What's Behind Your Anger?

The majority of people on the planet have had some sort of problem with anger and with people doing things that make them feel angry. People have looked at and dealt with anger in a variety of ways. I want to speak about anger today and what I have learned about it over the years. For a few minutes, try to let go of all you have previously heard, read and been taught about anger so that you might be open to some new concepts about anger. Psychologists have had varying theories and methods for analyzing and dealing with anger, and various spiritual teachers and religions have had their methods and beliefs about anger, but I am giving you now what I have come to believe and do with anger, which is perhaps a conglomeration of all I have heard, read, been taught, and experienced with anger and the conclusions I came to with it.

Choose not to feel offense when someone does you wrong. Train yourself to immediately go into what you know and want to practice….immediately remind yourself that people know not what they do….that is, if they knew what you knew then they wouldn’t be acting like that! If they really understood love and kindness and justice, then they wouldn’t have done that…and so, they are just ignorant of God’s truth and God’s love. If that’s true, which it obviously is, then you can just feel sorry for them, pray for them to be healed, forgive them, and let it go. When you do this, your anger quickly dissipates. However, be very careful with this in that you don’t want to be looking down on them, seeing them as less than you, thinking how unevolved spiritually they are…for when you do that, you are feeling superior to them and this is just your ego talking and not true nonjudgment, and this may not heal your anger, and if you come across to that person who hurt you with this kind of superiority pitying energy, this will just make them angrier! I am talking about just knowing they need healing and staying in your love vibration in spite of them and praying for their healing. That is true nonjudgment. It comes not from your ego or your hurt or your insecurity, it comes from the God within you that truly does not judge and that always forgives! This is what we refer to as “nonjudgment.” When you immediately condemn and hate someone for being how they are, this is what we call “judgment.”

Why do people so frequently go into judging and criticizing? Because it makes a feel a bit better by putting it all onto the other person. They may be entirely to blame and we are innocent and right…but that doesn’t mean we should be focusing on them and what they did…we need to look within ourselves and see why we feel so hurt and so angry that we are focusing it all on that other person and what they did and how bad it was and trying to analyze why they did it, etc, etc. When we go into anger and judgment of others, we are trying to avoid our own painful emotional reactions, but this is not wise, and it doesn’t real help anyway. In focusing on what they did and our anger and hurt, we are avoiding our own inner healing.

So, in dealing with anger, we first need to stop focusing on the other person, stop judging them, go into nonjudgment, and then focus on ourselves and our own inner healing.

But I want to talk more about judgment for a while, as there are different kinds of judgments. Judgment has differing connotations. There is another “judgment” which is healthy and needed. It is a judgment of simple observation of what a person is and is doing. It is knowing what is wrong and unjust and what is true and right. This clear seeing and clear judgment connects with your being able to discern, with seeing people clearly and avoiding people who are not good to associate with. It has to do with knowing what is right and what is wrong. Some new age teachers teach that there is no right and no wrong and that to label someone evil or wrong or unjust is to judge them. This is a twisting of the truth and comes from dark force influences and is not truth from God. If you believe this teaching, then you are being led away from God and God’s truth and your discernment with people will become way off.

If that person who did you wrong or hurt you was in illusion, unloving, hateful, crazy, and disconnected from God’s truth and love, you need to see that and recognize they were wrong and bad. That’s ordinary judgment, seeing a person clearly, calling a spade a spade. But if you go into blaming, criticizing, hating, and going on and on in your mind how bad that person is and what is wrong with them etc etc, then those thoughts are the other kind of judgment that criticizes and hates and wants to hurt them back…and that kind of judgment leads you into your anger reactions.

Most people have been trained since childhood to judge and criticize and be angry, or fearful, or deeply hurt; but it is not what Jesus taught us to do and is not what God wants for us. God wants us to feel peaceful, joyful, loving and happy, not angry and hurting others back! Jesus asked us to understand, forgive, not go into these types of judgment thoughts leading to anger, and to just understand, pray for them, and forgive. Now, yes, Jesus himself could not always practice this, but yet he knew he needed to and he practiced it most of the time and it is what he taught us to do. He taught us to stay in our state of love and peace no matter what was going on around us or what offensive things people did to us.

Now, let me say, too, that there is another type of anger that is a natural reaction to something unjust done to us, but this type of anger, though natural, will only last a couple of seconds, and then immediately our thoughts and feelings of understanding, love and forgiveness should be kicking in and if they are not, then we have shifted into negative judgments and have therefore disconnected ourselves from God and truth and love.

It will take practice over time to train yourself to shift out of anger and judgment and into forgiveness, understanding and prayer for that person’s inner healing. It may take you many years of practice. But have this as your goal.

