The Spiritual Eclectic » anger

Don’t Create Rooms Full of Anger and Hurt

I have a spare bedroom I’m painting and refurbishing so that it’ll make a beautiful guest room when my daughter is home from college or has friends over. I didn’t finish it earlier in the year when I was too busy, but I’ve had plenty of time to wrap things up in the last two weeks. I haven’t. I know better.

I’ve been avoiding putting any of my creative energy into this room for one reason: someone did something extremely hurtful to my daughter and me a couple of weeks ago and I know that all that anger and hurt would just go right into my creation. And anyone sleeping in that room would feel the angry energy bouncing off the walls.

I’ve been very picky about who I’ve gotten to help me with refurbishing my house and yards. Captain Earl has done wonders for my gardens and lawn, and it’s a sweet energy there when I walk around the outside of the my house. He’s helped with my indoor creations, too, including my home office, to create a beautiful serene, lovely place for me to create and work. When Justin was here with me, he helped me “build castles” out of my home, doing all sorts of chores and handyman jobs enthusiastically, and helping me design my rope-lighted patio. With Todd, he commented often on all the things in my house that he appreciated, though he wasn’t part of building this serene place where I live.

I’ve long understood that what you put into a creation is energy and that energy stays with it. I saw this with the clothes my mom made for me while I was growing up and with the clothes she made for my daughters. Every stitch made with love–and putting a little part of herself into every stitch. The girls always told me how loved and safe they felt in dresses Grandma had made them.

So my guest room with the planned teal and tan paint, the bamboo curtain rods, the wood blinds, and the walls hangings will wait a little while longer. My serenity is returning after a terrible upset, and when I’m sure that all I’m broadcasting is love and peace, that’s what I’ll put into this room.

Fifth Chakra Exercise: What I Wish I Could Say (2010 Version)

Photo copyright by addictedImage; Creative Commons License

Every year around this time, I do a little life coaching exercise that’s featured in Give Your Life Direction. The idea is to make a list of things I wish I could say but, for whatever reason, can’t. Maybe because the other person is dead. Maybe because it would be too dangerous to confront them. Maybe because the other person lives far away. Or maybe because I just don’t feel I can be honest with my emotions, whether they are jealous, angry, or wounded. My fifth chakra, the throat chakra, has often been rather weak, but I’ve been actively strengthening it.

The first year I tried this exercise, I had a list as long as my arm. It was only “supposed” to be ten things, but I kept going, shocked at how much I’d kept bottled up. A few years later, the list was down to the five to eight range. Last year, I had to dig a little harder and still ended up in the five to eight range, thanks mostly to some secrets I was keeping for someone else. Every year of this exercise, the burden gets a little lighter.

I sat down a few days ago to make my list for the year…and nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The closest I could come was a conversation I’d like to have with one particular man in my life who has been out of town, but I’ve held off only because it would be nicer to have the conversation face-to-face, alone. It’s nothing bad–no anger, no jealousy, no I’m-hurt, no why-did-you-do-this?, no nothing of that sort. Instead, it’s just a nice talk about something personal and lovely.

Right now, there’s little to nothing that I have bottled up, no emotion I’m swallowing because I’m afraid to say it or fear the ramifications if I do.

I kinda like it this way.

How to Release Resentments and Anger

Photo by Aphrodite ; creative commons license

“How can I release old resentments and anger?” a friend asked. She’s a very wise and together person, and very spiritual, so the question surprised me a little. There’s always that expectation, you know, that spiritual people don’t get angry or carry resentments but some wounds are deep and take a long, long time to heal.

It’s only in looking back over the past four years that I realize how much old anger I’ve released. It’s made a big difference in healing my life, and though I don’t quite have everything I want in my life just yet, I have a life I enjoy and one that’s vastly different from a few years ago.

The first step for me to begin to release old resentments and angers was in realizing that it really was anger that I was carrying, from as far back as my early childhood. I’d never considered myself an angry person…but inside I was furious. I so seldom got “mad,” but I did get hurt a lot. That was the key. I grew up in a Southern Baptist home amidst a church upbringing that taught me that anger was a deadly sin and that I needed to be a good girl, good and forgiving and great at turning the other cheek. The way anger manifested in me was not as rage but as “hurt.” I couldn’t tell the difference, and to be honest, I sometimes still can’t.

The second step in releasing my anger was to honor it. I had to stop thinking of anger as a “bad emotion” I wasn’t allowed to have. Anger was my way of refusing a certain path of oppression and of demanding that I be respected and valued. I learned to let it out in mostly constructive ways, to stop apologizing for it, and to use it as a reminder not to allow certain people to abuse either me or my compassion. It’s saved me many times from letting an old wounding be repeated.

