QA174 QUESTION: I have a question about repressed anger that depletes my energy. How do I bring it out when I basically feel very angry, but it’s a situation I have chosen and in a sense also would like to commit myself to.
ANSWER: The difference here is to be angry at someone or to acknowledge your own anger – whether or not you’re right or wrong. Mankind is usually conditioned to the former, because accusing someone else seems to excuse the forbidden feeling of anger. But in reality, it is exactly the opposite.
This is the pattern that is destructive – the blaming/accusing is destructive. Instead you can acknowledge the fact that you are possibly in error or possibly exaggerating, but you are human and you have a right to make mistakes and you happen to have this anger in you – possibly for many, many years, possibly since childhood.
QUESTION: The anger is also directed at myself.
ANSWER: Yes, then it turns against yourself. So if you can express the anger, “I’m angry,” in a very simple statement, and seek some physical outlet by hitting something and by really letting go – but not accusing anyone – or in a group where you are with congenial people, where you perhaps yell out your anger – not at anyone but just per se – then you go through the important act of self-acceptance.
This is you now. You do not go away from it; you do not gloss over it; you do not beautify it; you do not get away and put it on someone else. You just admit your anger, and in this lies something so healthy and so therapeutic that immediately you will find a release of the energy.
The self-acceptance will also bring you in contact with your good feelings. And the anger feeling itself may, right then and there – not always but sometimes – transform itself into good feelings. Then and only then can you go about investigating the reasons.
You can then see the exaggerations, the misconceptions, the irrational demands you make, the overreaction to anything that is unpleasant or frustrating that makes you very, very angry. But first of all you have to admit and accept this anger, without feeling a criminal about it. This is my advice.
