Dealing with Anger
13 Oct
Ironically timed journaling prompt:
“How do you deal with your anger?“
Boy oh boy, am I ever quick to anger at times. I think one of my biggest struggles is a temper that is easily triggered and requires an intense amount of energy to put away, especially when it’s accompanied by indignation.
I have a tendency to become especially angry on the behalf of others in a way that I’m still learning to rein in. I would never last a week as a social worker if I couldn’t process and move forward from the things we humans regularly and casually do to one another on any given day. Sometimes my anger and my indignation get a hell of a lot of things done at work, but only when I carefully channel it into advocacy for the patient.
In my personal life, I’ve recently taken a lot of anger and hurt that I’ve been feeling for months now, and I finally expressed it to one of the people who had caused the hurt and anger, and, as is usually the case with me, the minute I expressed those things, I finally let go of those feelings, acknowledged their validity, and moved forward without that baggage.
It’s frustrating to me that I have a hard time moving on without that process happening, but in this case it was completely deserved, and even my husband had told me it was well past time that I tell it how it is and move on from the relationship. He’d actually been telling me that the relationship was completely imbalanced (he said it more colorfully) long before I started to feel that the imbalance had become palpable. I just sometimes wish that the expression of my anger or hurt didn’t have to be such a crucial component to getting over it.
On the other hand, I like that I rarely take any shit, and that I’m capable of speaking my mind (sometimes in a fairly loud voice). ;) Something I recently took away from a spiritual discussion group is that even our imperfections are capable of being our best qualities at the right moment. I hope that I’m getting better at knowing which moment is which.
How do you handle your anger?
