How I Found My Peace After Years Of Letting Anger Control Me
On July 31 of 2021, I posted my first article here on Medium. Why Do We Not Normalize Male Emotions? To my surprise, my first article was popular and had many more views and reads than I was expecting for a first-timer. I consider that experience a wonderful welcome to a community of writers. One of these writers who became my greatest support is none other than fellow writer Nathalie Clair who reads all my articles and stories and always has useful edits and suggestions. Recently she noticed that in my first article I mentioned being more Zen and not letting anger rule my life but in that original article I don’t explain how I reached that level of peace. So today I will show you how I found my inner peace.
My first step to finding peace in my life was accepting that I was angry and that anger could be dangerous for myself and those around me. One outburst of anger could be the end of a relationship, a friendship or a career. As I worked with young students at the time my greatest fear was that my anger would lead to an outburst that would hurt a child’s feelings or even more devastating if that outburst destroyed their dream even before they had a chance to try reaching for it.
My desire to not hurt anyone around me forced me to look deep for all my triggers. What situations and circumstances that always lead to anger had to be discovered. Obviously hunger for many people takes them to a stage of hangry but to me any anger was a gateway into rage and in a state of rage I am no longer making smart decisions I am only reacting to the perceived world around me. I say perceived because in stages of anger you no longer take in information clearly. Being angry is like being drunk, what you see and what you experience may not be the reality of what is going on around you.
My major trigger was my anger towards my father who had been a disappointment to me. My father would often tell me he was coming to visit me on a weekend and I would get super excited and be dressed and ready hours before his arrival time. I would sit by the window looking down at all the cars waiting to see his car stop in front of my building. Then the time would come and he had not arrived. With every ten minutes that passed my excitement and joy slowly degraded until all I had left was sadness, abandonment and the first sparks of anger. I didn’t recognize the anger at first because before the anger could grow I had to cry. I cried until the tears could come no longer and then when I couldn’t cry anymore that was when I started to get mad and I never spoke to anyone about those feelings.
As I grew older my anger towards my father grew stronger and it filled me with vile and hate. This was the root of all my major rage and now that I knew that I had to do the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I had to accept that my father was not the best human being and that if I was ever going to live a happier life I was going to have to let him go. By the time I was ready to let go of the pain and disappointment that had rooted in my heart during my childhood, my father had died and I had arranged his funeral that I did not even attend.
The actual process to my healing actually involved writing. I would use a journal that had those sheets of paper that could be easily ripped out of the book. I would write down the experience of how my father hurt my feelings by never showing up. I would pour all the frustration, anger and tears into my words on these small pages. When I was done I would tear them out and carefully set them on fire. The act of burning these pages full of vile, hate and pain was a symbolic act of purifying myself. I would also write down every outburst of anger that I experienced and then work backwards to figure out why I became angry in that given situation. These small outbursts were also burned until my journal was finally empty. It took many journals for me to start feeling like I was in control of my anger and it was only once I felt in control and knowledgeable about my triggers that I was able to move on to experience other emotions in my life.
Now I am not a perfect monk but I do feel more balanced and stable with my emotions. I wish these lessons could have been learned at a much earlier point in my life but better late than never. Some of you may be wondering how I am doing today with my anger issues and I’ll be honest it is still a struggle at times. Now when I get angry or I feel it rising I force myself to control my reaction. I can be exploding inside with the fury of a thousand suns but if I know I’m not in a proper safe place to let it out then I contain my reaction. I am the master of my own soul and I can control how I react. I essentially bottle it up until I can move myself into a safe space like my home, my office or a quiet spot in the park. When I am in that space I will set a five minute timer and just experience that anger even if it means talking to myself which it usually does. Letting out my profanity which can be very colorful and specific also helps. I may do a combination of both while pacing. I experience my frustration to the fullest for those five minutes. When the alarm goes off I take a deep breath and let my shoulders drop and accept that it is time to move on.
I will experience anger but I will never let it control me again.
