The Anger Hack
Anger is an emotional response.
It's probably the most vilified emotional response on the planet.
Because of this,
people are desperate to know what to do with their anger.
How to prevent being angry, right?
The good news is that there's actually a hack you can use,
so that you no longer feel powerless to your anger.
Before I give you this hack,
I will say that if you want to understand anger in depth,
you can watch my video titled:
How to Deal with Anger
But I want you to remember the following statement;
I mean never forget it:
Anger is about unworkability.
If you're ever in a situation where you feel anger,
it means that you're perceiving some element of that situation
to be completely unworkable.
Now, why does this make you so angry?
Because wherever there is unworkability
in a situation that's causing you pain,
the fact that it's unworkable
means that it's like a "lifetime sentence" to pain.
No matter what you do,
you're trapped in pain and you can't get out of it.
That's your perception.
So think about it like this,
if you perceive something to be causing you pain
on an emotional, mental or physical level,
that implies that you need something to change about that situation
or in that circumstance,
so that you can feel good.
Now if you actually believed in your capacity to change the situation
so it did feel good,
you wouldn't actually get angry.
Instead, you would feel empowered.
So anger happens to the response you have in your body
when you feel disempowered
relative to a situation that's causing you pain
or making you afraid.
If you perceive whatever is causing you pain or fear to be unworkable,
you immediately feel powerless.
I'll give you some examples here
of how anger in a specific situation
is really about the perception of unworkability.
A woman gets angry because her husband's socks are on the floor.
Which is a chronic pattern of his,
by the way,
despite the fact that she has asked him not to do it.
What really hurts her about this
is that it makes her feel like he doesn't care about her.
Maybe what she feels is unworkable is
getting her husband to consider her.
Your next example...
A working mother gets angry
because she feels judged both ways.
Other mothers judge her for working when she has a child to prioritize,
and colleagues judge her for having a child
when her priority should be work.
What really hurts her about the situation
is that it makes her feel like she's never good enough.
She's afraid that her child will see her this way
when she/he grows up.
Maybe what she feels is unworkable
is other people's extreme and impossible standards.
Her inability to change anyone's mind
about what she should do.
Another example,
a man gets angry at a friend of his
when his friend gets into a specific college and he does not.
What hurts him about the situation is that he feels inferior to his friend.
It feels unfair that his friend
had more support for getting in than he did
and so the odds were stacked for his friend and against him.
Maybe what he feels is unworkable
is getting support.
Your anger comes in to try to rescue you out
of that powerlessness or that unworkability
that creates that powerlessness.
In this way, you can see anger
as a protector.
Another way of saying this is that unworkability is like a solid wall.
There's no movement in it, you can't create any changes in it,
and so it's a solid brick wall.
Anger comes up as a last ditch effort,
kind of like a grenade that thrown at that brick wall,
might do something to make it movable
or to collapse it or to make you empowered in any way.
Remember last ditch effort for empowerment
in the situation that you find yourself in.
If you listened closely to everything that I just said,
all of a sudden,
the anger that toddlers or teenagers are so incredibly famous for
will suddenly make sense.
It's really about feeling like they don't actually have the empowerment
to bring about the things that they want.
In other words,
their anger is actually about a lack of empowerment.
Toddlers are at an age of autonomy
where they need to be able to develop their desires
and also experience the process
of being able to bring their desires to fruition.
Kids turn into angry kids
because they feel zero empowerment
to turn their lives into what they need their lives to look like
in order to feel good.
This means they're trapped in pain.
And adults are exactly the same way.
It's just that so many adults
struggle with anger
because they've been conditioned in their childhood
to believe that it doesn't matter if they're in pain,
they can't do anything about it and the people around them
certainly aren't gonna help them do anything about it,
and so, it doesn't matter what they do,
they're just gonna stay in pain.
They are disempowered about whatever area of their life,
they feel angry about.
When children experience a threat to their well-being
The adults in their life
have to help them figure out a way
so that they feel empowerment
to make their lives feel better.
To avert that threat
or do something about it.
