170 Anger - What To Do With It

Whether it’s the injustices on the news, your internet being spotty or you’re mad at yourself for eating too many peanut butter coconut balls, anger lives inside us all. 

You’ll learn:

• Where there’s anger…there’s grief
• How to dissolve resentment
• A simple, effective 4 step method to diffuse anger in your most ragey moments 

• Shape Shift Program LEARN MORE
• Instagram: @mindful_shape
• Free Self Coaching Resources
• Interested in getting coached by me? Go to my website mindfulshape.com

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

 Hi, and welcome to The Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker, and my work is here to offer you specialized mind and body practices to shift into the next version of you. Today, I wanna talk about anger and what to do with it.

This is not what I had initially planned for today, but I listened to the most recent Ezra Klein podcast on Iran, and well, it feels timely. Also, I would say that my relationship with anger is such that for the earlier part of my life, I generally didn't experience as much anger as I did sadness.

As soon as I would start feeling angry, it would quickly turn into tears. You hear people say, I'm in touch with my anger, or I'm not in touch with my anger. It was kind of like that. And now I have two kids.

One is two and a half, and my son is five. And the fever pitch with which I regularly experience anger with my kids has been the single most surprising thing about becoming a parent for sure. I also am at the age where I think hormones are starting to play a role. Now, what can we do here? Right? We can blame the hormones.

For the ragey-ness for the crazy, or we can see any kind of hormonal change as accelerating our learning on how to take care of our anger, what to do with it. We can blame the kids, the other people, our spouses traffic. Right. We can blame those things or again, we can use these things, these people, these circumstances to learn how to take care of our anger and accelerate, really accelerate our skill at transmuting emotion processing emotions because we are going to be experiencing.

The whole range of emotions. We are going to be experiencing anger, there will be anger in you. Even if you consider yourself the most chill person on the planet, there will be something that, I mean, just watch the news for 10 seconds, right? So I know this is aspirational in terms of how can I, you know, experience anger and then transmute it quickly is very aspirational to be one of those people that like nothing ever rocks 'em like nothing.

But you know, there are tools and we can do the good work of getting better. That's what we're all about here.

So first I'm going to talk about anger so that we can understand it as an emotion, as a concept. We are going to talk about how it shows up. I wanna share some useful perspectives for how to approach anger.

We're gonna be talking about its connection to resentment and grief, and then also I wanna give you something very practical in terms of what are the steps in the moment that can really help you when you're in that rage moment, when you are feeling anger, so that you have a new tool in your toolbox and can be able to handle it.

You know what to do with it.

Let's talk about the relationship between anger, grief, and resentment. So here's how it goes. There's anger, and then beneath the surface of your anger, there's a grief. There's grief there underneath. If you have unresolved grief, you are not taking care of that grief. Then that's when resentment shows up.

So there's anger and then grief, and then unresolved grief breeds resentment. And a clue to whether you experience resentment and maybe you haven't labeled it as such, is if you often experience an unfairness. I always give the example of my husband, he's downstairs watching a show and I'm cleaning and I come downstairs and I see him just watching a show.

I. That will trigger resentment, like why am I the one that has to clean and he gets to watch a show and all of that. So there's an unfairness. That can be a clue. If you are not really noticing resentment, you can think, where in my life do I often have the sense that things are unfair? That's a clue to resentment.

There's a grief. Well, where is the grief coming from?

The grief comes from an unmet need, so that can be an unmet need from childhood that we didn't get what we wanted or needed. It could be from yesterday

there's different philosophies on what are the core human needs. In my training, what I learned, which resonates with me, is belonging, safety, and dignity. So you can take a look to see. What's the relationship between when I experience anger or resentment and the unmet need of belonging?

Maybe there was an experience in which you were say, I'm just making something up, but like in your book club and you felt triggered or you felt resentment or anger because you were. Feeling like you are outside of the group. Maybe it's something like that, or safety. It's maybe you're angry about something that's happening in the world or something that's happening locally, politically that makes you feel threatened.

Maybe it's your physical safety. It could be the threat of financial crisis for your kids, anything like that a clue to not getting dignity met would be anytime there is shame or embarrassment. So maybe there is you made a mistake and then you feel some sort of shame or embarrassment around that, and there's no forgiveness. That's an unmet need that you would need to give yourself. Okay, so that's dignity. So belonging, safety or dignity.

Anger comes from not getting what we wanted, not having that grief resolved. So this happens over time. Breeds resentment. So resentment builds resentment is cumulative. So say one time your friend shows up late. Not a big deal.

The next time they show up late, you're kind of irritated, and then the third time they show up late, you're like angry. You're like, can you not get it together? Right. If that's important to you. So I don't really care if people show up late or not. I always give a window, but that's me personally. I know that some people, it really matters to them that people show up on time.