The Bible says, when you feel anger, do not sin…that is, you can choose how you handle your anger and what you say and do with it. Anger only becomes “sin” when you let it expand and go on and on, when you add judgments to it, and when you say and do things while in the anger that are not wise, loving and Godlike. You will be tempted to say something to the person or send them a nasty reactive email, or even do something nasty back at them. You will have to train yourself to choose not to say or do anything in reactiveness to what they did that made you angry.

You will train yourself to do self-talk that reminds you that whenever you say or do anything in reaction when you feel angry and hurt, that it never benefits you and it always just makes things worse; plus you are moving from anger into sin by lashing back at the person, or by defending yourself from a hurt feeling position. Train yourself to say to yourself, wait, just wait.

Then, the next step is to pray for inner healing for yourself. Pray to God to help you to work this out within yourself and to show you why this happened and what you can do about it. Ask God to heal things between you and this other person, or to release you from this type of experience with this person and any others.

Then, you will most likely find that as you are working on this and processing through that situation, you will start to cry…that is, you will find yourself shifting from anger into hurt and the feelings of hurt will pour out through your crying. Then you will find that things that happened to you in your past and how you felt will start coming up into your awareness. God will be helping you to understand your reactions and your past and to let it all go. The next thing that happens is that you start to see the truth of everything and this balances out your emotions and you start to feel more logical, more peaceful, and then you get guidance coming into your mind as to what you need to say or do in the current situation, if anything.

Oftentimes, you might just get guidance to say and do nothing with it. Other times, you might get guidance to say something to the person to try and straighten it out. Sometimes, too, you will be shown that it is more important to keep the peace with that person than it is to try and get them to see they misperceived or were wrong…that’s a hard one… but in situations with say, your boss, for instance, it isn’t always a good idea to try and get them to see they were misperceiving something because they might not want to see it, especially from you, and well, I just feel like it’s important to keep the peace with your boss to keep your job and your livelihood and to be able to go to work each day and not feel there is always this anger between you. You sort of have to feel this one out, though, as some bosses are the types of people you can express feelings with and work things out with, as they are more mature, while others always have to be right and are crazier and you just cannot try to work it out with them as it only fuels the fire and makes things even worse.

Following God’s guidance in these emotional situations can feel sort of like following your intuitions, and your intuitions get mixed into the guidance oftentimes.

If you have evolved enough to be able to practice what I am talking to you about with anger, then you are in a state of ascension, which means a degree of enlightenment that transcends judgment, criticalness and anger. When you evolve into ascension mode, you have mastered anger and nonjudgment. Ascension, or enlightenment, has levels to it, however, like wattages on a light bulb. You just keep learning more, healing more in yourself, and growing, in ascension mode. Just because you have nonjudgment doesn’t mean that you have fully ascended and fully healed all of your misperceptions. It just means you carry a certain amount of truth and light and clear perceptions, and it means you are in levels of nonjudgment and forgiveness.

When you are angry and having trouble releasing it and balancing yourself out, say to yourself, wait, wait until I feel more inner balanced before saying anything or doing anything in reaction to what they did to me. Even if they are continuing pushing at you, bite your lip, hold in any angry words or defensive reactions, do not express your feelings! Wait until later, after you have balanced out and gotten God’s guidance and awarenesses on it, after you have released your hurt, seen your past and how it connects with this situation, after you have cried, and wait til you feel calm and peaceful, and then see what you need to say to straighten it out with the person, or to just express how you felt, or to be assertive.

If you are at work, you will need to take a break and go somewhere by yourself and work through it. Pray. Cry. See why you are reacting so severely to what they said or did. Severe emotional reactions need to be processed through and healed. If you just keep thinking about it over and over in critical thoughts and hurt thoughts, or if you keep thinking how crazy or nasty that person is and if you go on and on psychoanalyzing them or thinking how they need to be more spiritual, then you aren’t processing through it. If you are trying to intellectualize it through, that won’t work, either. It requires prayer, divine guidance, divine perceptions, and a choice to not criticize them, not stay angry at them, and to work on your own inner self and reactions.

It is also important to recognize that you might not be able to heal or change them by anything you say or do. It takes a very emotionally mature and spiritual person to admit they were wrong or that they misperceived something or that they need to be more spiritual or more understanding. If the person you got angry at who hurt you is this type of more emotionally and spiritually mature person, then you can have these deeper types of conversations with them and maybe it is healing for both of you and you grow from this exchange. But, please do wait until you have processed through your own emotions before trying to talk it through with the person who hurt you.

If you are dealing with a close friend or a spouse you are deeply in love with together, someone who is more mature and open to seeing they might have been mistaken or wrong or hurtful to you, then those are ones you can talk things through with and work things out with most likely….but even then, with them, wait! Wait til you have healed yourself, are balanced out, and then go back and try to calmly work things out with them. And if in doing so, they start reacting emotionally and illogically, then say let’s talk about this later on again when you aren’t feeling so hurt. I don’t want to hurt you, and maybe I am mistaken, but let’s give it some time off and come back to it later.

