The Truth about Anger

Ok, I'm still angry about so many things but that's because it takes a while to stop being angry when you've been angry all your life. I've got 40 odd years worth of angry habits to sift through - I'm getting there. I'm happy with that.

But I did learn something very very helpful a few years back. An epiphany in fact. I love epipihanies - especially when I get them before the lesson comes around again in an extra extra bad way. And some of them have gotten pretty wicked.

Anyway......a relative did something that we don't need to go into and it made me so unbelievably angry. Far more angry than I've ever been in my life. Until then I had never understood a persons need to physically hurt someone - which was truly alarming I can tell you. It can be amazing what happens to a relatively rational person when their primitive brain gets fired up.

So anyway here it is. Anger is a diversion - well whoopee right? Bear with me. It diverts us from the real goings on of the situation. It diverts us from recognising the humanity behind what people do. Anger is like an ugly wrapping on the outside of a parcel. The parcel inside is the human reasons as to why somebody does something and believe or not - that really matters.

It's no good saying, "But I would never have done that to them." That's irrelevant because people can talk themselves into justifying anything they feel the need to. And that's the crux of the matter - they felt the need to. And that need has a name - fear or greed or guilt or anger or grief.

They are all human reasons - very very human reasons and for what its worth, we ALL do things we shouldn't have done because of those reasons - ALL of us.

The anger stops us from seeing that because if we see that we have to consider (for a moment) the things that we have done that we shouldn't have (and there's always something).

The beauty of it is this: you may not be able to forgive whatever was done to you but you can forgive the human reasons behind what was done. They are seperate. And in forgiving someone else's human failings it becomes easier to accept and forgive our own.

And once you get that far........it removes the parcel (we're back to the parcel/wrapping simile) from the inside of the wrapping and there's nothing to hold the anger up - it deflates. Walla! Kind of. Good luck.