It's about being able to feel empowered
that if something is making me feel bad,
I can change it into something that feels good.
However, this is not usually something that happens
if you watch the childhood environment.
For example, a kid really wants a bike.
They're feeling in pain about the fact that they can't get around
as much as they want to get around.
Now the vast majority of parents
aren't gonna help the kid find a way that the kid can create
that bike for themselves.
That they can achieve it,
that they can get it,
that they can become more locomotive.
Instead, the average parents gonna look at the kid and say:
but I'm not going to get it for you because we're too poor.
See that solid wall?
That's "unworkable".
So this type of an experience
I'm gonna give you another one in a second,
is the type of experience that conditions a kid
to grow up to be an adult
who believes that they don't actually have the capacity
to bring about what they want.
And so they get angry.
Here's another example,
let's say that a child is in pain
because they have a painful dynamic happening with their dad.
Maybe dad has the tendency
of doing or saying things that makes them feel disapproved of.
In the childhood environment
it's very rare that a child has the capacity to bring out:
"This is what's causing me pain"
and for dad to sit down and be like:
"Well, I don't want you to be in pain, so let's figure out a way that we can feel
more empowered in this situation
so that it's what would feel good."
Maybe figuring out a different way of communicating
or a different thing we can do together to make this relationship feel good.
Usually the answer that the kid gets is something like:
"Suck it up buttercup".
See? Unworkable.
The kid gets mad.
If this kind of experience happens over and over,
a kid grows up to believe that they are genuinely powerless.
So I want you to remember
that a person who struggles with chronic anger in adulthood,
is a person who learned that things are unworkable,
even if things are workable.
Your anger will always reveal
what in your life you feel disempowered about.
But most people don't call out that disempowerment
or call out that thing that feels unworkable,
directly, so as to work with it.
But if you want to use this hack,
for dealing with anger,
you're gonna have to call it out directly.
What is it that's unworkable?
What is it that's making me feel disempowered?
So here's your hack, you ready?
Anytime you feel angry
you are going to use the sensation of that anger
as an alarm bell.
And when that alarm bell goes off,
you're gonna ask yourself the following question:
What in this situation do I feel is totally unworkable?
Name it directly.
From there,
all of your focus should change
to the unworkability sector
of the situation you're dealing with.
Not whatever situation the unworkability itself
is showing up in.
So you're gonna ask yourself the following questions:
First of all, is it really unworkable?
Maybe you can tell whoever is involved in the situation
what you feel is totally unworkable,
so that you can draw their attention to it,
so that they can problem solve that unworkability with you.
by the way, this is a really good tool to have
to name the unworkability directly and bring it up with somebody
so that their problem solving it also,
because people have a tendency,
once you bring up the fact that they're being unworkable
relative to something that you're experiencing,
they have the tendency to see their own unworkability
and not feel good about the fact that they've got that solid rigidness.
So you get a lot more playability
with other people who may be unworkable in a situation,
if you draw their attention
to whatever element you feel is unworkable.
You're gonna ask yourself the question:
What could I try to do so that the situation that feels unworkable,
is workable instead?
Now here's the next question you're gonna ask yourself,
and you get to only ask yourself this question
if you've really arrived at the place
where a situation that you're in is actually unworkable.
Most situations you think are unworkable,
are actually workable.
But let's pretend
you get in a situation that's like, really unworkable.
Like it's a situation you just have to accept.
For example:
"I want this person to come back to life, but they died."
What's unworkable is bringing them back to life, right?
Yeah, maybe you need to accept that that's completely unworkable.
So here's the question that you're gonna ask yourself
in that type of a situation:
If I accept that unworkability
instead of simply accepting that my life will be pain,
what would I do instead?
We have the tendency to make our anger which is about unworkability,
about surface things.
For example, let's go back to that analogy
that we gave her the example, rather that we gave of the woman
who has the issue with her husband leaving the socks on the floor.
Now it's tempting to think that the way to resolve the issue here
is about figuring out some workable way
to get it so that he picks his socks up off the floor.
But when she looked at the situation and realized what's really unworkable
is the fact that I feel he doesn't actually care.
