Thanks to Expressive Art Workshops!
Materials
- Felt pens
- Journal page
Method:
Draw Your Anger
Instead of letting anger eat away at us, we can express our anger by vigorously scribbling and swearing in our journal or by drawing a portrait of our anger. If you are going through a challenging time or have a great deal of anger to process, it is helpful to start a dedicated anger journal. Our anger is not all of who we are, but we can practice allowing our anger to move and create change in a daily anger processing journal.
Anger holds tremendous energy. The aim in processing anger is not to get rid of anger, but to get our emotionally stagnant energy moving in order to see what we are not looking at within ourselves. When we begin to feel our anger we can know that we are starting move stuck and repressed energy, and that change needs to happen. Anger that is safely expressed and mobilized can invoke the passion and power to grow. In order to process anger it is helpful to begin by expressing the energy of anger in a drawing, a painting, in a dance, or through your voice.
Tell Your Anger Story Fully
On the opposite page of your journal write out your "anger story". Write from only your point of view about how you have been wronged in vivid and furious detail. At this stage it is important to let out on the paper how you feel victimized. Feel free to write about how you despise certain parts of your life, who irritates and angers you and why, as well as who you feel has hurt you terribly. You also may be angry at yourself and will need to fully express your upset at yourself.
Note that it is important not to get stuck in resentment, but to get your anger story out of your body, and onto your journal page so that you can begin to witness your thinking process. You should feel released when you tell yourself your anger story for the first few times. If your story starts to repeat itself inordinately, you may be stuck at the level of resentment because you are afraid to feel your deeper feelings of grief, loss, and the heartbreak of self-betrayal.
Feel Anger Fully Through Your Body
Processing your anger through your body is essential for shifting out of your victim mentality. Our victim stories keep us emotionally and physically weak and unable to find the drive to move forward in our life. Mobilizing energy with power through body movement and vocalization helps transform the repressed anger of victimization into empowerment for change. In order to move past resentment it is essential to deeply feel and explore the feelings that hide beneath your anger in your body.
At this stage, vigorous vocal and physical activity can help you "drop" below your anger to the grief and hurt that you are afraid to feel. Pounding or yelling into a pillow, engaging in vigorous physical activity, or even cleaning your house while angry can move thoughts of anger and resentment through your body into feeling the sadness of self-betrayal that underlies anger.
As you drop into your tears - your grief, loss and sadness - know that as you feel and release your heartache, you will recover your joy, strength, and heart again. Anger can be moved through into self-empowement. It starts as fear and anxiety and the reluctance to feel upset. Fear moves into irritation, frustration and then anger, and perhaps even rage. Once anger is fully mobilized in a safe way it drops into grief and usually tears. And in the end, if you do not get stuck in rage, victimization and resentment you will likely notice that your heart has softened. Now you are ready to look at your anger story in a new way.
Disassemble Your Anger Story
Our anger stories hold our emotional pain but are they wholly true? Rationally separating your beliefs from the truth will help heal your victim story. We can start to look carefully at our victim stories only after we have released the bodily charge of our anger. As we neutrally witness our victim stories we will start to uncover the core negative beliefs that we formed about ourselves as children, teens and young adults. As we discover our negative core beliefs, we will wake up to how we see our entire life through the lens of what we believe is wrong with us, and where we think the world cannot love us.
Most of our anger stories as Radical Forgiveness author Colin Tipping writes, are mostly "B.S." They mostly contain belief systems that are toxic and that continue to affect and create our life in negative ways. Rationally separating the facts of what happened and what our interpretations of what happened is essential so that we can heal our victim stories. We can create our entire lives around a system of untrue beliefs about ourselves. Our anger points the way to where we can become accountable for everything that has "happened" to us.
When we start to look at what we really believe about ourselves, intense resistance and sometimes even nausea can arise. To disassemble your anger story you can turn to a fresh page in your journal and divide it into two columns. Looking at your victim story - in one column write out all of the facts about your story. In the other column write out your beliefs about yourself in the middle of your story. Meditate on what you believe about yourself and really pay attention to where in your body you carry your negative beliefs. Send your needy inner places love and encouragement.
Reframe Your Anger Story
You can never spiritually or cognitively reframe or deeply understand your anger story if you have not fully felt all of your feelings around it. Trying to cognitively reframe your way out of your anger without embodying it only represses it more. Your anger wants or needs something, and understanding what that is will help you to integrate it into your embodied wholeness. Deeper understanding always comes through feeling not thinking.
Even though our life seemingly happens on its own - on a very deep level we play a part in everything that happens to us. Reframing your anger story involves becoming as deeply accountable as you possibly can about how you played your part in the drama of your life story through the lens of your negative core beliefs about yourself.
Accountability asks us to look at the deepest and seemingly shameful patterns of struggle in our psyche that we are trying to heal. Our fearful minds have ways of avoiding our greatest strengths. We all have inklings when something is wrong. So if we have been victimized we must ask, "What was I believing about myself to have allowed this to happen? What was I trying to get by having this happen in my life? What need was I trying to fulfill? What purpose or gift was I avoiding living into by having this happen in my life?
The best way to become accountable is to pretend that you wanted the pain that you have experienced and ask yourself "Why?" There are many reasons why we want bad things to happen. On a soul level we are often trying to heal deep longstanding emotional patterns. Our greatest challenges bring great spiritual strengths into this world. On an ego level we use all kinds of problems to delay our unfoldment into the strengths that we are meant to be living into in order to properly contribute to our life.
Another accountability exercise is to integrate all that we hate about other people inside of ourselves. If we simply cannot get off of the idea that the other person is "wrong" we can make a list of all of the qualities that we hate about them. Often we compensate for the very qualities that we hate about other people by working very hard to act completely the opposite way. But we all have been out of our integrity at some point in our lives. If we accept other people's behaviour as our own - or as possibility of our own if we had the same life circumstances - we can integrate it and forgive it.
By being accountable for everything that has happened to us refines our highest integrity and helps us clean up our side of the story completely. If we cannot incite change in an unhealthy situation or another person, we can choose the strength we will develop in the middle of hardship and difficulty. In the end, we need to work with the serenity prayer in the midst of our anger, "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."
Results:
