Emotional Wellness

Becoming aware of your emotions means more than feeling frightened of some things, and feeling angry at others. It means becoming aware of everything that you are feeling. Until you do, there will always be parts of yourself that you don’t know about. Some of them are angry. If you don’t know about them, you will get angry sometimes, whether you want to or not. Some parts of you are frightened. If you don’t know about those parts, you will get frightened sometimes, whether you want to or not.

The parts of yourself that you don’t know about are the parts that surprise you. Have your ever decided to make up after an argument, but when you see your friend you start to argue again? You thought you were going to make up, but a part of you was still angry. That part had another idea. It surprised you because you didn’t know about it.

Have you ever met someone that you instantly liked, or instantly disliked? That is also what it feels like to have parts of yourself that you don’t know about. All of the parts of yourself have their own likes and dislikes. If you don’t know about them, you will suddenly find yourself liking or disliking what they do.

Almost everyone has parts of themselves that they don’t know about. The strongest parts of yourself that you don’t know about are your obsessions, compulsions, and addictions. They are so strong that if you don’t know about them, they do whatever they like, no matter what you want. You feel as if you don’t have any choice. People who can’t stop drinking alcohol are like that. So are people who can’t stop using drugs. They are completely in the power of parts of themselves that they don’t even know about.

The only way to get to know about the parts of yourself that you don’t know about is through your feelings. You have to get to know what you are feeling — everything that you are feeling. Each of the different parts of yourself has its own feelings. When you are aware of everything that you are feeling, you can recognise those parts right away.

If the boy knew about the part of himself that hurt so much, he might not have chosen to be angry all the time, but he didn’t know about that part, so when it got angry, he got angry. It was almost always angry, and so he was almost always angry, too.

Until you know the angry and frightened parts of yourself, they make the decisions for you. Once you get to know about a part of yourself, it doesn’t stop having its feelings and wanting to do the things that it wants to do, but it doesn’t surprise you any more. You don’t find yourself getting angry without noticing it, or being angry all the time, sometimes without knowing why. You can decide if you want to act as angry as the angry part of yourself, or as frightened as the frightened part of yourself. You get to choose.

112 (C) Creating Resilient Educators

Understanding Anger: Emotional Bomb Disposal

How much pleasure you derive from your life is in direct proportion to the degree that you do not express anger. The Euroamerican way of dealing with anger is to direct it at relationships. It is based on the "attribution error" that says if someone else is angry it is due to his personality but if you yourself are angry it is due to the circumstances. On the other hand, the Eastern way of dealing with anger often leads to a passive-aggressive withdrawal from intimate relationships. The Oceanic Third Way is to "confess" anger rather than "express" or vent it.

Confessing anger involves admitting to yourself and those around you that you are not thinking, feeling, or behaving appropriately when you are angry.

When your brain alerts you that there has been a trespass, gently feel the side of your neck for your carotid pulse. If your pulse starts to increase, your brain is regressing, your heart is being stressed, and your immune system is at risk. Remember the first of Thomas Jefferson's ten canons of conduct: "When angry count ten before you speak. If very angry, a hundred."

Next, put your hand down and count out ten slow, deep breaths. Take your pulse again. Don't deal with the perceived trespass until your pulse has slowed.

Although the brain often tells the body what to do, the body also communicates with the brain. Listen to it and let it help you to slow down and stop fighting.

We not only behave as we feel, we can come to feel as we behave. Never deal with anger when your body is in attack mode. If you want to deal with a trespass, write it down, write down what your brain thinks is its source, and then take a break. Come back to the issue days later when your body is calmer and your brain is less defensive. Remember, unresolved anger states escalate much faster than new anger, so you are best to sleep on it then discuss it. If you think you don't have time to sleep on it, go for a walk before you get back to the problem. The fuse of anger flickers for a very long time.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman warns that when we are angry, we become emotionally hijacked. When you are not flooded with anger hormones, you can try to be the rational person you are when you're not angry. Polynesians say, "Always act like the person you wish you were instead of the person you say others make you be.,'

113 (C) Creating Resilient Educators

Ten Myths About Anger

Here are the ten myths about anger that can lead us to automatic angry actions.

