.

Speaker 2:

Remember, under your skin is a sovereign country. Don't go passing out passports all willy-nilly to people who don't belong there. Let me help you protect your emotional borders so we can all start feeling on purpose. How y'all doing this is Judge Lynn Toler, and welcome back to another episode of Feeling On Purpose, the podcast dedicated to the notion that under your skin is a sovereign country, so don't go handing out passports all willy nilly to people who don't belong there. I want you to be in charge of your emotional house, and we're constructing it right now.

Speaker 2:

This week's episode is about a pet peeve of my mother's that has become a pet peeve of mine, and that pet peeve is anger. I rarely I thought about this morning, I thought about this that this morning I used to get angry all the time as a young lady, as a little girl, as a young lady, as a middle-aged lady and as an older woman less and less and less, but I used to get angry a lot, and angry has always authored some of my worst moments in life. My mother, on the other hand, who I considered to be an emotional genius I think I've seen her angry twice in the 57 years, or whatever, that I knew her and my mother's take on anger was always this when you get mad, you lose. And she was right about that and she was saying you always have to look at it that way. If somebody else angers you, you have already lost, and I took that as an axiom for years.

Speaker 2:

And then, as time went on and I sat on the bench in Cleveland Heights and I sat on the bench in divorce court, I realized that you lose when you get mad because you lose access to so much. You lose access to your higher reasoning when you get angry, because angry acts like static in the brain and you've got all of these hormones popping off cortisol and adrenaline and all that good stuff, and things are just happening in your head. And since we feel far, far faster than we think, our feelings take over and when our feelings are out front, first thinking, don't get a shot. So the next thing, you know, you've lost access to your higher reasoning. You've also lost access to a fair amount of logic. You've lost access to exit ramps. Do you know?

Speaker 1:

what I mean.

Speaker 2:

Ain't nothing like a good exit ramp, if you ask me. In other words, you're in a situation that is not going well, do you have a way out? I love a good exit ramp, but when you're angry, you're driving right past all the good exit ramps. Let me give you an example. You ever watch the people on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever that are all poppy poppy with the police until they go into handcuffs? And I'm talking about people that you know, middle class folks like me.

Speaker 2:

You know regular ladies out and they might have been drinking a little too much or whatever, but are outraged by the notion that they could be arrested and they get angry because they are insulted, that they as an individual is being treated like a common criminal, even though they engaged in some criminality and because they didn't see themselves as criminals. It made it all that worse and the reason I truly believe that's true is because of Thursdays in Cleveland Heights, thursdays was my traffic court, and I mean to tell you, when regular folk like you and me get a traffic ticket, some of us get very, very excited and upset about it. It was the most outrageous day of my docket. I mean, I have arraigned people for beating and killing and just negligent homicide or vehicular homicide.

Speaker 2:

But I've done all of those things and what I realized was regular people who've been told that they've done something wrong take great offense to it. Take great offense to it even if they're wrong, and usually the ones that you see on TV they've been drinking. And so when you're drinking, drinking is a little like being angry. You lose access to a bit of your higher reasoning and you go with the flow and you can't control where you go. But anyway they get so angry that they miss all the exit ramps. They could have complied at any point. They could have just stopped talking at any point. Ron White tells the funniest joke about he was getting thrown out of a bar and the police told him that he had the right to remain silent. And he said but he did not have the ability.

Speaker 2:

I love Ron White. He's hilarious, but anyway you miss the exit ramps because you're wrapped up in where you're going. You're wrapped up in where you are. You can't see the circumstance around you because it limits your vision. It pulls everything into focus because only thing on your mind is that thing that made you angry right there. So they miss the exit ramp and end up in the pokey. And when you get mad, you do in fact lose, and I think that is something that we need to remind ourselves of in this current climate where even our elected officials and I'm not talking about the presidential election even I watched congressional hearings, I don't know why. I also watched plane crashes, so I got something to talk to my psychiatrist about this week, but anyway, they seem to be trying to one up each other on anger now, because this is how we are. We're going to cook. I saw a young lady talking about let me cook let me cook, let me cook.

