Mindfulness for Anger Management: Transformative Skills for Overcoming Anger and Managing Powerful Emotions by Stephen Dansiger PsyD MFT

Author:Stephen Dansiger PsyD MFT [Dansiger PsyD MFT, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Althea Press
Published: 2018-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Healing the Angry Body

A mindfulness teacher told me over and over again that mindfulness practice is not a practice of the mind—it is a practice of the body. Becoming aware of how anger feels in the body is where we will find our answers and our alternative strategies. It may seem counterintuitive to discuss body before mind, but when it comes to anger, it is really beneficial to tap into the body. We can actually bring awareness away from the mind, where we tend to be comfortably fixed, cycling through our angry thoughts, mindlessly getting caught in them.

The practice of bringing attention elsewhere in the body can help break that anger cycle and offer powerful healing. Oftentimes when we’re in anger, we are quite outside the body. We are ruminating or growing agitated. An important step in overcoming anger is to connect with the physical sensations of the emotions so that we can have greater control of them, become aware of when anger is coming on, and avoid acting on it.

Bringing Mindful Awareness to the Body

Many of my psychotherapy clients who identify anger management as one of their issues will either report difficulty with knowing what they are feeling in the body or demonstrate behaviors that are in place to desensitize the body in some way. Stress placed on the body has now been implicated in everything from having a difficult day to developing cancer and other chronic or fatal diagnoses. The stress response in the body and the anger response for the most part are one and the same on a biological level. Stress and anger can manifest in body-related distress such as chronic pain or ulcers, or we might self-medicate them away with drugs and alcohol or addictive behaviors.

A great deal of what is taught in mindfulness practice and in anger management in general seems counterintuitive. As a suffering person, it would make sense that one would want to escape from the awareness of pain and difficulty in order to ease the suffering. However, that turns out to be a short-term strategy with long-term consequences if used over and over again. Buddha made it very clear through his long career of teaching that to address our pain, we need to lean into it and become familiar with it. We need to bring awareness to this experience of being human. Mindfulness teachers over the millennia have offered a number of ways to bring attention to the body and through that attention bring awareness, and through that awareness bring new perspectives, intentions, and actions. Here is a quick exercise utilizing the breath as the anchor to start our journey of healing the angry body.

PRACTICE: QUICK BREATH AWARENESS

This exercise is designed to help you notice the basic mechanics of your breath. The breath represents our best tracker of the moment and a bridge to awareness of the body. Before we can become aware of what’s going on inside, let’s first become aware of our breath. As discussed in the previous chapter, getting into the moment is a key to managing our anger.

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