Pausing in Anger to Move Toward a State of Well-Being - Episode 67

Awareness That Heals, Episode 67. What we're going to be talking about today is something that is so central to living a fulfilling life and breaking free from where we're trapped in conditioned reactions that each of us has. And we all have conditioning and really believe we are just acting normally. We all have loads of hypnosis or conditioning from our parents, from our culture, from our movies, from our friends.

The Awareness That Heals podcast helps its listeners learn to develop the capacity to have a more healing response to emotions and situations rather than becoming stuck. Your host, Robert J. Strock, has practiced psychotherapy for more than 45 years. He wrote the book Awareness That Heals: Bringing Heart and Wisdom to Life's Challenges. To help develop self-caring and the capacity to respond in an effective way to life's challenges, especially at times when we are most prone to be critical or to withdraw. Together, we will explore how to become aware of our challenging feelings and at the same time find alternative ways to live a more fulfilling and inspiring life.

A very warm welcome again to the Awareness at Heals. It's truly a pleasure to have you be joining us on the program. And what we're going to be talking about today is something that is so central to living a fulfilling life and breaking free from where we're trapped in conditioned reactions that each of us has. And we all have conditioning and really believe we are just acting normally. We all have loads of hypnosis or conditioning from our parents, from our culture, from our movies, from our friends. Do you get this? I mean, does that make sense to you? Don't just hear my words. Take a few seconds and see. Can you see how you might feel pressure to be successful, or how you might feel pressure to be sexy, or feel pressure to be more powerful, or to be taller than you are, or have more hair than you have, or or in any way, can you feel this conditioning to be something other than what you are? So none of us are really liberated from having our own direction in life where we're naturally following ourselves, our truest selves, where we would have a selection of what we're exposed to that we choose to align with. What we're trying to do in this show is to make that more clear, that you have a space inside you, we all have a space inside us that can choose to guide ourselves, and our emotional reactions are not going to just take us away, or our withdrawals or our defenses are not going to just take us away. Normally it's like an earthquake or a tidal wave moving us that we need to really develop our capacity to think for ourselves and to question for ourselves and to listen to what the answers are. Today we're going to go more deeply into the 7 steps to dealing with anger and how it applies to various concrete examples that will be something we all have to deal with, each in our own unique way. Please use your own examples as we share ours, and that doesn't mean not to listen to us at all, but the ideal would be half your example, half our example. Realize where you have a form of anger and how you are dealing with it and look at the alternatives that are being presented. The whole point is to use it for yourself. So I'm going to start with a review of the 7 steps. And again, when I list them, see how much they apply to you in your current life. You know, if this is the first show you've listened to, don't have very high expectations. If you've been listening to it for a while, it's going to be familiar. But it's familiar to me. But as I say it each time, it helps me. It helps me wake up to, ah yes, the first step is be aware of your anger and resistant emotions, no matter how it comes out. That's the first step. And that sounds almost trite, but think about how many times you're aware and you think you're angry because of what they did or what they didn't do. And you lose sight, it's your anger, it's your frustration, it's your impatience, it's your intolerance, which are the resistant emotions along with 50 others. So the second step of transforming anger and resistant emotions into intimacy and strength is finding a place inside you that knows it wants to care. So as you're hearing that and imagining yourself being angry or intolerant or impatient, imagine interrupting inside yourself with a place that says, well, wait a minute, We don't want to just act out, or we don't want to just be passive-aggressive, or we don't want to just be snarky. Maybe we want to be constructive. Maybe we want to be helpful. And formally, we call this the intention to heal. But it's really the intention to heal, the intention to care, the intention to move toward a state of well-being. That will naturally create a pause, at least inside, and perhaps even before you express anything, it will stop you from expressing the anger or the impatience or frustration outside. Or maybe you'll catch it in the middle and have to say something like, "Well, wait a minute, I'm trying to find another way to say it." That implies the third step. Which is being able to contain