The hardest part of releasing anger is to meet it head on and investigate its root cause. That means a lot of self-inquiry. It means looking in shadowy places, shining the light on them, and dispersing them. For me, it took the shape of a healing journal where I poured out millions of words that later became articles, books, e-courses, and workshops that help other people deal with similar issues. The writing, for me, was cathartic, but I’ve also written poetry and songs, and if I were talented at dance or painting, I might have tried those methods as well.

Some old angers could be released only through ritual; in particular the Ho’ponopono ritual has been helpful to me. It’s doubled as a funeral for my tyranical father and a divorce meditation for my ex.

Another way for me to release old resentments has been to recognize the situation for what it really was and then rewrite it the way it “should” have been. My article, The Day My Parents Killed the Pedophile, is a good example and is recommended by many online communities dedicated to healing sexual abuse.

It’s not that all of those old angers have been banished. They’ve been released into the wild. That means some have vanished, maybe for forever, but other still roam around and revisit from time to time to feed, or try to. It helps to realize that in most cases, the people who wounded and angered me were doing the best they could with what they had and weren’t intentionally trying to hurt me. It was just part of their personalities, but not something I have to bind myself to. Some old resentments still float around me, unseen and unnoticed until one lands close by or bops me on the head, and with those I can sometimes reach out from a different perspective and pop that bubble and it’s gone for good because it no longer has any power over me or chains on me. There was nothing left but a thin sheen of oily color and no substance at all.

To keep new angers from forming, I’ve become more vocal, allowing my anger to show where I might not have before and with little regard for whether I particularly upset the other person or not. Not every time, but exponentially more often than a few years ago. Sometimes it becomes a major confrontation and sometimes it might ensure the partnership will not thrive (it won’t anyway if I hold in the anger) but holding it in only transforms the anger into a cancer (sometimes literally) that eats away and tastes like hurt.

The big question for me to ask myself is, when my feelings have been deeply hurt, is it really hurt? Or is it anger? Or both? It’s more often anger at injustice and disrepect than anything else. And if I express myself as “I am so hurt that you….,” do I really mean “I am so angry that you…”? If I express it as hurt and the relationship is truly a loving one, it can manifest for the other person as guilt rather than as a chance to clear the air. Guilt only keeps it inside to fester.

How to Uncover Old Triggers and Release Explosive Feelings

Photo by whatsername

I’m having seriously hard feelings toward someone today. A stranger. A stranger whose work I have appreciated and promoted to others. And I’m feeling utterly irrational about it..as happens every time in my life that my integrity has ever been questioned.

Some people say it’s not spiritual to have bad feelings, but that’s hogwash and I think we do ourselves a physical and emotional disservice to believe that. I don’t swallow bad feelings any longer because it’s just not a healthy thing for any of us to do. Much better to work through it and release it in a healthy way than let it fester inside. The problem is figuring out the trigger. You can’t release it once and for all without knowing where the feeling began because the seed of it will be there to grow all over again, some other incident, regardless of how silly or minor.

I thought I was doing someone a good turn. I thought I was acting supportively. Right now, I’m trying to bandage those metaphorically bitten fingers, but at the same time, I’m still trying to figure out why I cannot let go of integrity issues and just shrug them off as someone else’s opinion. I think, during the course of this splatter of words and feelings, I’ve figured out exactly why this is such a big deal for me, and it’s a surprise to me where it comes from.

So let me show you how I work through this, and you’re welcome to try this yourself on your own most volatile emotions.

As many of my readers know, I really enjoy the artistic aspect of photography, both trying my hand at it and soaking up the visual pleasure of someone else’s work. Self-portraits are particularly captivating to me, even when they’re my own. I can’t draw or paint worth a flip, so it’s photographs that really tug at me. To that end, I started adding photos to this blog earlier this year so that I could share what I like with others and encourage others’ appreciation for those artists. Some of the photos I use on this blog are my own or ones that my daughters took (better photographers, better cameras, better artists, better eye for design and content than I’ll ever have). Some are stock photos from a company that sold me a license that allows me to use the photos in my print and online publications, provided I don’t re-sell the photos. Most are from Flickr photographers who offer their work under a special license grouping called a creative commons license.

The creative commons license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_commons_license) became popular online a few years ago and allows artists, musicians, and writers to make some of their work available provided attribution (and usually a return link) is given. There are “baseline” rights such as attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives, etc. Self-promoting writers (me included) were using this technique in the late 90’s, offering various articles for syndication (pre-blogs) provided the article in its entirety was republished and that the “information box” giving a short bio and a website link was included. I still have old articles on writing—from 1993—routinely being republished this way because the material is still timely even though I no longer write those types of books. I’d have no idea they were still being circulated were it not for Google Alerts. But the link-back still sends people my way and they often become regular readers.