Speaker 2:

You feel powerful when you cook. You got all those words and all that angst and all that energy behind those words and you're feeling quite dramatically about whatever you're talking about, because you are angry. And so they say let me cook, let me cook Like I am in control, I am in power. Now I'm going to tell you my favorite not my favorite phrase in the Bible, but one of. I just love this one. I have to read them because you know there's so many different Bibles and everything and I don't. It's Proverbs 25, 28. And it says anger is like a city broken into and left without walls. Do you hear that? Anger is like a city broken into and left without walls. It makes you vulnerable. It doesn't make you stronger. It makes you vulnerable. Now. It might make you harder to deal with in the current circumstance. It might give you the power to punch a little more potently or run a little more quickly, but it does not empower you with greater reasoning ability.

Speaker 2:

Anger is often an able imposter. Mostly, it is no more than fear or frustration, all dressed up in military garb, impersonating power. It's not real power. The cop in that situation had real power. The ladies that are angry. You know, susie or Tanya or Taniqua. Susie or Tanya or Taniqua, intoxicated, was angry and thought that they were powerful in that moment by using their words in a manner that got them arrested. But they had lost power in that moment. They were frustrated, they were fearful and they allowed that to tell them what to do, and they allowed that to tell them what to do and they felt powerful in the moment till they hear the clink, clink of the handcuffs that come for you eventually.

Speaker 2:

So the question that we all have to ask ourselves is how often do I get angry? What do I get angry about? Is my anger enabling me to do something? But now, sometimes you gotta be angry. You know, sometimes angry is helpful. Let me try to think of something. My brain is not helping me right now my dog. I had to get angry with my dog so I could lift it up and put it somewhere because I had to take it to the vet because it had done something, and upset was helpful in that moment, but I already had plans about what I was due. So a little bit of, and then it wasn't really anger, it was pretty much anxiousness and upset and distress. But you know, a lot of those are the same chemicals. But sometimes, you know, somebody hits my kid or a little kid or something, I might get angry and jump in and fight and that's where anger helps you. But that's rarely the circumstances when we pull out our anger. And if we are prone to anger, our anger runs us, not the other way around.

Speaker 2:

One of my favorite tolerisms and I have a lot of tolerisms around anger is that and I got to look it up now, no well, let me look it up that if just about everything offends you, anybody can own you. I mean, think about it. There is this thing, a bit of virtue signaling, going on where everybody is. How could you laugh at that? It's not funny, do you know? Do you know? And you know everybody's looking to get outraged. Somebody takes a sentence and then people just keep moving on it and moving on it and talking about it, and talking about it, and talking about it, as if these small things upset me because I am such great moral character, you know, like the princess and the well, anyway, upset me.

Speaker 2:

But the thing is, if you are offended by everybody else's failure, weakness not quite rightness stuff, you don't know about them but you've judged them incorrectly. If you're angry, you just don't have access to understanding the thing with which you are angry. And if you can't understand that and you might think you do, your fear of them, their otherness, their lack of submission will let you think that they are a real threat to you and are appropriate targets of your anger. But you don't really know, because anger has taken your ability to understand, nuance, to reflect, to really you can't even listen. Well, when you're angry, you can't hear, and what you hear isn't quite correct because it has to come through all that static, all of that hoopla that is happening in your brain. So, while it feels powerful in the moment to express your anger like that, you always have to be in a position to use your second set of eyes. We've talked about this before. I have a second set of eyes that my mother had took decades delivering to me. That allows me to step away from myself more often than I otherwise would be able to and assess what I'm doing from a more objective perspective. Perspective, and I want you to have your second set of eyes. And the second set of eyes are so incredibly important when you're dealing with anger, because anger hops on you so quickly.

Speaker 2:

Anger is often a response to fear. You know what did he do? You know that fear and your body releases all of these chemicals that tell you you know you got to fight and you got to carry on. You got to do this and do that and, yes, if a dog comes in the room, you got to run or you got to deal with it if it's trying to hurt you but you don't know. We often get angry or feel insulted or fearful from comments that are about insult or just you, you're not like me and you want things not like me, or whatever it is.

