Mastering Anger: A Shotgun in A Room of Chandeliers

Anger is like fire in a paper mill, it can consume you so quickly that you don't even realize what is happening until you are a pile of ash. People battle anger daily and a lot of times they lose. Even though in the moment it feels like a boiling cauldron whose overflow cannot be denied there are ways to master your anger. Some say you should count to ten, some say to hit a pillow but these methods don't seem to be as effective as some might hope. I like the analogy of the angel and the devil on either shoulder. We all have one of each and we all decide which one to listen to. It is a constant struggle because what is good in us sometimes sounds like a whisper compared to the incessant screaming of our more negative sides. When anger wins out over patience we can hear that voice in our head saying, "what am I doing?" That voice is what I call your true self. It is who you are at the core and who you fight to protect everyday from what is damaging and negative in the world.

Anger is one of the ninjas we employ to battle for us when our better half feels unable to meet the challenge. Most of us try patience first. We try to reason and communicate. That is our true self trying be a problem solver. When it doesn't work we call in the artillery. Our anger is a coping mechanism and it can be very effective at conveying our ideas. People listen when you are angry and screaming, just not for the right reasons. Picture a room with a really high ceiling, full of hanging chandeliers. Above one of the chandeliers there is a light switch on the ceiling. This light switch when turned on fills the room with the most beautiful feeling of peace. We want to turn on the switch because we want to feel the peace it will bring but the ceiling is too high. We try to use a ladder but the switch is still just beyond our reach. We begin to try other methods but every time we are close to touching it, the chandeliers are too thick and our fingers can't fit through the spaces between them. So we run out of options, or so it seems and we go and get a gun. That gun is our anger. We begin to shoot the chandeliers until none remain. All we want is to flip that switch and fill the room with peace and we are willing to do anything to make sure it happens. Once we have destroyed everything in our way we climb up and try to find the switch but then we realize that we have destroyed all of the lights and the room is dark. Now we can't see the switch and we are stuck in a dark room covered with broken glass. In the aftermath of an angry outburst we find ourselves even farther away from our goal of peace and walking around in the dark, cutting our feet on the broken glass of our hateful words. That is what anger does, it destroys. Anger has one goal and it is blind to all else but that one goal. Anger wants only to be heard. It doesn't care about the feelings of others. It doesn't care about property or image or even someone else's safety.

If you think of your anger as a seperate entity it will help you fight against it. After all, at the close of a rampage you feel just as bad as whoever was at the recieving end of you rage. This is because the things that were said and done weren't said and done by you but by your anger. You, too, are at fault of course for affording it the power to act.  You have seen what anger can do and even knowing this you still let it hold the gun and pull the trigger so you feel guilt and remorse. You see, once you allow it to be in control you become an observer, chained in a corner and helpless. You have quit and given your hands and your mouth away to be used in ugly ways. It is true once you have given anger the power to act it is hard to stop it. But what you must remember is that anger needs your consent. When you feel your anger beginning to rear it's head think of it as a possession. You are being taken over. You are giving the controls away to a thing who does not have your best interest in mind. You must say to yourself, "I am in charge of me." You have to fight to keep your hands on the steering wheel, don't relinquish your power. You have to make the choice to be the driver. If you allow anger to drive, you are the one who suffers the injuries of an imminent collision. You are the one left to clean up the mess. You have to learn to admit that you are losing control. You need to learn to visualize your hands slipping from the wheel and you need to learn to maintain your grip. If for you that means walking away or asking for time to think then that is what you do. In any case you must make a choice to never allow anger to use your mouth or your hands. Take back your power. Clutch that steering wheel as tightly as you can and never let it go.

You CAN Teach an Old Dog New Tricks: Synapses and Decision Making

Have you ever had a moment where you are frantically searching for something, your keys for instance, and then eventually find it in an obvious place that you had already looked in? You wonder on these occasions how it is possible that you didn't see it the first time you looked. The reason is that the first time you looked, your keys simply weren't there. Sometimes when we are looking at something we aren't actually seeing it, we are remembering it. Your brain is really busy and because of this, fails sometimes to process new information. Physics is the study of matter and energy and their relationship with each other. Some physicists believe that most of what we think we see is really just our brain sending us a memory of what we've seen before. What this means is that to truly view something as new we must pause and focus on seeing it. This is why we couldn't see our lost keys. When we were looking for them our brain sent us a memory of the spot we were looking in and in that memory our keys weren't there. It's like sitting at a stop sign and when you looked for traffic, you saw none. But then when you pull out into the street suddenly there's a car there that you hadn't noticed before. You weren't actually seeing the intersection, your brain was assuming.