I’m a stickler on copyrights (having had my work pirated before) but I ran into someone today who’d put the wrong license on his copyrighted photo. I’d followed the license exactly as provided…but he didn’t understand the difference between a copyright and a license, or that he’d licensed the world to use his photo without paying him a dime. It wasn’t the license he intended, but I couldn’t have known that from anything on his photo page. I was happily sharing and recommending his work and flowing my readership to him, as my blog stats will attest.

And that’s where this current burning sensation started—with a really distressing morning wake-up email accusing me of theft and very obviously not understanding that he’d used the wrong license, which, as of late this morning, was still on his photo page for other people to use erroneously. Hopefully I’ve been able to explain the difference in what he wanted and what he was presenting to the world, and he’ll remove/change the license so there won’t be any further alienation of previously supportive fans. Right now, he’s full of righteous indignation (as am I) and he seems intent that people are out to do him wrong–but that’s his cross to bear. I have my own, thank you.

If anything will get me riled up, it’s having my integrity questioned. Well, that and threats of lawsuits, regardless of what I can prove fairly easily. And yes, I get riled to the point of being…over the top, apostle of fire-type angry. Why? I’m not completely sure but I think I know the answer.

I’ve obliterated many of my hot buttons over the past few years of intense spiritual work, so I’m trying to do the same with this one, using the same process as before. It’s just two questions, this process. And it usually sheds light on things at a great distance.

First, how does having my integrity questioned (or whatever the incident that incited this emotion) make me feel?

Angry, helpless, defensive, enraged, heart-pounding, just…life or death upset. WOW! Why that level of upset over some guy who doesn’t understand copyrights and the situation is easily corrected by deleting all references to him? Why can’t I simply say to myself, he doesn’t know what the frak he’s talking about, delete his work, delete his references, delete his email, and move on without a glance backward? Why the—seriously—life or death upset?

That brings me to the second part of this process. I’ve identified the feeling, all the way down to its ugliest core and the severity of it (because the severity will always be great or else it wouldn’t still be a factor in my life). So….

When was the first time(s) I remember feeling this way?

I remember two incidents where, as a very small child, I found myself having my integrity questioned. I have to go way back, first to about age five and then to a couple of years before. They’re just flashes of emotion and memory now and I’ve talked about them before in my blogs and books. They’re viewed in hindsight as if I stood alongside myself, not hearing my own screaming but keenly aware of everything around me.

The latter of the two incidents , I was attacked by a vicious dog that went for my jugular and caught my jaw instead. The scars aren’t very obvious now, thanks to laser smoothing at the plastic surgery clinic, but I know they’re there. I could easily have died that day if I hadn’t jutted my shoulder upward to instinctively protect my neck, and I still remember in an oddly detached way that life-or-death fear, the sense of survival, the sense of surprise and hurt. What I associate with this long-ago event is Daddy not believing me when I said I was just petting the dog and warning me that I’d better not tell that to the doctor because no one would believe me and I’d obviously provoked the dog somehow. It was the insistence that I’d done something wrong and the refusal to believe that I was telling the truth that stuck with me. I’d been taught to tell the truth and was now being told to withhold it in favor of a more believable story. My daddy questioned my integrity at a time when my fight or flight survival instincts were highest.

The other time was a few years before this, when the ground under my sandbox gave way, and I was buried alive in dirt and muck until my mom could race out of the house and across the yard to pull me out. I might have died that day if she hadn’t seen it happen and been close by. There’s still something dark in those memories that I cannot touch, dare not, but I do remember the oddly detached sense of fear, the life-or-death closeness of the moment, the surprise, the terror. I also remember someone in my family—I don’t remember who—implying I’d done something to cause the situation and not wanting to hear otherwise. I was too little to understand what integrity was then, but I knew the feeling of being questioned as a wrong-doer at a moment when my fight or flight survival instincts were highest. I couldn’t distinguish between the two.

So I guess it’s no surprise that having my honesty questioned brings back those feelings of “MUST SURVIVE THIS—MUST FIGHT—MUST KICK AND SCREAM AND STAY ALIVE.” I know the trigger now, at least two of them, but how do I blow off the next person who comes along with wild accusations? It’s going to happen. You know it is—we live in a litigious world and throwing around threats of legal action is a typical shoot-and-ask-questions-later methodology. So how do I not “over-react” next time, even if most people don’t know how irrational I feel about something they’ll never hear about?

I guess the truth is, I don’t know how to not react. The best I can do, and what usually works for me…eventually…is to know the root cause of those feelings and understand that it often has nothing at all to do with the current event. I don’t know if that’s a cure for releasing explosive feelings and letting them fade away, but it’s the best I’ve got.