yourself, which is referred to as containment, which is being able to slow yourself down, see the anger, and recognizing that you don't want to just act it out or act it in. You want to find a way to possibly be harmless or maybe even constructive. And that containment is a crucial step that might seem artificial, and it might seem like you're suppressing your anger. But as you've heard, if you've listened to prior shows, or as you'll hear again today, the containment actually means that you're doing everything you can privately to primally experience the anger or the frustration or the intolerance, Don't suppress it at all inside. See it nakedly. But have a witness, have an individual consciousness that's watching that feeling like you're two beings. You're the anger, the frustration, the intolerance, and you're able to see it. And when this happens in the containment phase, you naturally will also start to see, "Gee, I'm angry." But I also am aware that underneath that there's vulnerable feelings, which is the fourth step, like fear or hurt. I'm angry because I'm hurt because you weren't sensitive to me. And you can become aware of the vulnerable feelings in the containment phase and the underlying needs, which is the fifth step. So again, the third step is containment, the fourth step is the vulnerability, And the fifth step is the identification of the needs. And for those of you that have been listening to the show, you'll know that we have a chart called the Introspective Guides that identifies 75 needs that are essential. Needs like empathy, communication, honesty, Trust, strength, gentleness. And the whole emphasis in this 7-step process is instead of acting out your anger at what you're angry against, is discovering the need that you're for. It's a pivoting. It's a, okay, if I'm angry against something, it means there's something I wanted that I didn't get, or something I didn't want that I did get. And if you can identify the needs, there's a chance that you can reverse a very destructive and nuclear process that can be channeled in a way more closely to your sensitivity to express what it is that you need. So that fifth state of identifying your needs is quite crucial. And the vulnerability helps you identify your needs if you can feel it. And then the 6th step is learning how to express your needs in as sensitive a way as possible. That's a big deal because there's all too high of a risk of, oh, I realize what I need is communication, so I'm going to communicate in an angry way. You know, you were a fucking asshole. That's not exactly what we mean by a sensitive expression of needs. It might be, I need you to be more gentle, or I need your tone of voice to be softer, or I need to take a little bit of time to try to find how to express what it is that I need. So I need to find my needs. And in this 6th step, I generally encourage trying to find a way to express your needs as sensitively as possible at least 3 times. And I don't mean at the same sitting or standing. I mean through time to really see, is the person at all interested in your needs? Or maybe they're not in the slightest bit interested. It may be your boss that's tired of hearing from you. It may be somebody that's violent. It may not even be worth trying because you intuitively sense that there's zero chance of getting through. And that's what makes the 7th step necessary, which is if you see that your needs are not going to get a reception, and you're positive they're not going to get a reception, or virtually positive, then you're going to need to resolve your needs internally. So sometimes it's communication, and sometimes it's learning how to accept what is happening and discovering what's the best way to navigate my life so that I can move toward an acceptance and see how to communicate or not communicate about something else. So it's not a one-size-fits-all. Every situation is unique, and it requires discriminating whether you have a chance to communicate. So now that we have a basic understanding of that, I'd like to invite and thank Dave, my closest friend for 52 years, my partner at the Global Bridge Foundation, you know, and someone that I'm very, very grateful is joining me on this journey and finishing up the final chapter of Awareness That Heals.

Robert, thank you. And, uh, it's hard to believe right now at this moment that we are here in this level of the part of the, uh, evolution of all the things that came before in these series of podcasts, which I don't know how many there are, but there's a lot and a lot of nuance, a lot of detail. Uh, and there's one thing I want to ask you to elaborate on. You said it right at the beginning, or I— and after going through the 7 steps, I'm not sure I'll remember it exactly, but it's related to what is normal. And I want to say to you that in my life, normal was really the first 20 years of my life was, quote, normal. But it was completely unaware, completely without any understanding of having an internal reality even, all outward. Everybody has their own version of that, but can you talk about normal maybe versus healthy or whatever it would mean for you?

