SSP164: How To Release Your Anger & Become Emotionally Stable

All right, my friend, if you've landed on this video, you're either one of two types of individuals. Type number one is you're the kind of guy who doesn't get angry, pretends like he doesn't feel anger. He's the nice guy. And maybe you're here because you're realizing it's time to figure out how to let out this primality and this anger in a healthy way. Or you're the kind of guy that overreacts. The anger leaks out in unhealthy ways, and maybe it's starting to cause dysfunction or destruction in your life, and you're ready to learn how to harness and control your anger in a more healthy way for the benefit of your relationships. Now, my name is Jordan Kalnish. I'm a men's coach. I've coached thousands of men, and I facilitate retreats all over the world, helping them tap into some of these primal essence of these aspects so they can integrate all parts of themselves so they're calm, control, grounded, and this energy of anger isn't causing havoc in their life. And this is a really important topic because we're not really given any education on how to tap into these parts of ourselves. But it's absolutely vital as a man that you learn how to harness this energy. You learn how to own it, you learn how to honor it, because it is the clearest source and connection of your masculinity. It's the clearest source of your power, is your ability to channel this emotion in productive ways. And it is one of the fastest ways to destroy your relationships when you allow this energy to come out, out of control, when it gets out of control. Because women are really going to feel unsafe around a man who hasn't owned this part of himself. I'm going to break down some techniques today in this video. Five really powerful techniques that I use and I pass on to my clients when anger comes up and how to effectively process it. But I want to talk about why we end up suppressing anger. If you're in that first category of guy, if you suppress your anger a lot, why does that happen? You've probably associated anger with some form of violence or aggression, and you've seen destruction in the form of men in your life who have been out of control in their anger. Now, for me, growing up, my dad immigrated from Scotland to Western Australia, and he was a very. He's a very hard man. Like, worked as a welder. He worked long hours, and he would come home and drink alcohol to just unwind from the day, as most fathers did in that generation. And I watched his anger cause a lot of, a lot of chaos in our house because there was not a lot of nights where we had friendly, inviting moments around the dinner table. A lot of arguments between my dad and my mom. And it's not his fault. It was just a lot of buried pain and trauma that I'm about to talk to you about in a moment that was coming out of him in the form of reactivity. Anger is usually the first surface layer that we see when someone is holding suppressed fear and shame and guilt. But in my dad's case, I saw the impact of this out of control anger and I reverted to the opposite. So if my dad was quite domineering and over intense in his anger, I then decided that I wasn't going to be that. So I became the opposite. I became the nice guy who put his anger down and almost suppressed and disowned that part of myself. So when it came later into my mid-20s and I was stepping into my own development work, it was a lot of the shadow and the darkness was in the anger for me and learning how to tap into that. So the reason it gets suppressed is because behind it is the darkness is the fear is the shame is the heaviest stuff that we often avoid as men. And we often use these habits of overworking and overdoing and overstimulating to avoid getting in confrontation with. But very often, if you sense there's some form of irritability or frustration or passive aggressiveness, these little signs are indicating there's a part of you that needs to get angry. There's a part of you that's afraid of something. And anger just happens to be the surface layer of that. And the more you disown and deny that part of yourself, the more the anger is going to eat you from the inside out. The more unstable you're going to be around woman and the people you care about, the more you're going to leak energy. You're not going to have ease, joy and lightness in what you're doing. To really get to the depths of your own emotional work is we have to move through this first layer of anger. Now the trauma. There's a trauma response, right? The nervous system has a trauma response. When you go through intensity, growing up at some form, at some stage in your life. There's the trauma response is fight, freeze or flee. And there's also a piece there which is the Fawn mechanism as well, right? Where we just give in to what Anyone else is wanting us to do. But usually we can see the anger response in those usual trauma response categories. The people whose initial response under trauma and threat, which is to fight, are usually the people that outwardly express their anger, or they bury it through massive amounts of overwork and pushing their body to the physical limits to suppress anger. All the anger that's back there. The people in the freeze response are often the ones who will just shut their anger down, push it down. It gets directed internal as this really tough inner critic, this really harsh inner voice that like beats you, tells you never doing enough. And that's the response that I have. And if you're in the kind of appease response, then it's the similar kind of category where you're just constantly people pleasing, always trying to do the right thing, afraid of upsetting others, afraid of confrontation altogether. So noticing the nervous system's response and your nervous system response will be fully down to your own developmental patterns. Your father, very often, if you go around a father who had a fight response, the child sometimes develops the freeze response. But in certain situations, maybe the child had to develop the fight response to just survive, which was what my father had to develop growing up when he was a kid. So understanding these mechanisms is key, because now that you can sense the subtle signs that