Speaker 2:

We're so categorical these days. Have we not built ourselves some sad little silos where everybody I mean in concentric circles that are smaller and smaller you have to like this this much in this way and you have to hate that that much in that way in order for you to be one of us. And if you don't hate all the things to the extent I hate them, the way I hate them and why I hate them, and if you express anything that is not completely in line with how I feel about it, completely in line with how I feel about it, I will other you as well, and we end up in smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller silos. And I know it sounds like we feel more brave and strong in a group, and that's true. It has benefits. But there are also problems with grouping up, and I know everybody's talking about you know. First of all, I won't talk about nobody else's religion because I don't want nobody talking about mine. I ain't in it, but I will speak on it.

Speaker 2:

Historically, you know, it always sounds good at a point. For instance, there are those who say they want this to be a Christian nation and that the separation of church and state was just mentioned in a letter and it's not necessarily in the Constitution. However, the Constitution says in the First Amendment that the government ain't going to get into religion in no way, shape or form and in order to be a Christian nation, you have to be dictating what the religion of the country is. But when you remember it, why did they do that? Ask yourself, why did they come over here and do the First Amendment? Why did they come over here at all? Because they were running from religious oppression elsewhere in England. But they weren't running from the Sunnis or the Shia, they weren't running from Jews, they were running from other Christians you know what I mean. We're all Christian does not solve the problem. It didn't solve the problem with them.

Speaker 2:

You know they had all of that you know you're going to be a Protestant or a Catholic. It was all one religion first. So it's splintered, just like the Sunnis and the Shiites splintered, you know, you know. Anyway, don't get me started. All I'm saying is people tend to silo up and their groups get smaller and smaller and smaller, because once you're in that group, you want to dictate terms. When you dictate terms like you can't, we're in a place where we can't accept difference. I want to be in a room which you'd be unlike you and it not bother me or you. You know what I mean. But anyway, back to the topic of hand at hand, which is anger. You know, with every temper tantrum we hurl. Every temper tantrum we hurl. With every epithet we hurl. With every temper tantrum we have we teach our children how to feel.

Speaker 2:

Now, when you look at all the rage and everything that's going on, when you look at your own life, you have to ask yourself before you conduct business. If my five-year-old were doing it, would I tell them it's a good thing. My mother told me that once, and it just I mean right there, because I could get horribly angry and to be a mean person. My sister told me one time I asked her one Christmas. She never hung out with me One because I was boring and I didn't want to go anywhere and that was part of the problem. She also said because you were mean and I was mean, and I was mean because I was angry and I was angry because I was afraid and fear. You know, you respond to it with that anger and that's why I've had to fight anger all my life. It is my fear dictating terms and pushing me to a conclusion of horror and catastrophe. That is incorrect, because my mind had been hijacked by all of those chemicals. And it's happening more and more and more. It's happening more and more and more.

Speaker 2:

I saw it from the bench in Cleveland Heights. You see it, you see it online. What was it in Kentucky? Two friends, a judge and a sheriff. Sheriff shoots him in his chambers. They were going to lunch but they got in an argument about something and he had a gun on him. He got mad and he got shot.

Speaker 2:

And everybody wants to say we're searching for motive. We're searching for motive Often, and we do need to search for motive. We always do, because we can't fix what we don't know, what we don't understand and don't acknowledge, but what most people are looking for when they're searching for motive is motive that would be sufficient for them to say I understand why he did that that way. You know you want to say oh, it's mental health, it's mental illness. You don't have to be mentally ill to do some crazy stuff, you don't have to have a diagnosis, you don't have to have a flag in the DSM-5 in order to have an emotionality that does not conduct business well with regard to what you're doing, what you're seeing or what you're saying. So my thing is we either talk about rights and responsibilities and we talk about mental health. Like you know, get diagnosed. If mental health is real, there's problems.

Speaker 2:

But everybody has a mental health moment at some time and in some places, and it's not necessarily because it's just because you're angry. And we teach our children how to be angry, when to be angry and with whom to be angry. And so you have to ask yourself, in every circumstance in which you could get angry, whether your children are there or not, or whether or not you have children, is is my anger something that I would? Is this anger something I would ask my five-year-old not to entertain? Now, that's a difficult thing to do because anger jumps on you so quickly. So in order to deal with anything that jumps on you so quickly, you have to have plans before anything happens at all.

Speaker 2:

The time to decide to not get angry about something is before anything at all happens. It's right first thing in the morning, when you talk to yourself about who you are and where you are, you know, like the weather report I give a weather report every morning how you feeling. Tola, you know you're a moody chick. Did you have a bad night last night? Did you sleep enough? Are you worried about something?