Or maybe you or somebody who likes to get a quick response from a text, and it happens often that your friend doesn't do that and you you get angry. Oftentimes this can happen in partnership or in marriages

resentment builds because there's a grief of some sort of unmet need. There's something that we feel like we are not. Getting that we really want. And I think sometimes it can be really simple, like I want a clean house. This is my safe space, this is dignity.

I feel proud of my space. And if that's being threatened or you feel like you're not getting what you want, then resentment builds. It could also be with yourself. So let's say dignity. You get on the scale and the scale goes up and you judge yourself and you beat yourself up, that's going to erode your dignity.

Or if you see a picture of yourself and you have a barrage of negative thoughts. Then that is chipping away at your dignity. You will almost resent yourself, right? You will be angry at yourself, or what happens a lot of times with my clients, whenever there's overeating, or say they said they weren't gonna have a glass of wine, and then they did, they will.

Then there will be a slew of negative thoughts about them. Again, that's dignity, so it's saying to yourself, I am wrong. I shouldn't have done that. Right? Guilt, you might experience guilt or you might experience shame in which shame means I am wrong,

I said I was gonna do this thing and I didn't do it. I can't do it. I'm in the wrong, I'm on the side of bad. So of course we don't have these conscious thoughts, but if you feel terrible, it's a signal that you're beating yourself up. So this can happen in really subtle ways, like I shouldn't have done that.

Just notice if you are chipping away at your own dignity, that will harm the relationship that you have with yourself. You'll be angry at yourself, breeds resentment over time. So let's talk about what we can do here, because this is gonna happen over and over, and I'm gonna give you an example of what to do and what I did.

When I was taking my kids to school recently. So these are gonna be steps that you can follow because again, we don't want that resentment to build. We really want to clear that out in the moment. So here's a step by step. There are four steps. So as I mentioned, so my kids, they both go to the same preschool and my husband usually does pick up and I do drop off.

So I go in the morning and it's close enough where we can walk, and it's a great way for me to get fresh air in the morning and get my steps in. And it is typically, if I just walked on my own, it would be. I'd say 20 minutes max, and it obviously takes longer with them. Now they're old enough that they want to not be in the stroller anymore.

My son wants to ride his bike and my daughter wants to ride her scooter. She's two and a half and she's amazing on the scooter, I have to say. And oftentimes there are no problems. Oftentimes we can get there and it's okay, but recently. And it was a full moon, so maybe that was part of it. But recently my daughter, we didn't even get a block and there were so many problems.

Like it was, it was, oh, she didn't have the right stuffy with her and she wanted to wear her hat over her helmet, and she just stopped and she wouldn't go. And I could. Feel, I could feel the anger coming, right? Like I'm berating myself and say, oh, why do I even agree to let them ride their bike in Scooter?

Like it's so much faster when we just go in the stroller and all of these things. So here's what I did, because I've been practicing this a lot, which is one you acknowledge. So I acknowledged, oh, I notice. I am feeling angry. I can, I can feel it in my body. I can feel the surge come up. So you want to be aware of it again, so that you can respond and not react.

React would just be like yelling at her or doing something physical, right? Response is gonna be what we're talking about here, but we're gonna get very nuanced with it. So you want to acknowledge it in the moment? I'm feeling angry, not I am angry. Notice the difference. One is I am feeling this is a feeling and one is an identification, which I am anger.

We don't want that. We want, I feel angry. Okay. Next is, and this is a tough one, especially for moms, is to drop the judgment. Of what you are feeling. So because I'm a weirdo like this, what I do is I literally take my hands and I imagine I'm scooping up in front of me. I am scooping up the judgment, and then I.

Push my hands down to the side of my body, like I literally need to drop it. I need to drop it onto the sidewalk. Otherwise, it just helps me to do that kind of physical, energetic work. Otherwise I hold onto that judgment. So try it. It's a little trick if you don't mind being a bit of a weirdo like me.

You just baw it up and then you just throw it down and like nobody's watching. Nobody cares. Right? So next, so that's step two is drop judgment. Step three is your brain will want to attach to a narrative and grasp for some thinking, grasp for a reason why this is happening. So your brain might go to this shouldn't be happening.

That's essentially what's happening. It's like, I'm not getting what I want. That's breeding anger. This shouldn't be happening. And in my case it's, we're gonna be late. This means I won't get in home in time to do my workout. This is taking too long. This is annoying. They shouldn't be doing this. All of those things, I shouldn't have let them do the scooter.

Like my brain will just like fly off on this tangent. Okay? So your brain will want to do that and. We don't wanna do that. Just notice if your brain is going on this thought tangent. Okay. And redirect it to something else. We can think about it later. Okay. So you can think about how, what's the mindset work I wanna do about this so that you can have some sort of plan and maybe it is you change the circumstances in my case, okay.

