Thriving with Heart Disease by Wayne M. Sotile Ph.D. & Robin Cantor-Cooke

Author:Wayne M. Sotile, Ph.D. & Robin Cantor-Cooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

ANGER MANAGEMENT, STEP 3: LEARN WHAT YOUR ANGER IS ABOUT.

I have never counseled a heart patient who could gain control of his or her anger and hostility without grasping this truth: other people may stir your feelings, but your anger is your anger; it is intimately entwined with what is inside you, and you must learn to take responsibility for it. In Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh recommends thinking of anger as a seed within you. 19 This anger seed holds the emotional residue of your history and psychology. Some situations and people may fertilize the seed and cause it to germinate, but your anger is embedded in your personal dealings with yourself, and you must disengage it by the roots from the dark soil of the self.

In many years of counseling heart patients, I have learned that unresolved grief often bleeds beneath the skin of chronic anger and hostility. As mentioned earlier, the disappointments and losses that come with heart illness can beset a person with grief, and anger is a stage of the grieving process. As you contemplate what your anger is about, ask yourself: What losses have been particularly difficult for me to bear, and how am I coping with them?

Clément, a forty-nine-year-old actor living in Los Angeles, walked around with jaw pain for three weeks until one afternoon it seized him with such force he asked his wife, Marguerite, to take him to the local clinic. Tall, dark, lanky, and handsome, Clément didn’t look like someone with heart trouble. But when he collapsed in the examining room, he was rushed to the hospital for an emergency angioplasty. Here is what Clément said about the anger he felt at being diagnosed with heart disease:

“The whole episode paled in comparison to having to quit cigarettes. At my follow-up visit to the cardiologist after being released from the hospital, I was a basket case. And I lit into him—I felt bad about it later—I told him, ‘You know, this heart thing was a nonevent in my life in comparison to having to quit cigarettes.’ And I was deep in the throes of withdrawal for a week to ten days after that.

“I felt a tremendous amount of resentment. It makes no sense emotionally; this was the guy who pretty much saved my life, or at least saved me from severe heart damage. But he was the one who was most immediately insistent, saying, ‘That’s it—you’ll never touch a cigarette again.’

“For me, it felt like a fifth limb had been severed. I’d been smoking about three quarters of a pack a day since I was fifteen; about thirty-five years. It becomes a part of your life—when you’re talking on the phone, after a meal, when you take ten during rehearsal, during intermission … smoking was my friend, in good times, bad times, indifferent times, the cigarette was always there.

“People would ask, ‘How’re you feeling? How’re you feeling?,’ and you really want to say, ‘Will you

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