Be the One You Need by Sophia A. Nelson

Author:Sophia A. Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Health Communications Inc
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

LESSON 8 Control Your Anger Before It Controls You

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape one hundred days of sorrow.”

—Chinese Proverb

Your Ability to Exercise Self-Control

My grandmother had many words of wisdom to share with me. She used to say, “Anger is one letter away from the word danger.” Controlling our anger is important but difficult, and let me confess at the outset that I haven’t completely figured this one out either. However, having lived for over five decades, I do know something about how to spot my anger and manage it before it erupts into an uncontrolled fire that I can’t put out. Painful experience has taught me that when I let my anger get the best of me, or when I let my anger lead the conversation, or when I let my past anger and resentment take over the present, I am not only setting myself up for failure, but I’m going to end up doing great damage to people I love and care about.

Anger is one of those tricky emotions: at times we need to express it, and at others we need to hold back from expressing it. What a contradiction, right? How can it be that, in one instance, I need to get my anger out, to let people know how I’m feeling, to tell them that something they’ve said or done has hurt me, has caused outrage in me, and that I need to let them know it before that anger boils over. But then there are times when my anger needs to quiet itself, to settle down so that I can sit with it and then later express it when I am not upset, emotional, or in a state of outrage.

Unfortunately, we live in a rage-a-holic culture. Gun violence is worse than ever (for the record, I am a gun owner and Second Amendment proponent). Domestic violence is through the roof. Our first instinct is to curse one another and cancel one another and berate one another rather than talk. We are an angry lot in the twenty-first century. The goal of this lesson is to see what tools we can put in our EIQ toolkit to deal with anger, to manage it effectively, and to try to operate from a spirit of collegiality and respect.

I want to touch on three points in this life lesson: First, discerning the difference between being angry and feeling something else that we haven’t dealt with. Second, facing your anger so that you can fix it. And third, managing our anger effectively.

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