For maybe for this week, then we do take the stroller. It might be something like that, or it might be. I changed my thoughts again outside of the scenario where I'm thinking, what's the rush? Like? I could also be thinking, kids act like kids, like this is, this is, I've learned by now, like this is what they do.

This is to be expected. Some days it's gonna run smoothly. Some days it's not. It's gonna be okay. Like it's gonna be okay. There is actually no late, so that's a bit of a, you know, a thought error. There is no late because we can just get there when we get there. But all of that mindset work, I'm not gonna be able to access that in the moment, not when I'm feeling a little ragey.

So I don't require that of myself. What I do instead is I just say, I have an anchor thought, which is, there's no rush. Right, or I'm, I can handle this anger, I can process this. I can handle this. Okay. So I may or may not believe it in the time, but I have. Some way of being able to guide my brain. Now, if you have zero ways of guiding your brain, you'd have no anchor thoughts like that.

That's not a problem either, because the point is just to not let your brain go on a runaway train and instead go to step four, which is move it through and out. Of your body. So remember, this is anger. This is an emotion. This is just a feeling, a sensory experience that you're having in your body. You wanna breathe into your heart.

And breathe out. So breathe into your heart and breathe out. We wanna be calming the nervous system. Now, you're not necessarily going to completely regulate yourself or get too calm, a hundred percent calm. That's not the point. You don't need to do that. What you're trying to do is be more gentle with yourself so that you are not lashing out, you are not taking action from anger and that you are.

Clearing that anger out of your body. So it might take a while. Like for me, sometimes it takes like 10 minutes, like we're halfway there before I start feeling okay, I'm like, my brain is back online again. Like I can think clearly and we can have a conversation or whatever needs to happen. Right. Okay.

That is what to do in the moment. I'll just run through the steps again. You wanna acknowledge what you're feeling. You wanna drop any judgment about what you're feeling, and then you wanna watch the thoughts that come up and just let the thoughts go. Don't attach to them, don't believe them, and then you move it through your body.

Any way that you can do this will be helpful. I'm walking, so that I think also helps. So if you experience anger and you can go for a quick walk, that also helps move it through and out of your body. Breathing into the heart, breathing out helps. That's what you can do in the moment. But I also wanna emphasize that we can, on a foundational level, do the work to support ourselves so that our brain can access this tool

it can remember even to do this. And these are going to be all the usual suspects meditation. Journaling or thought work, regular movement, eating in a way that nourishes your body in a way that serves you co-regulating with other humans. That's how our nervous systems operate. Is this why you feel so good after?

Being with people, right? Even if you are an introvert, oftentimes you will feel better after a 10 minute conversation with somebody because why? Because we co-regulate. That also happens in coaching sessions, so get coached if you have a coach. Some other helpful perspectives that I just think are worth emphasizing are one is.

Anger is energy. It's not a problem. It's energetic fuel. There might be an opportunity if anger is a, what I think of as your go-to emotion, like you, like I said initially, that I would go to sadness more than anger, but if you are somebody who maybe you are a fight in terms of your nervous system response.

If you're, you have more of a fighter, how can you use the anger in a way that serves you? So yes, it might require you to go through all of those steps, but then you might be able to use it as almost a superpower, right? And that gets overused. I don't love saying that, but you know what I mean. It's like we take that fuel, that energetic fuel, and we use it for good.

How can you use it in the next workout? How can you use it to lift heavy? How can you use it to get yourself in action to make the call that maybe you were more timid to make before? How could you channel your energy to take the action that you need?

Because I think the amazing thing with anger is that often there's a lot of power to it. We just need to channel that power towards something that serves us. So just see, is there anything scary that you could channel that anger towards, that would help you?

Another thing that I like doing with my anger sometimes is. Is asking, what else? And that's why I do this with my kids sometimes. Like my son, tristan, he really likes to talk. So if something's going on for him, how he regulates is talking about the problem. And he will say like.

He'll say some things that like some, most of the time they do make sense, but sometimes it's just like these random things. Like he'll talk about how he's really upset because he doesn't get to go to the store and get toys as often as he want. Like when we go to the store, we only get food and he doesn't get toys, and that really upsets him.

And so I let him talk about it and then I say, what else? Like, what else is making you feel mad or. What are, tell me your other problems. So I encourage you to almost like do that with yourself. And sometimes I think of this as letting your bratty teenager just vent. So you just get out all the things and what else and what else and what else until you notice.

Okay. I am kind of at the end of the list. Like there's nothing really else to do. It helps you process. Okay. So just another little tip that if you were really feeling like I need to get this out of my body, I need to. Move it through and out of my body and you are a, an active thinker, like your brain is active.

This could be a good tool for you. And again, just see it as a feeling that passes through you. I think that's the most important takeaway from this. Alright, I hope that was helpful in terms of how anger works and what to do with it, both in general and also that specific step-by-step process. I will talk to you again soon.

Bye.