We become accustomed to living so quickly, to moving at such a fast pace that we don't actually consume what is in front of us. Science by way of physics has proven this. When you ask yourself the question, "How did I miss that when it was right in front of me," you are acknowledging the idea that the connections made by your nervous system have become habitual. For instance, why do we feel physical pain? It is because when we cut our skin or touch something hot our nerve endings are built to send the message to our brain that we are hurt. When you go to the dentist and they numb your mouth, what they are doing is impairing the ability of those nerve endings to send that message which means that the brain isn't able to tell us that we are hurt. When the medication wears off and your nerve endings "wake up" what we feel is the aftermath, the wound but not the initial injury. We can't feel the initial injury because our nerve endings were sleeping when it occured and are therefore completely unaware of it. We spend the first years of lives building more synapses or connections in our brains than any other time in our lives. A three year old actually has twice as many connections as an adult. From age ten to twenty, trillions of extra connections are eliminated. The connections that have been used consistently have become stronger and stay; those that have not been used often enough do not. If two children fall down in exactly the same way at the same time one may cry hysterically while the other just stands up and dusts off their knees. It's not because one child is hurt more than the other, it is because their environment has helped them form synapses that tell their nerve endings to tell their brain that they are more hurt. The point I'm making is that the way we react to life is based on the connections our brain has been building since birth. All of the cells in our brain have the potential to form a connection but only the connections which are used remain. It is survival of the fittest.

The phrase "practice makes perfect" takes on a whole new meaning. Since our nervous system dictates our reactions to stimuli based on the connections or synapses that are there then how do we change something in ourselves? Are we powerless against these habits? As adults we are forming connections too, just less frequently. Learning a new skill forms a connection, learning a language. Habitual decision making reinforces connections and branching out and trying new things forms new connections. What you must do is to realize that your brain is never in a static, permanent state. It changes everyday based on the choices you do or do not make. You are creating pathways everyday which determine how you are projected onto the world. Make conscious decisions don't live based on presumed circumstances, don't let habitual connections determine how you consume your environment. Open your eyes, make a choice to really see what you're looking at. Retrain your brain and open the gate to your endless possibility.

Congratulations.....You Are An Author!

Our history is weaved with stories. Stories which are true and even those which are not can offer many benefits including wisdom, entertainment, and education. Stories of strong leaders give us a desire to pursue inner fortitude, stories of injustice inspire us to rise in the face of adversity, and stories of everyday heroes show us that sacrifice is indeed the greatest gift of all. We look upon these stories through eyes of wonder, almost enchanted by the lives led by others. We watch movies and are captivated by the threads that hold the characters' lives together. We hear of triumphs and disasters on the news and we are truly moved by them. That is our heart. We feel these stories because their characters are human like us. We sympathize with them through their struggles and victories. There are people in history who have changed the faces of government, industry, and compassion and we are the living proof of their successes and failures. Human beings are enthralled by stories because we know how important they can be.

What we sometimes forget though, as we're taken in by all of the stories around us(our family's individual stories, the stories of celebrities, the stories of our neighbors) is that we are also authors. Each morning we wake up with a pen in our hand. We are all writers. The pages we write may never be read but they are written all the same, added to daily. What if those pages were tangible and you could hold them in your hand and read them? What if you could could read your own story cover to cover without bias? Would you praise the main character's decisions? What if your story were a movie? What kind of a movie would it be? Were you watching it would you be laughing, crying or cursing at the television? This is food for thought because if there are parts of the story you aren't fond of you are the only one who can change them. You are the author. You decide were the twists will be.

When you wake up in the morning, remember the pen in your hand. Choose carefully what you write with it because there is no eraser. Remove your habits and hurts and write yourself as a character with possibility and optimism. Craft a story that will warm hearts, comfort pain, and inspire. Make your story a story that others will tell to impart wisdom or entertainment or education. There are many more blank pages to fill. Fill them with something amazing!

