There are situations that make us angry, plain and simple. There are times when we cannot control that feeling of anger that grows rapidly inside us until it explodes. There are also people who have the same effect. They may be extremely perfectionist, overly critical or people who do not commit. One way or another, the truth is that their behaviors and attitudes end up affecting your psychological balance, destabilizing you and generating anger.
However, it is not actually that person’s fault that you are angry. You are not angry because of them, you are the one who gave them permission to do so, you have allowed their behavior to resonate within you, you have allowed it to destabilize you. After all, we must remember that only those things that really matter to us can hurt us.
So, every time we let someone unleash our anger, it’s like we’re saying, “What you think about me is more important than what I think about myself.” In this way, you give up control and power to the other person, losing the battle before it even begins.
Your emotions are only yours
Carl Rogers said, “Recognizing that ‘I am the chooser’ and ‘I am the determiner of the value an experience has for me’ is enriching but also frightening.” When we get angry, we tend to point the finger at others.
It is easier to focus outside of ourselves because it frees us from any responsibility and prevents us from having to work to control our anger. It is easier to blame someone else for our anger than to look for the causes within ourselves. After all, we have been taught to think that anger is a response to certain environmental conditions.
However, this is only a small part of the truth. The truth is that our emotions and feelings are our responsibility because, although we cannot choose how we feel in certain circumstances, we can choose how we react to them. We have the ability to modulate our reactions and maintain control.
Therefore, every time we let someone make us angry, we are giving up control, we are giving them an importance that they probably don’t have and, above all, we are letting them take away something very precious from us: our emotional stability.
Accepting that emotions are ours and that we can choose how to react can be scary because it implies assuming an enormous responsibility, but, at the same time, it opens up a world of new possibilities because it invites us to know ourselves better, to dive within ourselves to understand why we react in a certain way.
How to stay calm?
If you think about it, reacting angrily to someone is like putting your emotional stability in their hands. However, would you trust your psychological balance to a stranger who is also rude and unfriendly? From a rational point of view, the answer is a resounding “no.” However, from an emotional point of view, this is what we do every time we get angry. That’s why it’s important to learn to stay calm. Responding calmly is empowering. And very much so.
1. Find out the source of your anger. Usually the person in front of you is nothing more than the flame that lit the fuse. You may actually be angry because you had a bad day, because something didn’t go as you expected, or because you had too many expectations for that encounter. One way or another, the cause of your anger is inside you; there’s no point in looking for it outside. This small exercise in insight will allow you to shift your focus from the outside to the inside, and this simple change of perspective will allow you to take control of the situation.
2. Don’t take it personally. Most of the time we get angry because we assume the other person’s behavior or attitude is a personal attack. However, this is almost never the case; it is a misinterpretation. Basically, what happens is that our ego, which is often excessive, makes us think that certain situations are a personal attack, because we have over-identified with the experience. Therefore, it is important to learn to evaluate situations by assuming an emotional distance, so you can develop a more objective and rational perspective. The world is not conspiring against you, it is just a distorted perception of a huge ego.
3. Change your mindset. To stay calm in the most difficult situations, you can think of anger as a kind of gift. If a person is trying to make you angry, you can allow it, or not. If you accept that “gift,” you will get angry and the person will have gained power over you. On the contrary, if you do not accept it, if you do not play along with the insults and provocations, they will have no choice but to keep all those toxic feelings to themselves. Remember that there are people who go through the world as if they were emotional garbage trucks, but it is up to you to accept that they unload those toxic feelings or ask them to put them somewhere else, far away from you.
In any case, always keep in mind a phrase from Aristotle: “Anyone can become angry, it is very easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way, that is certainly not so easy.”
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