Tarot: Card for Love and Innocence

Photo by MShades

Twice in the past month, I’ve drawn the Two of Cups. It’s one of the most beautiful cards in my Arthurian Tarot deck. A man and woman stand together aboard a dragon-faced ship, locked in a deep embrace, her head against his chest, his hand curling around her head. They are in love, and-I think-so am I.

I step out onto this thought, just bare toes on thin ice, and wait to drop into numbing waters and feel nothing again. I am jittery, hopeful, terrified, and elated, all at once. But I am alive, and I feel…something. Something that isn’t hurt and grief and anger and betrayal and devastation. Something I haven’t felt in a long time.

I call my best friend to tell her what I’ve discovered, but she already knows. Apparently, I’ve mentioned this man to her once or twice, and my eyes have sparkled and betrayed what even I didn’t know. She tells me I sound like a teenager, and she just loves it. She’d been afraid I would become bitter toward all men, given my marriage, and she gets a kick out of hearing me describe what I like about this man and the way my voice softens and lilts when I say his name.

Thinking this news will make my mother feel more secure about my new and independent life, I tell her I think I’m in love, but she doesn’t want to hear it. Why would I be interested in another man and so soon after my divorce? Would this stop my ex and me from getting back together? Maybe it would be better to let my ex remarry before I fall in love with someone new, she says. Disappointed, I tell her nothing else.

I should quit while I’m ahead, but I don’t. This new feeling is exciting and I want to talk about it. I tell two work-friends over lunch because they want to know why I keep smiling to myself. They want to hear all the dirt, so I describe this man and his sense of integrity and the way he makes me feel all shiny and new. They note the lightness in my voice, even a giggle, and then rip into me, teasing me until I have tears in my eyes. They take a happy moment and shred it. I don’t finish my dessert, but I feel stupid and childish, and I cross their company off my list. They tell me I’m being too sensitive and shouldn’t be upset with them.

None of it changes the way I feel. I’m totally and completely besotted with this man and didn’t know it. I can’t tell him this, not yet. I have to know if there’s a spark there first or if I’m the only one who’s smoldering. I don’t want to make the mistake of confessing to someone who isn’t ready to hear that I have emotions in his regard.

So I tamp down the feelings. I swallow them. I choke on them. Along with so many other feelings I’ve had that I wasn’t “allowed” to have during the course of my adolescence and later my marriage. I’m not allowed to feel anger because, I’m told, it’s morally wrong. I should be forgiving instead. I’m not allowed to feel joy because too many people see that as bragging or selfishness. I should feel selflessness instead. I’m not allowed to feel grief or despair because then I’m accused of needing anti-depressants or even, as one friend hinted, a suicide watch. I should feel calm and rational. And I’m not allowed to be in love because it’s too soon, too childish, too…whatever.

I choke and sputter and drown in my feelings, and they settle into my fifth chakra, right at my throat. I swallow them but they stick in my throat and won’t go down and won’t come up. I can’t breathe. The doctor says I have an infected trachea. I’ll be out of work for two weeks, and I’ve lost my voice in the meanwhile.

With a raspy, barely-there voice, I talk to my counselor but by now I’m distraught. “I had feelings come up for this man,” I tell him.

He laughs at me. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Yeah, well, everyone else seems to think so. And I don’t know what to do about them, so they must not be good. I’m expected to have all the post-divorce anger and grief and everyone wants to know if I’m having those and well, good, now swallow them and get on with your life. But these feelings are different.” I describe my affections and the reasons for them, and he stops me.

“Aw, honey, it’s okay to have feelings. Feelings are good. And these are good feelings. Just enjoy them. You don’t have to express them to this man or to anyone else. Just enjoy them for what they are.”

These feelings do feel good. I could get lost in enjoying them. I could want to drag them out and make them last a long, long time.

“It’s been so long since I’ve felt this way,” I tell my counselor.

He laughs again. “I can hear it in your voice. It’s like you’ve become a virginal maiden all over again. You get all giggly and feel like a teenager around him instead of the calm, cool, and collected businesswoman that nothing fazes. It’s very sweet and wonderful. Just enjoy that feeling.”

Before I can say anything else, he adds, “Honey, don’t you see? You might very well have written off all men after your marriage, but instead, here is a man who has touched you deeply and rekindled an innocence in you that you thought you’d lost forever. You don’t have to say anything to him or to anyone else. Just breathe through your feelings and explore them.”

And now I have tears in my eyes again because my counselor has pinpointed the revelation for me: that I’ve reclaimed an innocence I thought was dead.

I’ve found a part of myself that I locked away a long time ago.

And I’ve fallen in love when I least expected it.

www.spilledcandy.com

This is Book #1 in the Third Degree Diary series, but they can be read in any order