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Releasing Anger and Rage

Honoring Yourself

Nothing is more infuriating than being extremely angry and having someone tell you that your anger is invalid. Adults often tell children they have no right to be angry. The truth is that they have the right to be angry simply because they're alive. Neither you nor anyone else has the fight to physically inflict you anger on someone else, but you do have the right to feel it, whether it meets with approval or not. What makes you angry makes you angry until you do some work on it and release it. Many of us get stuck in an internal tape loop in our heads, with feelings of anger and rage simmering just under the surface and someone else insisting we don't really feel the anger, the anger is forbidden, or we're bad to feel the anger. This form of invalidation will make you crazy, because your internal emotional state is telling you one thing and the outside world is telling you another.

Back to the model of perception being everything: No one else has the right to tell you that if something you perceive makes you angry you are wrong to have that feeling. In their perception they may not experience the feeling of anger in this particular incidence. You also need to consider that they may be running a particular incidence. You also need to consider that they may be running a particular control game on you and that your anger gets in the way of their manipulations.

Remember that your emotions are like an onboard guidance system. Your anger is a cue that something (according to the parameters you have set up in you perception) is wrong, that a boundary of yours has been crossed, or that you need to take action. You can think of anger as an alarm bell going off and signaling that the parameter has been breached. You must honor yourself and pay attention when you are feeling angry. If your get the message (why anger arose), you can dismiss the messenger (the anger).

May times old, unresolved anger arose as a response to being in a catch-22 as a child. It may have been a situation such as feeling enraged that someone abused you and feeling threatened you'll be abused even further if you express your anger. A child has no choice at that point but to shove the anger deep down inside. If what you honestly feel could cost you bodily or emotional harm, you will logically choose to hide it.