There are different levels of reactions to hurt and anger. When you feel angry and you start going off on the person, that’s feeling angry and then sinning with it. You are attacking back. This is like revenge consciousness, and it has within it a desire to hurt someone because they hurt you. This is the lowest level. At this level of anger, sometimes things can still be worked out and discussed with the person, at some point; but other times things just stay the same and nothing gets worked out. But just ranting and raving and going off on the person, without giving them a chance to talk, without trying to work things out and discuss it, this is the lowest level of anger.

The next highest level of anger is when you feel anger and you decide to express it, but you stop at some point and allow the other person to react to it, to say something, and then you say something back. Neither one of you may be able to really work it out because you are both too emotional and caught up in old emotional baggage to think and react clearly and work on yourselves, but at least you are expressing back and forth, so this is the next highest level of anger.

The next highest level of anger is when you are expressing your feelings and anger, with some intent to try and work things out, and you are at a level of evolvement where you know that there is a possibility that through this expression back and forth with the person that you might work things out with each other. However, at this level, you both need to be aware enough of your own inner workings and problems and how to heal them; otherwise, this discussion with angry words and reactions cannot possibly heal the situation.

The next level of anger is what I have talked about already, where when you feel anger you choose not to say anything to that person who hurt you or to anyone else, and you go off and work on yourself and your own reactions and feelings and clear yourself before doing anything about it, if anything.

The next highest level of anger is when you feel anger, you then recognize what it’s about within you, you immediately clear it, feel more balanced, and get God’s guidance as to what to say, if anything. You have evolved to the level where you do not need to spend a lot of time going off alone and praying and processing through it; you just have to remind yourself that it came up again, remember what it was about, and clear it, all within a few minutes or even seconds.

The next highest level of anger is when you feel anger, and something deep within you just clears it almost immediately because you no longer choose to go into old past stuff, judgments, and emotional reactions. At this level you are operating from nonjudgment, mostly, but there is still some level of habitual judgment reaction because you felt anger at all, even if it was momentary.

The next highest level of anger is when you feel something that feels like anger and looks like anger but it is a different sort of anger that has absolutely no judgments, hurt or criticalness within it. It is a pure energy that’s healthy, that is just needed at that moment to stand up for yourself and it is like saying to the person nonverbally, but they sense it, that that kind of manipulation and injustice doesn’t work on me, it just doesn’t. Now here’s the thing…people tend to get this type of anger confused with other types of anger. They think this is where they are coming from, but they are not, as they have some degree of judgment, criticalness and desire to hurt the other person mixed up in that energy. It is a rare person who is able to access this purest anger energy without everything else mixed up into it and changing it into something else. This type of anger isn’t really what we call anger, and it dissipates within a few seconds or minutes, but it has no desire to hurt, it has no hurt or judgment within it. It feels different to you than the other more common type of anger.

The highest level of anger is when you don’t feel anger at all and just immediately go into nonjudgment, pray for that person’s healing, get your divine guidance, and respond or don’t respond without emotional baggage clouding up what you say and do. You don’t even feel a need to go into the previous level of anger which is a healthy energy, as you just choose to stay in a state of peace and love, rather than react to them at all. This state is just as powerful and healing and healthy as the previous level of anger, it’s just different, just a different sort of way the God within you chooses to react., and this comes from divine guidance in particular situations. This is a higher level of ascension. This is a higher level than the last level I spoke of because it is like turning the other cheek and walking away. It is like you don’t want to feed it or give it any energy at all. You prefer to just ignore it, stay in your peace and love and light energy, and not get caught up in any sort of reactions to their anger and what they said and did.

I want to cover another aspect of anger now. It is a lower level of anger, on the same level of just reacting without trying to heal yourself or work things out with the other person. This is when you just hold onto the anger. Holding onto anger will eventually cause you physical ailments, and will also cause you to go off on people inappropriately at the drop of a hat. You know you are holding onto it when you go to sleep with it still there, when you spend days, weeks, even months, hashing it over in your mind. People can hold onto old angers for years, even for a lifetime, and they get very ill because of this and they are miserable people. They become bitter, cynical, angry all the itme at everyone and about everything, and they become more and more critical, criticizing everything and everyone all of the time.

Revenge and hate and crime is also a holding onto anger and then sinning with it. Hateful and evil acts like murder, rape, and physically or even emotionally torturing someone are acts of revenge and are the most evil types of anger expression. It’s like they think that if they can kill off the person or cause great suffering or harm to them that that will alleviate their own pain, hurt and anger, but it really doesn’t and this is insanity vibration, complete illusion and completely caused within them by the dark forces, the Devil, as it has nothing to do with God and God’s truths.