your body is holding on to anger, when there is stress, when there is situations of uncertainty, when someone is attacking, you start to monitor how you initially respond. Do you shut down or do you overreact? Okay. So we want to monitor that first and foremost. Okay? Because ultimately, until you've been able to tap into these areas of these aspects of yourself, there is going to be this weight, this energetic shadow that's hanging around you that you haven't looked at. And people who are sensitive to energy, you can almost pick up someone when they walk in the room and they feel a little bit. If you get a bad vibe from someone, you can pick that up. Usually that's because they haven't integrated these darker aspects of themselves. So the question that I want to pose to you is like, when you're noticing this tension, because anger will show up as tension in the body, tension in the shoulders or the traps in the jaw. Notice where you hold tension in the body, because in the tension inside of the fascia, which is the connective tissue in the body where we store memory and emotion, there is parts of yourself that have been disowned. And when that tension is stored and locked in, the body will actually create physical, Will actually shift physically around the Tension. So you might notice people who are suppressing anger for long periods of time walk a certain way or hold their shoulders a certain way. We've got to open up the bodies while I anger to come in. And anger moves up the spine, right? Think of anger as an energy that's getting trapped here in the solar plexus area. Also behind that we have shame and some of these heavier emotions, these survival emotions. But for the anger to move up, we have to allow the energy to come up and out. And that's going to transition into some of the exercises I'm going to share with you. But we have to support this energy in moving up and out by bringing sound, movement and expression into this movement. Because you don't want a common trap. This is really common. I want you to listen closely here because this is key. So many men will spiritually bypass their anger. And I did this for a long time. And it's one of the reasons why I run retreats. And I give men spaces where they can actually tap into the anger around other men. Same with the online men's groups that I run. If you're interested in that. By the way, click the link in the description to check out the retreats or the online men's group. Because you want to have a space with other men, especially where you can be seen in these emotions. We can be seen in this primality. Because you don't want to do an anger release around a woman. It's just you don't want to let your anger come out around a woman. It's just as simple as that. What it's going to do to their nervous system will destroy your relationship, I can guarantee you. So having spaces with other embodied men who can hold you in this power, in this raw essence is essential because if you don't have that, two, two things normally happen. The guys who are on in the personal development path, the spiritual path. And I started when I was 21, reading all the spiritual books and going down this path of raising my vibration and being in the power of now and all of that, right? But it never shows you how to tap into these dark aspects. And what ended up happening for me is because I had a tendency to suppress my anger instead. Just be the nice guy and work harder and all of that. I didn't know how to tap into those. Those elements. And I would meditate and do all these spiritual practices which resulted in me just sitting on my anger, not actually feeling it, trying to transcend it or ascend it, but it never works because you can't meditate your way through being angry. Anger is. Is a sympathetic response. We need to actually activate it and give ourselves permission. And I like, that's the thing for you, bro. It's like, we just need to give you permission to be angry most of the time. For me, and all the moments where I've had huge breakthroughs was I'd be trying to get through it, figure it out on my own. I'm like, I'll go into this lone wolf mentality where I'll just like, shut out the external world, and I wouldn't reach out for support from people who could really hold me. And it's in those times where you can spiral. I would shame spiral all the time. And I'm thinking, I'm not doing enough. I'm not doing this should be doing more. But it wasn't. It wasn't until I realized that the anger is directed. For me, the anger gets directed towards myself. When you're directing anger towards yourself, you're beating yourself up, and all of a sudden you're making yourself wrong. And a lot of the anger and frustration for me comes around the lack of. Sometimes the lack of progress that I think that I'm making and the frustration I get around that. But the moment I'm in a space or the moment another man can support me and allow me to either express it through the voice or express it through movement, beating down into something, or even just allow it to hold me and see me in it, there's always a breakthrough. There's always a shift. And that shift allows emotion that's underneath, which is sadness and grief. Very often the sadness is back. There is the sadness from all the lack of love that we didn't receive in critical moments growing up, either from our father or our mother. And on top of that is the anger and resentment that's built around that over years. Remember, stored in the fascia. So we have to move it. We have to breathe into it. So the first exercise I want to give you is the primal screen. And the primal scheme is not a out of control, just yelling in your house, out of control. It's finding an environment, either in your car, either in somewhere private with another man. Ideally, if you can do this on your own as well, somewhere where you can absolutely let out a yellow. But you do it from a place of intentionality. You're doing it from a place of. You're activating the anger that's in there. You're activating. You're waking it up, tuning into, why am I angry and then belting out a yell feels really good. I shit, you know, it feels amazing. And you let it out a few times. You want to yell from the core of your solar plexus, not from your throat or your chest. Because if you do that, you're going to lose your voice very quickly. If you yell from your chest, you yell. It's like a roar. When you see a lion roar, you let it come out from the belly, you scream. That's one, one avenue, okay? The other avenue is you can beat down onto something. You can be down onto a bed, a pillow, something where you're allowing your hands to come above your head. And you can't see my toes right now, but I'm up on my toes, I'm coming down, I'm slamming into something. And you want to continue that movement where we're allowing this energy to move up and out. And when you're beating down into something, you're doing the same thing. Activate the energy. Why are you angry? What are you pissed off about? Don't go into this as a passive practice. This is a very active expression of emotion. You have to awaken it. You can't half ass it. You keep beating down into something until you can't do it anymore. You let yourself go until you cannot move a muscle. And at that point, you'll have a breakthrough. And it's helpful to breathe, it's helpful to maybe swear, be like you while you're beating down into something. But we need to let that energy move. Okay? So that's the other option. The alternative to that, which would be technique number three, is there's a qigong movement that allows you to have a similar kind of release. It's not as intense, but allows this energy to move because we're mimicking the emotion. This qigong movement is you hold your thumbs like this, okay? Your thumbs like that. And you're doing the same thing. You're coming up above your head and you're just breathing down. You're throwing your hands down behind you. Okay? They're breathing up. You're just breathing out with a. An audible pushing of the air, you're coming up again. You're squeezing and throwing the air down and then throwing your hands behind you. That can be effective as well. Okay. So it goes without saying, when you process this emotion, when you process the intensity of this emotion, you're going to feel very tender and sensitive on the other side of it, which is good because anger is a sympathetic expression on the other side of it. We want to balance it with parasympathetic, we want to drop you into the feelings, okay, which is sadness and shame. And the shame is back there that we've associated ourselves as. I'm wrong, I'm doing something wrong. I'm not good enough. From all the programming that may have come from conditional love that you may have received. And as you rest and allow yourself to be seen in the shame. And again, best place to do this around other men in a men's group or at a retreat, you allow yourself to be seen in the shame. After the anger, you're going to have such a really liberating experience. Because when you're witnessed by something, when you get witnessed by something, the consciousness of another person or another man seeing you allows that energy to dissolve so much faster. And what then must happen after that? For most men, speaking, sharing. If someone has pissed you off, as someone outside of you is upsetting you, if you're pissed off about something that someone else did, you must go and initiate that conversation. You must go and speak your truth. Withholding your truth and not sharing what you feel is the fastest way or the consistent way of allowing this energy to fester beneath the surface. And you stay stuck in this loop and cycle. You close the loop by having the conversation, addressing the thing that you're afraid of, and then break. And then you've come out the other side integrated, because you had the emotion come up, you took responsibility for it, you processed it, then you had the conversation, and now that's doing the work. You're not bypassing by just like trying to meditate through it and avoiding doing the hard thing. Really important that we understand that because I've fallen to that trap so many times. Oh, like just meditate. And I've soon fucking realize. Doesn't matter how much you meditate, when you're angry, you're still going to get up, just overthinking. You're still going to get up, just not feeling like yourself. Because there's fear and stress in the body that's disconnecting you from being in a state of clear coherence. Remember, ease, joy and lightness. If there is not ease, joy and lightness in what you're doing, there is fear back there, there is heaviness, there is something blocking your fullness from coming through. And that is where you must make it a priority to step back and figure out what that is. Anger will always be on the surface. Okay, so we've got the one more technique I want to. I want to throw in for you. Okay, is the med ball slam. Because when you're at a gym, you can also exert this energy. It's better to do this in an environment where you can fully go at it. In a gym, people are going to look at you a little bit weird if you're just having an anger release. But you can mimic it. Because the same thing when you pick up a medicine ball, what are you doing? You put it above your head. You're going on your toes and you're slamming it down. So you can do that multiple times. Pick up a med ball, slam it down, pick it up, slam it down. Keep going, keep going. Don't do it half ass. Keep going until you can't do it anymore and you'll have a liberation of energy. Okay, again, you can do this with boxing bags. Like, obviously you can hit something, but remember, above the head is going to be more effective than from the waist. So I hope you implement something from this video today because this is a really important topic and something you want to keep coming back to examine your relationship with these darker aspects of yourself. And on the other side of this, my friend, you're going to be such a more stable, calm, safe man to be around. And that is what your partner, your woman, your family, if you have kids and your friends really need. We need more stable, safe men in this world. And it comes from doing these practices and taking ownership for these parts of you. So if you watch the entire video, I have a lot of respect for you. Well done on just doing this work and just keep at it. Subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.