It's a great question. It's a great contrast. I think it's very normal I'd almost have to go through all 7 steps again, which I'll do extremely briefly. It's normal to be unaware of our anger. We have it so rationalized that the other person caused it. It's so deserving that we're not aware of our anger in a way that we're considering contemplating. We're not aware of our anger and finding a part of us that wants to care while we're angry. That's not normal. That's abnormal. It doesn't mean it's abnormal in an unhealthy way. It's abnormal, and everyone needs to feel very patient because we're doing a virtual lobotomy while you're in an angry type of state to actually find what you need and express it in a sensitive way instead of just dumping. The next story I'm going to be talking about, which is my mother, is going to demonstrate that. And to contain is not a normal state. Most people would think that's suppressing. And, 'Oh, you're going to stop me from expressing myself?' As one of my close friends said, 'No way. I want to bitch at my husband. He deserves it. You know, you're not going to get me to stop doing that.' And it took years to be able to partially get through. So it's also not normal to see the vulnerability underneath the anger, to actually be angry and say, oh, what hurt, fear, sadness, you know, anxiety might I be feeling that would be a little softer? It's not normal to even know what you need, which is why the introspective guides are there, because they identify the 75 challenging emotions. As well as 75 needs and help separate those. It's not normal to be able to separate those. So it's done in a very simple chart. It's also not normal to have an aspiration. And I'm, I'm speaking about statistically normal. I'm not talking about normal as in normal healthy. To sensitively express your needs in a really kind, caring, or strong way as is appropriate given the situation. And it's also not normal if you get thwarted and you're with somebody that you consider to be an asshole to be able to resolve things inside yourself and still find a place to move forward in life with them or deciding maybe without them because they're so toxic that you make the decision that, you know what, this person's not right for my life, or this person might be my partner, and they just have one part of them that I don't like, but they've got 9 parts I love. So I've got to find a way of accepting it so I can make the best out of my love relationship. So none of that is normal, but we're aspiring to not be normal. We're aspiring to find our hearts, find the best sides of ourselves, find ways to love, find ways to be aware of a process that can move us toward healing. I want to be very clear, it's not to healing very often. It's moving in a direction. This is not 7 steps to bliss. This is 7 steps to improve. We're all on an arrow moving in a direction, and very few situations, unless they're pretty superficial, do we resolve completely. And so it's very important that we're not looking for quick, easy answers. We're looking for a process that's a lifelong process to develop being a little bit paranormal. So I mentioned I was going to include my mother, and my mother has passed away about 10 years ago and was a very devoted great with my friends, took care of all my basic needs, but really gave me my first life challenge because she was intermittently quite bitchy. And so I needed to learn how do I take care of myself when I have a mother that's angry at me. And I knew even when I was 6, 7, 8 years old that she was getting angry at things that I wasn't doing that really didn't have much to do with me. And I already knew enough about her parents to know she had a horrible childhood. You know, she made massive improvement to be where she was. And so my initial reaction was to be annoyed and to withdraw. And in that withdrawal I started to begin unwittingly, not with knowing at 7 or 8 years old, kind of asking myself, how am I going to cope? How am I going to be okay and not get hit by this anger more than I need to? Because I knew what she was angry about was I was a little sloppy. I wasn't particularly motivated at school. I wasn't polite enough in her mind. I— my table manners, I put my elbow on the table, uh, I was too, too picky with the food that I ate. And all those were true, but there was no— it was like, aren't we here to love and be loved? Why would you get angry? Just tell me, you know, to be cleaner, or tell, tell me to, you know, please get my elbow off the, off the table. But that wasn't the case, so I had to resolve it mostly internally because I was 8 years old. I realized that I needed to pay a little bit more attention to those things. But as I look back at it, I was still a bit passive-aggressive. I was still a bit sloppy. I was still all the things that she didn't like. I only one-third improved, but it helped a little bit. But it was something that helped me start to understand that I wasn't going to have a lobotomy and she wasn't going to have a lobotomy. Of