Ashok Gupta explores whether anger is inherently wrong, discussing how it affects your nervous system and connects to chronic conditions like chronic fatigue. The conversation covers strategies for managing anger rather than suppressing it.
We may remember some previous webinar series. So, Doris the dragon, representing the anger or irritation part of ourselves. And it can be anger at external people and situations. It can be anger at having this condition, or indeed it can be anger at ourselves. And in each of those scenarios, this can rev up our nervous system. Yeah. And cause just as many vicious cycles as fear and anxiety. And anger can be quite subtle because sometimes with anger and also fear, these patterns become normalized. So we think they're perfectly normal because that's how we've always felt. And it's becoming more acutely attuned into our nervous system. And how these anger reactions are revving us up and they're beginning to let go. And Chris says, is Doris actually a protector part? Absolutely. Each of our emotions, as bizarre as they may seem in certain situations, are there to protect us or to warn us. So all parts are protecting us or warning us. Even warning is a form of protection, essentially. And therefore anger serves a purpose. There's nothing wrong with anger, by the way, as a response, as a reaction. There's nothing wrong in inverted commas with anger. We don't judge ourselves for anger. The challenge is, how quickly do you recover from an anger reaction? That's what we're changing here. So we respond to a situation with anger. In that moment, it's serving a purpose. But if it then lasts for hours, the whole day, the next day, then all it's done is rev up your nervous system for longer and longer periods of time. So that's where we look to retrain these responses using these types of tools so we can recover from anger. Anger isn't the issue. It's how much is it taking you away from your center.
And I think, like pure emotions, when they're just being felt through the body, they don't last very long. It's, you know, it's. If there's thoughts about them sort of dwelling in them in an unhealthy way, that that will then perpetuate it. And. And I had an experience with anger, though, that I really needed to. Also. I had a lot of repressed anger that I think was connected to chronic fatigue in some way as well. So I had to find ways to let it through in a healthy way, in a therapeutic way. So that might be relevant to some people here, particularly with chronic fatigue and particularly maybe women often.
Yeah, no, I agree. And this idea that an emotion comes up and if we just are neutral observers of that emotion, as we talked about last week or the week before, they begin to dissolve away. But the moment we start having a thought about it, oh, I'm feeling really angry. It is that person's fault that they've made me feel angry. Then we've created a thought about it which triggers more emotion, which triggers more thoughts about the emotion. And round and round we go in another vicious cycle. And the purpose of soften and flow and retraining and talking to the angry part of us is to calm down that vicious cycle and eventually, once again, break the circuit. Break the loop. Then the whole system can begin to.
