Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live by Martha Beck

Author:Martha Beck
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Motivational & Inspirational, Personal Success, Business & Economics, Self-Help, Personal Growth, Happiness
ISBN: 9780307453136
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2008-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

GETTING TO THE SOURCE: ACHIEVING SERENITY THROUGH HATE AND RAGE

When you’re genuinely angry, it means one of two things: either something that your essential self needs is absent, or something your essential self can’t tolerate is present. To make the anger go away, you have to change this situation. That isn’t possible if you don’t know what’s making you angry. However, pinpointing the source of anger is often more difficult than identifying the cause of fear or grief. That’s because anger is so volatile, so fraught with danger. We may be loath to turn it on a person we love, or a job we desperately need, because we equate anger with absolute destruction of the relationship. The truth, of course, is that we ruin our relationships (to things or people) when we harbor anger without acting on it. No matter how frightening or irrational your anger may seem, acknowledging that you are angry is the first step toward a peaceful and cooperative connection with the world around you.

I preach this to my clients every day, but it’s still hard to practice. For example, the other day, as I was working on this book, I suddenly felt a horrendous, stabbing pain in my back, as though I’d been harpooned. I tried to shake, stretch, and rub the pain away, but I’ve had back problems before, and I knew it wasn’t going to be a minor episode. For the next week or so, I spent most of my time lying down, panting, like a sick cow. Then someone gave me a book on back pain by one Dr. John Sarno, a physician who seems almost fanatically convinced that the majority of back pain comes from muscle spasms caused by repressed anger. Acknowledge your anger, Dr. Sarno writes, and the pain will go away.

I was skeptical, but I had nothing to lose by trying the good doctor’s advice. Wincing with the effort, I found a spiral notebook in my kids’ school-supply drawer. I drew a few flowers, birds, and valentine hearts on the cover and labeled it “Muffy’s Hate ’n’ Rage Journal.” Then I opened the notebook and started writing down anything I could think of that really chafed my foundation garments.

Although I’m used to articulating my feelings, I was appalled by the things I wrote in that notebook. It turned out that I was irrationally angry at some of the nicest people I knew, people who had never done me any harm, people who would have smiled and said they were fine, perhaps even apologized, if I’d deliberately and maliciously set fire to their hair. Just thinking about these ingratiating folks made me absolutely furious. I started writing down all kinds of rotten things about them, which culminated in a full-page scrawl in my Hate ’n’ Rage Journal: “THEY’RE ALL SO #*&$#* SPINELESS!”

What an interesting word choice. As soon as I wrote it down, I felt a tingle along my own spine, and the pain in my back relaxed significantly. I realized that I had been raging at my own reflection.

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