course, I wasn't thinking those words. I'm not going to completely change, she's not going to completely change. And in those early years, I wasn't aware of the passive-aggressive side of me that wasn't very motivated to improve those simple little areas. It was just the way that I was, 8 years old. And I grew to really understand that her childhood was so horrible that it was miraculous that she was only a bit bitchy intermittently, that she wasn't just miserable all the time. So one situation that is not at all characteristic but was something that I referred to as my 13-year-old bar mitzvah was my mother accused me of stealing something that I definitely didn't steal. And I was a polite kid, you know, overtly I was a good kid besides my minor transgressions. So I never swore at her and I never really raised my voice significantly. But I knew at that moment that it was so crude and she had never accused me of stealing something and it was off the wall. So I ranted at that moment and I said, I didn't fucking steal anything. I'm not your fucking brother. I'm not your fucking father. So fuck off. And my father was there, and my brother was there, my mother was there. My father had his mouth open because he was the consummate great father, but not able to really calm my mother down. My brother was laughing, and I just walked away so happy and so peaceful. And it changed the dynamics. And it was important, not so much that I'm trying to model the way I would encourage you to do what I did. But it was a version of having the awareness of what was there in her life. And ideally, I wish I would have been able to say, listen, I need you to trust me. I need you to understand that you're caught in your past. Now, at 9 years old, it was a little unrealistic to be able to say that. In such a clean way, 'cause I was just too pissed off. And I was kind of in a shock and a joy and an independence. And so it's something that once in a while, once in a blue moon, the conditions are exactly right for you to make an expansion from wherever you are. Perhaps you're someone that does that on a regular basis and does that with your lover or does that with a friend or does that with a business person, a version of screw you. Or just gets angry. But you can have the chance to see that maybe this is a time where I can upgrade my game. I upgrade my heart, upgrade my awareness to move from just dumping anger or just suppressing anger to being aware of anger. Or maybe I can see the underlying hurt because I felt hurt, I felt wounded, that I— and injured. That I was accused, being accused of being a thief. And I knew I needed to, I knew I needed to be trusted, but it wasn't a conscious process. It was just a feeling of innocence that I knew wasn't being seen. And so it's so important for you when you see yourself in a situation where you're being misunderstood, you're being treated harshly, you're being treated like you know you don't deserve to be treated. For you to look at, can I be aware of my anger? Can I see I want to care? Can I contain it? Can I see the vulnerable feelings? Can I really recognize the needs? And if I can't, can I go to that chart and circle the 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 needs that were there? And take a look at your life right now as I'm sharing this. At one level, you're hearing my story. Look at where you're most caught in your anger, your frustration, your irritation, and can you discover what it is that you need or needed? And is it fair for you to potentially go through what process? Just be honest at whatever level it is. It might be very hard even to be aware of your anger until 2 days later. And then congratulations, it's never too late to be aware. It's never too late to be aware of a part of you that wants to care. It's never too late to evolve to the next step. And one of the keys, which is in some of the other chapters, and if you followed us, you'll know, is you want to do what you can to have a a caring tone toward yourself while you're expanding in your awareness and while you're trying to flip over the most destructive side of ourself and have that be moving into a part of our heart that can create greater intimacy and strength. The idea here isn't just to be a nice guy. The idea is to be balanced and to recognize we're not suppressing anger, we're using it to find our strength. And we're not suppressing our vulnerability, we're using it to find the more gentle, tender, caring side of ourselves. So my hope and my wish is that you can see that in understanding the process of how important it is to start with our awareness of our anger and resistant emotions. And if we don't see that, if we just rationalize it, our life is kind of frozen in a certain kind of alienation. But if we really take the time and use it and dedicate ourselves to this process or a similar process, we really can have a much more inspiring and fulfilling life. I deeply thank you for your attention.

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