Speaker 1:

Let's figure out what it is.

Speaker 2:

You know, I used to well, I had a worry book, which is another thing, but I would list what I was worried about because it was just so taxing. You know, it was just so taxing to worry. I had to chase all of the fears in my head because I always believed that each and everything that I was worried about will necessarily end me, you know, which is silly and ridiculous, ridiculous. But you stay angry a lot when you're afraid a lot because you're always under threat and you're always like soaking in the soup of of of hormones designed to agitate you and engage in behavior. So you just got to watch that. But so you have to have a way to intercept your anger. Talked about it before. I used to intercept it with deeds. You know I'd have to stop If my mother had a gold phrase for me let me tell you something. If I ever hear you say, let me tell you something, step back and then watch me step back, because that means I'm angry and I'm about to say something that I'm probably going to have to apologize for, and I would rather just not get angry. So you have to intercept your anger. So you have to. A way to intercept your anger is A to know what your triggers are. I hate that word trigger, but anyway to know what the things that usually make you mad are. Triggers are.

Speaker 2:

To me, a trigger is a real thing. You pull it and a bullet comes out. Emotional triggers they're real. I'm sure there are things that trigger me emotionally, but I like to say that I have to have a million pounds of pressure on my trigger. I want to have a trigger that needs a million pounds of pressure to pull, because that means the world has less control over me. Because you ain't pulling your triggers, the world is pulling that trigger. And if you only need a half a pound of pressure I don't know how much is a lot of pounds of pressure because I don't know nothing about nothing but if you can go off with very limited pressure, pounds of pressure, then the world is running you. You're not running your world and you don't want that because everybody out there doing things and angry and upset.

Speaker 2:

So if you know how, you know when it's going to show up, what it looks like, where it usually shows up, and then what is it you do when you get to the angry place, a lot of us fail to make sure that we know where the mad is supposed to go. My boss can make me angry, but since I can't holler at him or her and go home and fuss at my husband about something that he should have done but really wasn't worth a full fuss, you don't want to take boss mad home or wife angry to work. Even when we're angry, we're not foolish. I used to my mom used to use his cop friend and he was huge, like six, seven, just huge, and he would walk into circumstances and he'd grab somebody and that dude would stop swinging and he said, oh man, why you were trying to wail on her like that. He said I couldn't help myself. He said, well, you helped yourself. When I came in the room you stopped. You know, we know who we can't go all the way angry with. If there's a man coming in this house with a gun and three men with a gun, I'm not going to come in. What are you doing in my house? I'm going to run, I'm going to do something. Hopefully the dogs are chewing on them while I'm out the window.

Speaker 2:

But you usually get mad at the nearest person or the easiest target Because even though you're mad, your body don't. You don't want to die and your mind knows that. So you got to make sure you know where the mad is supposed to go, and misplaced anger allows us to take out our upset on any and everybody. It authors an unmanaged response to everyday emotional triggers. You know what I mean. And it can become a habit. You know people can get in the habit of being angry and even after the thing that angered them is no longer there or no longer there, they're in the habit of feeling upset. And when you're in the habit of feeling upset, when there's nothing to be upset about, your mind finds something to be upset about. Let me tell you what I do. I just discovered this today and I'm tickled one, because I usually don't have many epiphanies. I have epiphanies because I'm one of these people that, just you know I'm pedantic. You know I don't storm cities, I guerrilla fight house to house. But anyway, why was I telling you that I guerrilla fight house to house?

Speaker 2:

Well, the epiphany that I had this morning was I was working up a strong stress response to my dirty flow. My dogs had dug up the sprinklers in my backyard and made a water park. They went out there, they played in it, they tore it up. They were mud. Then they flew through the house. I had mud everywhere and I couldn't get it fixed right away, so I had a couple of days of this. Anyway, my house was just filthy, just absolutely filthy, and I have bought moms.

Speaker 2:

I Oceter did not make my life easier, I don't know how that happened. I bought some mop. I bought one mop twice, didn't realize that new mop heads everything. All I'm doing is slurrying around the dirt and I was mad about it and I got fixated on it and I was like I got angry about it. It's just ridiculous. And then I thought to myself in the pantheon of indignities that I have suffered in the past couple of years.

