A while back, a friend told me how she had been chronically angry in a past relationship, and she eventually realized it was because of his unresolved anger.
Yes, that can happen, and it’s not the whole picture.
We pick up what’s going on in others, whether it’s on the surface or more hidden. We respond to it. And we may well respond to unresolved anger in someone else with our own anger.
For me, this is life inviting us to see and explore our own anger.
How do I relate to my own anger?
How would it be to befriend it? Invite it to wake up to its nature?
If I make genuine friends with my own anger, how do my relationships change? How does my relationship with angry people change?
In the case of my friend, how would her relationship have been different if she had found more resolution with her relationship with her own anger? Maybe the relationship would have ended, if the unresolved anger was a major tie or if he wasn’t able to change with her? Maybe he would have been able to shift his relationship with his own anger?
And, yes, I know it’s not always so easy. Sometimes, we have the space and availability to explore these things only long after a situation is over that brought our own issue up for us.
Note: How may it look if we genuinely befriend our anger? We’ll have an easier relationship with it. We are not caught up in fear about it. We trust we can relate to it in a more healthy and conscious manner. We allow ourselves to more consciously feel it. We may even allow ourselves to speak and act from it in some situations where it may be helpful, and use it as an energy to cut through certain situations. We continue to explore our relationship with it since there is always more to discover. We know our relationship with it still has unhealed parts and that we still have blindspots.
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DRAFT
How do I relate to my own anger?
Do I see it as a problem? An enemy? As “unspiritual”? Dangerous?
What’s the worst that can happen if I befriend my anger? How likely is it to happen?
How would it be to befriend it? To get to know it? Listen to… What it has to say? It’s advice for me? How it sees my relationship to it?
What does it need and want? If I rest with what a part of me wants, I find it’s often given to that part through the resting. What happens when it’s given what it wants? Does it relax? Something else?