Now I want to talk a bit about recurring situations that make you angry over and over again. If you are with people and situations where your anger keeps coming up, and where the person keeps doing these things that hurt you, and where you can never seem to work it out with the person and get them to stop hurting you….then you need to examine why you stay in that situation with that person, why you chose that person and that place, and what in you needs to be healed so that you choose and are with saner, more loving people.

If it is a boss or coworker, then you need to be healing something within yourself that attracted them into your life, and then you need to be finding yourself another job. If you get another job and this same problem with a new person crops up again, keep working on yourself to heal it in you; and when you know you’ve healed you, then get another job and you’ll find it doesn’t come up again and you’re working with more balanced people; or if it comes up again, these people are more on your current level and you can work it out with them as they are also working on themselves!

Why do we all have these problems with anger and people hurting us? It goes back to our childhood, where we observed our parents judging us, criticizing us, misreading us, falsely accusing us, or judging us when we didn’t know any better yet. If we did what they wanted us to do, they loved us, or at the very least didn’t hurt us. If we didn’t do what they wanted or be what they wanted, then they withdrew their love and attacked us with anger, criticism, judgment and perhaps even physically harmed us. We were taught judgment and anger by society and our parents and we were taught that this is just normal, right and good to think and feel in these ways. I have met women who were being emotionally abused by their husbands, and they didn’t even recognize that they were being abused until years later when something or someone woke them up to the fact that they were being abused. They had accepted abuse as just normal and right. Women who are being physically abused by their spouses actually believe that it is their fault, that weren’t good enough, that their husband is right about them and that they need to be punished. This all comes from bad parenting that teaches withdrawal of love or punishment emotionally or physically when someone isn’t being or doing what you want them to do. It’s called manipulation and control. We all bought into it, and it has created many problems and much hurt and sadness in our lives. We need to heal it. We need to understand what anger and judgment is and do its opposite which is peace, love and forgiveness, and sometimes a healthy “anger” on very high levels of ascension as I previously mentioned.

The Value of Anger...

After all I've said herein that's bad about anger, I must also mention the value of anger. Anger is often a reaction to some sort of manipulation, control, or abuse. This anger often starts in one's early youth or teen years, in reaction to abusive or controlling parents. If you just stuff your feelings, believe in what your parents are doing to you and justify it, or adapt to please them, then you are in illusion and are allowing yourself to be controlled, abused and manipulated. On the other hand, when you react in anger and rebellion, you are not changing their behavior, you are in judgment, you are hurting your health, and you are not able to find inner peace.

Your anger in these situations is healthier than if you were just adapting to your parents' unfairness or manipulations or abuses, or believing they are justified or that their behavior is okay. In a way, your anger is keeping you alive and free, to a certain extent. But the problem is that some people hold onto that anger of their youth against their parents and do not realize that there is a higher, more peaceful way to relate to what happened and to relate to people and life. There is a higher level of consciousness beyond the level of anger and rebellion. That's the level of letting the past go, not projecting your parents onto every single authority figure, not rebeling against any authority or rules just for the sake of rebellion. It's also the level of choosing inner peace and love feelings over anger, choosing to forgive and let it go instead of holding onto resentments, fears and angers from long ago and projecting them onto every life situation and person.

Some rebellion may be good for you, but what I see often is people rebelling against all rules and all authorities, and this is not healthy or good. They are not trying to make you do something that's bad for you or for others, they are just setting some rules that are fair for all, that are considerate of others, and rules that will actually help you and benefit you and be good for you. But you, the forever rebel, choose to do the opposite of any rules and any authority figure. You are rebelling against people and situations that you have no need to rebel against. One time I was supervising an employee when I was a hotel manager, and I asked him to make the beds a certain way with the sheets turned up a certain style, and because he was this eternal rebel he chose to do the opposite to what I had instructed. He couldn't see that this was unwise and wrong. He could not be told what to do, even in a simple situation like that! He would also not follow any of the house rules. There was nothing bad or wrong with those rules or with the way I asked he do the sheets. He is his own worst enemy and cannot hold a job because he feels he must rebel against everyone and everything, just to feel free and uncontrolled. This is a real problem in his life.

So, although your rebellion and your anger in your childhood might have been healthier than adapting and allowing yourself to be abused and controlled, and although your anger might have kept you sane and alive back then, there is a higher level of forgiveness, love, inner peace and letting go of the past. Anger may be higher levels than adaptation and being a puppet, but it isn't the highest level of consciousness you can attain.

I highly recommend that you read my next article, as well, which examines anger, judgment and punishment from viewpoints of Christians, God, and atheists, and where I comment on same.