Unravelling anger…

The safe expression of anger is something I have recently been contemplating.

Given my over-familiarity with fear, this emotion and its family of emotions, irritation, frustration and at the extreme end, rage, are not states that I have been frequently visited by. When someone has done something to aggrieve me in the past, I have often bypassed these normal human responses to sometimes even unquestionable behaviours, moving quickly into a state of compassion, empathy and understanding of the suffering the person must be experiencing to drive their uncalled for behaviours.

However I have been guided to question just how helpful this way of operating might be. And what arises in my mind, is perhaps if these emotions in the past were not outwardly expressed, could they instead have been redirected inwards, being stored in the crevices of my body as persistent, niggling symptoms wanting to be heard, felt, or released?

We have conditioned by society, especially as females, to suppress our anger. Perhaps because no one is that well practiced at healthily expressing it, or our parents or society at large similarly are unsure how to manage it, we often bypass these feelings and keep moving on.

But when we really stop to think about it, perhaps there are people or circumstances in which we have felt angry, frustrated or even rage at someone’s behaviour towards us.

I know that if I dig deep and think about the people that I may have stored negative feelings towards, my past neighbours most definitely come to mind. This was an unfathomable series of events that was completely uncalled for. The result for me was a constant feeling of being under threat, feeling unsafe and an extreme activation of hyper-vigilance within me, as I dealt with the projection of their wounded parts. And even despite calling in the justice system and the police, this was still not addressed, due to the absence of physical harm towards me. Yet what happened was wrong. Was extremely uncalled for. And completely unjust.

The outcome of this situation was that I sold my home. I decided to move on. Not in a sense of giving in, but in a surrendered act of being redirected to somewhere better.

But perhaps the body keeps the memory alive in the cells within. Perhaps until we really feel that anger, that rage and that frustration at unfair circumstances beyond our control, we will suffer in our physical body with the anger unconsciously turning inwards towards ourselves.

Ultimately we are all human beings. We will feel joy. Peace. Love. Compassion. But we will also feel fear, anger, frustration, guilt, doubt, jealousy and mistrust. So I think the more and more I continue down this path, this path of awakening, of making the subconscious conscious and of shining a light on the places of darkness within in order to set them free, that the key lies in making space for it all.

In feeling our anger. Talking about our frustrations. Releasing our rage. Not in an unhealthy, destructive way, but in a way in which we feel liberated from the past, unburdened by things we have been unable to say, and let them free.

And that it is only by doing so, that we are truly able to be present in our current life circumstances, and to move forward with more freedom and space to meet the reality of our life, right here, right now, in this very moment.