Don’t be a Victim of Anger Management, Yours or Anyone’s
ANGER!! That fiery, volatile beast surges within us like our personal psychic terrorist, threatening to consume everything in its path. But what if I told you that this seemingly uncontrollable force is a smokescreen, a façade of false strength? What if, instead of managing this fire, it could transform into something more profound, more authentic?
Anger: The False Strength
Anger masquerades as strength. It’s a formidable armor, a shield that the ego wields to defend its boundaries and sense of self. But, isn’t this so-called strength a form of bondage? Anger is fundamentally frustrated energy, a cauldron of undigested past experiences that we carry within us. It’s as if we’re dragging a heavy chain wherever we go, forged from the iron of past hurts and misunderstandings.
This is the process of the clarification of the personality: Each time you understand an issue or an identification with a past conflict or a now-unnecessary defense, you discharge feelings associated with the issue and work through the feelings and the beliefs about it. As you have seen many times, working through an issue—which involves ceasing to be identified with it—typically allows the arising of an essential state. In this process of working through an issue related to any essential quality, the personality confronts the part of its structure that substitutes and compensates for the lack of that true quality. For example, issues around essential strength will uncover the false strength of the personality. When this compensation is seen through and the essential strength is freed, there is no more need for the personality structure of the false strength. – Diamond Heart Book One: Elements of the Real in Man
The Ego’s Defensive Mechanism
The ego is a cunning architect. It constructs walls of “don’t-fuck-with-me” anger to protect the false citadel of the ego self. But these walls are both a sanctuary and a prison. They keep out perceived threats but also disconnect us from the unified field of existence. The ego uses anger to draw lines in the sand, to say, “This is me, and that is you.” But in doing so, it perpetuates the illusion of separation, the grand cosmic joke that we are individual entities disconnected from the Whole.
The Therapeutic Approach: Normalizing the Self
Most conventional approaches to anger management aim to control this volatile emotion, to tame the fire, but not to understand its ontological source. Therapies and coping strategies are designed to minimize anger’s destructiveness and make it socially acceptable. But this is akin to putting a lid on a boiling pot; the steam is bound to escape, sooner or later. Such approaches rarely delve deep enough to free the soul from being bound to past identifications, allowing essential strength to emerge.
Essential Strength: The Soul’s True Vitality
Essential strength is an aspect of our deeper self that transcends the ego’s petty defenses. Essential strength is characterized by expansiveness, aliveness, discriminating awareness, and the capacity to initiate action. It gives us the strength to set appropriate boundaries without severing our connection to the unified field of existence. This is strength that doesn’t need to shout to make itself heard; it simply is.
The Alchemy of Anger
So, how do we transmute this base emotion into spiritual gold? The Diamond Approach offers a path. It invites us to sit with our anger, not act it out and discharge it, and explore its nooks, crannies, hidden alleys, and secret chambers. It encourages us to ask: “What is this anger protecting? What ancient wounds are festering beneath this fiery façade?” As we delve deeper, we begin to untangle the web of past experiences, digest them, and free the bound energy. This process is not in the service of a more civilized self-image but in the service of freeing us from the self-image. And as we do, something miraculous happens: the false strength of anger gives way to the true strength of the soul.
To explore an example of working on psychodynamic issues, we can look at one of the presenting issues of the strength aspect. The issue might present itself as a difficulty with anger and aggression, as a stance of passivity and weakness. Exploring this issue may reveal a fear of aggression, which then may remind the soul of the anger she encountered in her early environment, in the person of her father or mother. Making the fear conscious and remembering its source will help the soul to access her own anger, since she is in reality no longer a child who must be passive in the face of the anger of the more powerful adult. Exploring the energy of this emotion can reveal its connection to strength. Anger turns out to be a distortion of essential strength; that is, the quality of strength becomes caught up in the emotion of anger, which is itself caught up in the self-image of being a child in relation to the parents. In this example, the soul was afraid to own up to her strength because of fear of her parents’ anger. So she abandoned and repressed her strength, and its resultant distortion, anger. Working through this issue opens the quality of strength in the soul. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
A Call to Inner Exploration
Anger must give way to the assertion of one’s strength and expansive energy, and is often the way to it. Although the process often starts with anger, in the cases where separation actually succeeds, it always ends with the sense of expansive and assertive strength. This strength indicates the dissolution of the affect of frustration, and always ushers in the sense of separation. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach
Move beyond mere anger management and explore the alchemy of your own being. In experientially understanding the roots of frustration and anger, we free ourselves from its bondage and open the door to a deeper, more authentic strength. A strength that doesn’t divide but unites, that doesn’t destroy but creates. Are you ready to take the first step?