A Fortress

A fortress grows around our hearts
Inside it's walls our hurting starts
The parts of us we keep within
Keep the bricks from caving in
With longing then we forward move
With bitterness and things to prove
So on we walk for miles and miles
And navigate through tears and smiles
Calling out for truth and love
For what we have is not enough
Begging from inside our shells
To fill a space that can't be filled
For what is true and what is real
Is one can't touch what we conceal
For we have built this fortress strong
To shelter us from any wrong
And if we want for something more
We know we must open the door
Once we open soon we see
What's been hidden, now set free
And brick by brick our fortess falls
With nothing there to hold it's walls
Our hearts exposed can feel the air
The sun, the rain and all that's there
The beautiful machine they are
No force can truly break a heart
With patience time heals every wound
But opening doors, that's up to you

Empathy and Selfishness

Almost every problem people have in their relationships can be traced back to feelings of being unloved, underappreciated, or misunderstood. This is because people, for the most part, only pretend to be in relationships. A relationship, you see, should come with an assumed and insurmountable degree of empathy. Selfish is, instead, the third and invisible member of most relationships. We don't realize it because we push those thoughts away in the interest of portraying the image of ourselves we wish for other people to see. We may not care to admit our selfishness, our actions may in fact speak to a more gracious and giving nature, but thought, though easily hidden, cannot be denied. Selfish thoughts live inside all of us and are most often kept at bay, sacrificed for a more "acceptable" and considerate way of living.

It is the distance between what we say and what we actually feel that determines the emotional state of our relationships. I am not saying that we should all be selfish and fight for every miniscule idea that presents itself. It is the lack of honesty and empathy that makes our selfish nature ugly, not the selfish nature itself. It is nothing to be ashamed of, we were built this way. It is the way we were made. Most of us see a situation, a person, an act and first think of our feelings and how it affects us and then second we introduce everyone else into our thinking. Whether you choose to admit it or not that is the truth. We rarely act on these inclinations, taking the high road, choosing others best interests instead but that doesn't make our thought processes any less real.

Selfish is the birthplace of bitter, angry, and depressed. Negative emotions are what happen when we finally reach a breaking point. This usually happens when our outward giving nature doesn't reap us the rewards we seek and any suppressed, self serving thoughts come to the surface. We don't want to hurt anyone and we certainly don't want to tarnish the way we are viewed. Our apologies after the storm are sincere. But we will continue having to make them if we don't recognize the simple truth. We are selfish just like everyone else. Every single person on the planet harbors selfish thoughts. When they make us feel unloved or unappreciated or misunderstood, they are simply acting out the same internal battle we all are fighting.

Empathy is the key to ending that battle. Understanding that we are all trying. We can understand our own thought processes easily because we know what they are born from. We know where they begin because we have walked with them for our entire lives. When we apologize and our sincerity is shunned we long for understanding that other people can't always give. What we need to do is to stop relying on our relationships to give us the lift we desire. We need to accept the fact that the flaws in others that hurt us are flaws we all share. It isn't a personal attack when we are hurt by those we love. It is a simple, outward expression of the internal battle we all fight to remain good in spite of our respective selfish natures. Our love for others is constantly put on trial in the midst of the many mistakes we make, but even when doubt surrounds us we know our own hearts and the truth of the love we feel. Before you put someone else's love on trial, remember that they are just like you, flawed and fighting.

Emotional Habit

There are many positive ways to change your life but in order to guarantee that the change is permanent you have to take an honest and sometimes brutal inventory of your negative emotional habits and the choice patterns that have led you to were you are. And second you must make a conscious decision to create healthier reactions in yourself. Remove judgement (of yourself and others), quell the need for outside approval, and take back ownership of your life. Once you've done this, the people around you will no longer stake a claim in your stress, your happiness, or your decision making. Their woes and triumphs will be theirs and yours will be yours. This does not mean that you should stop caring about others. It simply means to stop being consumed by what you can not control. The first step to ownership of your life is accepting that it is yours and only yours. That is freedom. That is where you find content.

How to Fail

Do not be the one who loves with all you have inside

Do not be a worthy friend, never truth confide

Live forever in a shell and always looking out

Upon the things that others need but you choose to live without

Always lie and always steal, never show remorse

Be certain to burn every bridge and close every door

Make sure your words are weapons, be certain they cut deep
Never give forgiveness, never secrets keep

Look upon the world and judge, take all that you can get

Never think you have enough and never be content

Always wear two faces, be petty, cruel and trite

Never smile, do not be kind, make everything a fight

Be afraid and live in fear of everything you see
Do these things if suffering alone is what you seek