Anger myth 1: Unexpressed anger leads to cancer There is very little research supporting the existence of the so-called “Type C” or cancer-prone personality. It has been speculated that cancerprone people are unable to express their anger, but studies in this area fail to support this claim. Some recent research shows that “exploders,” or persons who have frequent outbursts of temper, have more cancer than non-exploders.

Anger myth 2: Unexpressed anger raises blood pressure and causes heart disease In fact, the very opposite is true. Expressing anger raises blood pressure and significantly interferes with the efficiency of the heart. The research is clear on this: overt hostile expression is a major threat to your cardiovascular system, and because it drives people away, the resulting isolation also leads to illness.

Anger myth 3: Depression is anger turned inward This 80-year-old Freudian fallacy dies hard. Popular psychology still suggests that our emotions work like liquids trapped within our body container. Dam up the flow in any one place and it will flood out in another place. This psychodynamic theory provides a good excuse for aggressive expression, but it is simply not true. Modern research has shown that our emotions are not within us, rather they are a system of interaction with everyone and everything. Happy people are not usually aggressive people.

Anger myth 4: Showing your anger is just being truthful about your emotions Western culture teaches us to be truthful and express our innermost feelings, particularly anger. The problem is that emotions exist to give colour to our experiences and often distort and exaggerate them.

Because many of our five basic senses are weak in comparison to those of other species, our brain and our emotions magnify what does get through to us to compensate. Emotions allow us to act powerfully. How we feel may be honest, but it is not always truthful. When we are the most emotional, we can’t see truth very well, only the brain’s version of reality, and the brain’s interpretation is an amplified, biased projection of what it has selected.

Anger myth 5: Showing your anger is how you get justice When we feel frustrated and angry, we are often seeking justice for a perceived trespass. The exaggerated urgency response of anger is not designed to see the world from someone else’s point of view, only to protect our personal survival. Anger and aggression are self-righteous, not righteous.

114 (C) Creating Resilient Educators

Anger myth 6: You are at your most powerful and effective when you are angry Good, hot anger may help when you are being threatened during a robbery or physical assault, but it is almost useless when it comes to day-to-day life. Anger feeds on itself, crippling us intellectually and emotionally when we most need to think clearly. Saying that we have allowed ourselves to feel angry and upset can be empowering, but accusing someone else of making us angry is an admission of powerlessness.

Anger myth 7: Venting your anger prevents violence While the Eastern-Asian mind is not inclined to venting emotions, Western culture stresses expression of almost any feeling, anywhere, anytime. One only has to walk through the corridors of any school and listen to students’ language to see how freely emotions, particularly angry ones, are expressed. From our belief in this free expression, we have reaped one of the most violent societies in history. Our vocabulary reflects how we live and also helps determine how we live.

Anger Myth 8: Parents should get their anger out with one another in order to be better

parents Social and health researchers know that perhaps the greatest single risk to children’s health and happiness is turmoil between parents. All major studies of family life clearly support one warning: never, never fight in front of the children.

If parents fight and argue, they are raising warriors and they are hurting all of us.

Anger myth 9: A good anger explosion clears the air This is the catharsis theory of anger, which suggests that a good fight once in a while naturally cleanses and revitalises a relationship. Unfortunately, just the opposite is true. Expressing anger always amplifies it. It contaminates relationships, and eventually drains them. Anger leads to contempt, contempt leads to disgust, and there is nothing quite like disgust to prevent a life of shared pleasure.

Anger myth 10: Nice gals and guys finish last This myth is about power. It says that the more anger you express, the more success you will achieve through your assertive confidence and resulting competitive edge. The trouble with edges is that you can fall over them: angry people get angrier and angrier in addictive dependence on the urgency response. Assertiveness training courses flourished in the last decade, but the research again contradicts popular psychology. It is clear that those who confess their anger in the most pleasant, appropriate, and socially acceptable way are the most successful in all areas of life.

“If you want to stay healthy, be nice. If you want to heal, be kind. If you want to help everyone be healthy, be very, very tender.

115 (C) Creating Resilient Educators