Like at all.
And in because he doesn't care, he doesn't consider me.
Okay, now if that's the issue
and that's the unworkability,
she's gonna be putting her focus and energy in a completely
different area than the socks on the floor.
And if she does that,
if she identified that as the unworkability,
look at how different the steps that she's gonna take
to create workability are gonna be.
It's gonna be things like this:
Communicating this fact to her husband,
attending relationship counseling which may make the relationship better
or one may make her aware that she's not in the right relationship,
doing shadow work with her root wounds
around not feeling loved in childhood,
committing to the mastery of relationship
and seeking out people to teach her about that specifically,
spending time around people who consider her in what they do.
In other words,
these are the steps that she might take to restore empowerment
into the sector of unworkability
which is:
"I have a husband that I feel like or perceived doesn't care
and I perceive him to be unworkable
in that he won't consider me."
See? If we tried to make that empowerment
about finding out strategy
to get him to pick up his socks off the floor,
it would be missing the mark
of where the actual disempowerment and unworkability is
and so it wouldn't do anything to resolve the anger.
When you are able to identify the true perception of unworkability
underneath your anger, the anger dissipates.
It dissipates because it's no longer trying to rescue you
from that threat,
because you've consciously chosen to be empowered
by going directly towards it instead.
You get that if anchors a protector
and it is,
and instead of it having a purpose,
because it can't protect you in any way,
because you're directly going towards that unworkability,
instead of it trying to save you away from the unworkability,
it no longer has a purpose.
Anger is only there if it serves a purpose.
So if you go in the direction of figuring out what that unworkability is
and try to figure out how to introduce
workability into the unworkable situation,
the anger has no reason to be there,
so it won't.
It won't be there.
So what happens when it's not there?
What happens is that you down into those layers that are underneath it.
You know, those things that it was trying to rescue you out of.
so you'll drop down into feelings of pain,
feelings of sadness,
whatever fear that that anger is trying to rescue you out of.
When you are staring at resistance directly,
and by the way, when you're working with unworkability
you're working with resistance,
so when you're staring at the resistance directly,
what happens is it puts you squarely in this empowered seat of strategy.
Suddenly you are able almost like a chess player,
you're able to see what strategies
might actually create work ability in that unworkable situation,
and which ones may totally fail.
Now, this gets really interesting
because it means that quite often
when you're staring at that unworkability in the face,
it becomes obvious that anger, in fact,
makes an unworkable situation even more unworkable.
And when you are looking at it in that way,
you're being, often, let's go of the strategy of anger completely
because it sees this isn't a strategy that's going to work on the unworkability.
In other words, it's not going to make me any more empowered.
When you look directly
at what the unworkability is in a situation that's making you feel angry
it will cause you to do
completely different things to resolve the situation
than you would have done originally.
It will be obvious how things
that the anger may cause you to do
to create work ability,
like raising your voice,
or getting violent, or walking out the door
is the wrong strategy.
And by the way, I need you to see that.
That what anger does
is it causes you to behave in ways
that you think introduces workability
into a situation that is unworkable.
For example,
if somebody is stonewalling you,
then your anger will force you to walk out the door,
because you're convinced that that's
gonna make the person who's stonewalling you, more workable.
It may or may not be the case.
That's why looking directly at that unworkability
might actually reveal a different strategy
to create work ability in the situation.
You did not come here
to put up with things the way they are.
You are meant to be empowered.
Anger directly reveals those areas
where empowerment needs to come back into life
as long as you are willing to see the unworkability
that your anger is trying to call your attention to, directly,
so as to strategize how to make it workable instead.
In other words,
empowerment is about facing your disempowerment directly
and finding workability
is about calling out those elements
of unworkability that exist,
and consciously strategizing ways
to make the unworkable, workable.
And that process makes anger obsolete.
Have a good week.
If you liked this video,
be sure to share it, like it,
and also subscribe to my channel so you can see more content like this.
But I want to personally thank you
for taking the initiative and having the bravery
to step into the space of awareness.
Not only for yourself, but for the benefit of those around you.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte