![\"\"](\"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/wp-content\/\/2020\/02\/Blog-5-image-of-sadness-300x200.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Many people (including some therapists) tell us to express our anger at the unfairness of life.\u00a0 Go on, they say, beat those cushions to a pulp and scream out your rage.<\/p>\n
But this can be very misdirected advice.\u00a0 It accentuates the anger and sends blood pressure through the roof.\u00a0 It often ends in repetitive, violent behaviour and it makes the perpetrator more outraged than ever, since they fail to address the real \u2018purpose\u2019 of their anger.<\/p>\n
Let me give you an example.\u00a0 A man called Tom feels angry that his friend, John\u00a0 is backing out of their long-term friendship.\u00a0 John keeps cancelling arrangements to have a few beers at the local pub and, he is also not returning Tom\u2019s phone calls.\u00a0 Tom feels inclined to give John an earful of his vitriol.\u00a0 He feels furious that John is snubbing him and wants to confront him angrily.<\/p>\n
But what is Tom really feeling?\u00a0 I can tell you from my decades of experience that the anger is simply a learnt strategy to deflect<\/u> Tom away from feeling the sadness<\/em> that perhaps John doesn\u2019t care about him anymore and no longer wishes to be around him.<\/p>\n This hurts – and Tom has \u2018automatically\u2019 learnt from past events to protect himself from feeling this pain.\u00a0 Specifically, Tom is afraid to let himself feel the sadness in case his fragile self-esteem cannot bear it, and so instead he opts to go on the \u2018offensive\u2019 by focussing on his anger.<\/p>\n But if there is one thing that Tom needs to do for himself, in order to move past this event, it is to feel the correct<\/u> emotion (sadness).\u00a0 Anger will simply make him deflect outwards and blame John without taking any responsibility for his own behaviour.\u00a0 This will inevitably keep Tom \u2018stuck\u2019 in his rage.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if Tom allows himself to bravely feel the sadness and the vulnerability that comes from self-reflection, he will find that he can bear it quite easily. \u00a0In fact, facing reality actually strengthens Tom\u2019s fragile self-esteem in the longer-term, as he learns that he is far more robust than he originally believed.<\/p>\n Also, being sad will more likely encourage Tom to reflect on how he may have contributed to John losing interest in the friendship.\u00a0 Was he too pushy?\u00a0 Was he a bit boring?\u00a0 Was he whinging a lot of the time? Was he drinking too much?\u00a0 Was he not contributing his required 50% input into the conversation or friendship in some way?<\/p>\n It is the honest, unadulterated answers to these questions that get people genuinely \u2018unstuck\u2019 and allow them to progress and incrementally improve their behaviours, strategies and happiness over a lifetime.\u00a0 Keeping on \u2018loudly\u2019 expressing the wrong emotion just keeps people barking up the wrong tree for decades – agitated, unhappy and unable to progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many people (including some therapists) tell us to express our anger at the unfairness of life.\u00a0 Go on, they say, beat those cushions to a pulp and scream out your rage. But this can be very misdirected advice.\u00a0 It accentuates the anger and sends blood pressure through the roof.\u00a0 It often ends in repetitive, violent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3970"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4646,"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3970\/revisions\/4646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salleemclaren.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}