Anger
Why not start with my most complicated relationship. Anger, I hardly know ye. As I will repeatedly beat into the ground, I was not contained as a child. I had two loving parents that were lost in their own dramas and dropped me. Consequently, I was taught nothing of what it means to be a man in this world by men. That responsibility was outsourced to women, Hollywood, and the public education system. I don’t think I need to go deeply into any of those groups other than to say that none of them know me very well and have their own agendas. Therefore I was taught that anger and physical conflict was something to be avoided. Throw in my dad spewing out rage at the slightest provocation and I was left believing that I wanted nothing to do with this problematic emotion.
The costs of denying a genuine feeling are many. For starters I was taught to believe a part of me is bad and that I need to dishonor pieces of myself. As if that isn’t enough, when this emotion did arise, as it naturally would, I had to then do what I could to rid myself of the bad feeling. Amazingly, while you can probably guess where this story is heading, I did not in fact have a meltdown or any sort of release when the genie finally came out of the bottle. Being an overacheiver is something that came natrually to me, so if I was told not to have anger, I was going to do my darndest.
There wasn’t really a watershed moment here beyond my growing awareness that there are not bad emotions and that I needed to start integrating all my emotions to complete myself. But as the journey led me to address this feeling head on I received a most generous surprise. My anger is a gift. I can use it consciously to elevate people as needed. Now, this is a powerful tool and one that I must honor and create containers for if I want to use it fully, but I share this because I have a suspicion that other men of my time were taught that their anger was bad too and I want to invite them to begin to question that believe and find healthy channels of expression.
A final word on anger before I leave you to contemplate your relationship with it. The anger we see out in the world today is not a healthy expression of this emotion and the men that you may have reference points from only exude it from a trauma response. It comes out of hurt and is sprayed indiscriminately. The anger I speak of is that of a weapon that a warrior has mastered and is consciously deployed. It does not come from triggered reactivity but is brought forth as a tool at the proper time. Think more of the coach screaming at the player to catch the ball with both hands, as practiced, so that his team can maintain possession vs. a drunken worn out man coming through the door and releasing all his pent up frustrations through his fist. The coach is trying to bring awareness to a player who lost focus and who from the right place wants the player to flourish, vs. the beaten down man in a trauma response.
