I have a student who seems to be looking for reasons to be unhappy, angry, frustrated. And not surprisingly she finds something. Always.
She is working on her health and well-being, and part of that ‘work’ is to document every breakfast, lunch and dinner what she eats, what she drinks, what she does, what she feels like, and whether she had a bowel movement or not. These are all indicators of her well-being and progress.
This morning I realized something: her diary says: bowel movement: small. She doesn’t say: bowel movement: yes (or no, whatever is the case.) No she says: small.
This realization lead me to look back and see that she wants to find something she can be unhappy about.
Now, this is actually very familiar to me. Bear with me, a lot of you have this, and if you can see it, you can do something about it.
I’ll share my story later, but let me first distinguish the mechanism:
Something happens to you. It feels like injustice. You are punished, you are abandoned, you are reprimanded, you are called a liar, a thief, a bastard, whatever… it was, for you, from your point of view, injustice.
If in your culture expressing anger was politically incorrect, not tolerated, then you could not express your anger. Besides you were little… You had no voice. You did not matter, your feelings did not matter.
So you vented your anger on food, your siblings, your dolls, your pets, your furniture, the weather, your poop, anything you could find to be angry about.
But it did not get rid of the anger, did it?
So you took the anger to your marriage, to your children, to work… it never emptied.
Why? Because you have to go back to the root… and handle it there.
How? Let me share how I did it…
I was molested as a child. By my father.
At age 38 I got lucky. I was in a program that had a method to get back to the root of that anger.
I saw that I wasn’t angry about the molestation. I was angry for a surprising reason:
With my child’s mind, he was my husband, or should have been, instead he ‘stayed’ with my mother…
So I was angry at him, and I hated my mother.
I was belligerent, and I provoked my mother to beat me, to punish me, to yell at me.
I needed to have a politically correct reason to hate her for taking MY husband…
Anyway, just seeing that it was that young thinking that got me into trouble, and got me to be angry, I could express and dissolve my anger. I laughed and I cried for a few hours. And it was gone.
The fact that my relationship with my mother was created by my need to justify my hate…
…THAT I just saw. 30 years after the first insight.
Going back to the root of your anger or hate is not easy.
Scientology has a technique I learned from books and videos I bought for a buck on Amazon. They call the process ‘auditing’ and the only goal is to find the moment when it all went south.
They have auditors. Two friends of mine did the process, $5000, and neither of them got to the root in a week long one-on-one session. So, obviously, it is not easy.
Facing the tiger
It takes a very skillful ‘auditor’ and a willing to face the tiger client.
Can I do it in groups? Probably some of it. But the anger and hate suppressed is like a bomb you sit on… you are afraid to see what and who it will kill.
I was sure that my anger kills. Certain. So it takes a safe environment to tackle the sensitive issue.
Now, one more thing: if you have had therapy, coaching, and the anger is still there, then you have created more buffer to protect the roots… and it will be harder for me to get to it.
I was in therapy for many years, and I could only get to the fear of opening that door… the door that held all that anger at bay.
It was a miracle that I could see the error of my thinking, and the source of the anger disappeared.
So it is not about expressing the anger, it is about disappearing it. Really.
And that you probably haven’t manage to do, yet.
Face the tiger
