Providing Marriage And Family Counseling Services In Portland Oregon

About Anger

Anger carries a contagion that affects us all. I don't know of anyone whose heart doesn't start beating faster when they encounter an angry person. And that person doesn't even have to be angry with you. When you pass two people fighting with each other, chances are very good that you'll walk away different from the way you were before you encountered them. A faster heartbeat, yes, and like as not you'll make some comment in your head about what you've seen.

In public, anger is not an acceptable emotion to show unless someone else makes you feel that way. And that is a lesson we carefully teach our children: Someone else can make you feel. We believe that myth, have been carefully taught it's true for all our lives. Of course, becoming angry happens so fast there is no time to be rational, to wonder How can someone else's feelings affect me? Aren't feelings inside a person? But who hasn't encountered the weary mother, shopping at the end of the day, attempting to accomplish an exemplary task while beset with two or three children who all want either attention or the Cheerios on the top shelf? She strikes out at them verbally, first. They persist in their "misbehavior" (our term, not theirs). When she's beyond her limits of patience and understanding, and after she's checked out the aisle to make sure no one is looking, she grabs one of them by the arm and shakes him, hard. Then she admonishes him, no longer patient: "If you don't stay still and quit that, I'm going to spank you!" In her mind, he made her angry. At that point, being rational has stepped out the door. In its place are higher blood pressure, a mask of rage, more shallow breathing and a fast-pumping heart. She has no awareness that she is feeling her own childhood anger resurfacing. The memory of how or why she was punished may not be forthcoming. In fact, what catapults her back to that childhood moment is the feeling.

Feelings link our past to a present occurrence, deny it though we may. When that happens, we search out someone to blame. The connection between the anger we feel and "Whose fault is it?" comes so fast we often don't have time to know it's our own anger. But it is our own. We are not responsible for the feelings of other people, any more than we are responsible for their actions. However, we are responsible for our own anger, our own actions. To begin disengaging from other people's actions and feelings gives us our strength back. That is personal power.

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