Speaker 2:

My husband died. He was my life and when he died everything just caved in and I had all of these extraordinarily difficult things to do. So I was putting out fires all day long and just just struggling and struggling, and struggling, and I got used to struggling. I got used to being upset all day. So when I had some of those problems solved they ain't all solved, but when I had some of them solved I brought some small problems up from the basement of my brain and I allowed them to meander through the main rooms of my house of my mind, the main rooms of my mind. That's where they were, and I was just as agitated by that as I was by the visit from the police two weeks ago, which I ain't gonna tell you about. My life is a little more sparkly than you think. I just can't tell those stories, you know.

Speaker 2:

But that's what that is. You know, you have to be able to see your anger as a separate thing and something that you manage and you control, so it don't control you. Then you got to work your quirks in the way they work for you. And when I say working your quirks, I mean I know what makes me angry. I make sure that every day, because I'm moody, my quirk, so I ask myself who I am, where I am and what I'm doing and what I'm feeling. Every day I talk to myself a great deal.

Speaker 2:

Lynn, don't get angry, lynn. That is a fear. Move, stop right now. Is it that important? If you were on your deathbed, would you think about this instance as something worth agitation? I ask myself all the time, talk to myself all the time is it worth it? Is it real, is it necessary? Is it for you, is it right, is it wrong? You gotta ask or you won't know. Anyway, you gotta work your anger just like you work your other emotions, except it tends to be more aggressive and quicker, because you have to be fearful, for the fear and then the anger. Not always or often Frustration and then the anger. And the more you see others as other, the easier it will be to get angry. That's all I have to say about that.

Speaker 2:

So pay attention to how you feel, pay attention to what you're doing, pay attention to what's happening, pay attention to your circumstances, because the last thing you want in this world is for the world to know where you're weak and just get up in there and decide that they can manage your day for you. I'm sure the sheriff and the judge, whatever they were upset about, was not worth both of their lives. But in that moment, in that moment in Taco Bell, in that moment when you got rear-ended, in that moment you have to be able to manage your emotionality. And to the extent that we don't, given what's in the zeitgeist, let's go shoot people.

Speaker 2:

I do want to tell you about a project that I worked on called Bloom 365, in which we used to go into schools to help people. It was for, to teach young children what a healthy relationship looks like, because we always talk about domestic violence can often one in four people, one in four women less men, but still both ways. It's not one way or the other. The majority are women and we would go into schools and not only talk to young people about how to recognize the signs of an abusive relationship so you don't get in. It is how to recognize if you are an abuser in a relationship so you can stop it.

Speaker 2:

And when we did that, we went in and heard the stories and the emotionality of these kids. That and in each and every one. Well, I will say this there are those. We we used to give them what we called elephant in the room cards. So, because they're not going to tell you nothing spectacular by standing up and raising their hand and they could write down what they're feeling and we would have people I'm going to change this in terms of technical terms, but this is the level of what this person was talking about. She said I'm going to kill him and everybody who didn't believe me when I told them what he did. And every time we got into a school, you would see two or three very alarming elephant in the room cards. That were the fear and the frustration that could burst into anger at some point, and what we would do is we would figure out who people were, we would surround them and try to get them together. But you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and when you're angry, we teach our children when and how and what to be angry about.

Speaker 2:

If we don't manage how we feel, how we feel will manage us and we have got to act. Like all of the rages and the horror that is happening is something that we have the ability to affect simply by existing in the world in a less emotionally unmanaged way, and that ain't going to change the world. If 10 of us, it ain't going to change the world. If 20 of us, it ain't going to change the world. But if you get critical mass of a certain percentage, it begins to move the masses in general.

Speaker 2:

And all I'm saying is you want power. The power you have to have over first is you. I always say in any fight you have, the first battle is always with yourself, because you got to show up correctly, not show up in a manner that, for instance, donald Trump, I don't care if you like him or you don't like him. I don't care if you like Kamala or you don't like her. Let me say this she knew what to do, to get under his skin, and that was an emotional door that he had yet to shut. It can expose you. So, anyway, that's it, feeling on purpose, feel better, feel fine, feel good.