Anger management is searched online by over 3 million Americans every year who are looking to help themselves or someone they love with controlling anger. If you don’t take any attitude, lip, smack, backtalk, don’t let anyone get away with anything and make darn sure people show you some respect…if you’re quick to flare up, long to forgive and nearly never forget… then this will be the most important article you read this year. Because this type of take-no-prisoners attitude is a sure-fire way to destroy your life in a blinding ocean of anger and the 3 steps to tame your rage revealed here could become the only lifesaving vessel available out of your perfect storm.

Perception Exposed

When something happens that sets you off or someone does something to really work you up, remember we all use different filters of perception. We all see the same thing in a different way. There is a high chance of probability the person or people who are making you angry don’t know they are doing it and are not acting to make you angry on purpose. It’s like having 100 people looking at a coin, depending on where they are standing, they all see something different. It could be 50 of them see tails and 50 of them see heads, but all 100 of them are looking at the same coin. We could all be looking at the same situation, going through the same experience yet have totally different views and feelings about what we see and feel.  The ancient tribes of Latin America called this part of life’s Maya (illusion). Don’t be fooled by the illusion of perception.

Be patient. Breathe deeply and repeat. Remove yourself from the situation and remember we often sense too much confidence in what we think we know, we make no room for any other possibility or different interpretation. Think of how limited we can be in perception, how many things are going on all around us yet how few of them we are aware of. Take time to calm down and then ask the person who upset you what they meant by their action or words. Give them a chance to explain and do not jump to conclusions or cut them off. Listen to them until they are done and then do not go off in rage. If you still feel betrayed, angry or frustrated simply tell them you feel so and leave. Look for quiet personal spaces you can get cool and collected in. If you are dealing with your kids, don’t physically discipline them when you are angry and boiling over. Wait till you are calm and if you still feel they deserve a spanking, do it without aggression or violence and never do it in the heat of the moment. Always remember, it is you who controls your reaction and how other people make you feel.

Proactive Formula

Emotions are powerful and when you are first transforming anger out of your life some challenges feel impossible to overcome. You can feel like you are always reacting to a situation instead of dealing with it proactively. That is why Kabbalah teaches an ancient formula anyone can use for eliminating anger out of their life. Its name simply translates to The Proactive Formula. Here is the first step…

Stop. When you feel the acid in your stomach boiling up, your head is getting hot and yours ears closing in. Just stop. Don’t think, don’t react. Disconnect yourself from everything and create a small space.  Ask yourself if you would prefer to have the space filled with love or anger. If you want to have love come in to the space, then let the Light Force work for you. No matter what you call your Creator, ask for the Love of your Creator to fill the space with its Light.

Step two is to let go. Release your usual reaction of screaming, throwing or hitting and connect to the love you requested fill the small space. Recognize you usually react to this type of situation in a destructive manner and you now have a chance to be proactive; you have a chance to try something new.

Step three is to take action on your proactive feeling. Maybe it is to leave the room, or to put down the plate instead of slamming it against the wall, perhaps you decide to not speak instead of yell. What is important is your new action not be your destructive old reaction. Your proactive feelings and actions will grow from small victories to major triumphs where you actually laugh at things that used to make you tremble with living rage.

Put It In Your Mouth

Your mouth is like a hundred lane super-highway for micro vehicles transporting tons of positive and negative energy in and out of your life. The things coming in and out of our mouth impact your anger triggers. Whether you like it or not, what you say and what you eat have a direct effect on how often and how intense your anger rises. For example, eating under the stress of anger can cause spasms in your bile ducts producing excessive bile when you are angry. The bile becomes toxic in the body when excessively produced and leads to stomach ulcers, cancer, bouts of depression and fatigue. These illnesses in turn produce more anger in your life.

How you speak and the words you use record themselves into your subconscious and energize your environment. We all act according to our thoughts and feelings. Think how excited everyone acts when the words being spoken and the atmosphere are positive. Versus when the words in the air are negative, how heavy and unbearable it becomes and how horrid the feeling in the room can be. If you are looking to master your anger, then you need to consider both nutrition and meditation or prayer as key tools on your road to success.

Meditation and prayer at the start of each day helps you set your intentions. How you want to behave, feel, think and act for the day. By using simple prayer and mediation you can generate the power of miracles in your life. You can use the life and love force flowing in the Universe to help you be proactive and overcome angry explosions. Enjoy a vocabulary rich in sweet words, positive statements and constructive comments.

Your food diet is also important. Avoid red meat, liquor and fried fats. Eat healthy foods that free up your colon and cool your digestive system. Fresh vegetables and cold fruits help your brain release chemicals which cheer you up and make you feel happier. Look to not eat foods which you notice make you feel depressed or slow. And definitely stay away from liquor which taxes your liver and plays with your emotions.

When most people hear the words homicide and war they think about a conflict between countries or an innocent bystander stabbed to death in the street. This is only one way of looking at it. When your anger hurts others, it is killing them. It kills a piece of their dignity, of their happiness and worse it kills off their trust in you. When fights break out with beatings and broken glass, this is war. However small and isolated, violent angry outbreaks of battles are personal wars resulting from anger. The little things we do in our personal life, add to the bigger problems manifesting in the world. Like the now famous song from The Lion King, “It’s the circle of life”. In western society, the saying is “What goes around comes around.” If you are putting out anger and violence what do you think will be coming back around to you, to your life, family and ultimately coming back around to world at large?

Take each of the 3 steps outlined here with the certainty that you can control your anger instead of being controlled by it. Take each step, one day at a time and never lose sight of how wonderful an anger free life can be. Pretty soon you will not only be dreaming about a peaceful fulfilling life, you will be living one.

I know what I instinctively do when I get angry. I sit on it.

I want to think about it. I want to think about what to do with it. If the person who just said or did something that got my anger started, especially if it’s my husband or my daughter, I most especially stuff it down until I can figure out what to say. Often the moment gets lost entirely. I find myself grumpy or tense ten minutes later, ruminating on my anger like a cow chewing cud, and my opportunity to express myself feels lost forever.

Not so. What I’m describing here, it seems, is me beating myself up because I didn’t know what to do with the anger I was feeling. What’s sometimes worse is when my husband is angry. At me.

I can handle his anger if it’s towards others. I get behind him, confirm his righteous indignation, his enemy is my enemy. I’m a great team player. So where am I when he’s angry at me? What team am I on?

The first split second I feel his coolness, I’m on team Rori. I get my back up, I protect my back, I face off. I’m the star goalie, defender of Rori, no angry words could possibly hurt me, I never, ever, ever did anything wrong. Or I did everything wrong. I bounce from anger at him for being angry with me to anger at myself for causing such unbearable conflict. I blame myself for severing love, even for this moment. It doesn’t occur to me until sometimes hours later that acting as if I’m on team Our Relationship would not only be better for the relationship, but for me, too. All I need to do is share my anger.

We all know from reading every book on communication ever written that we’re supposed to communicate in “I feel” messages, not “You did” messages. And yet — How do you do that? Most of us don’t even know what that looks like, much less how to get the words out. Not one woman (including me) that I’ve met has even seen it in our lifetime, except maybe in the movies. Not only do we not know what it feels like to really talk in “I feel” messages, we hardly ever even know what it is we even feel!

Those of you who have been to my workshops know that a big part of my work is helping women access their feelings and then express those feelings in words a man can hear.

One of the emotions we women have the most trouble with is anger, and anger is also the emotion we often seem to have the most of! We are all angry a good part of the time. Perhaps it’s disappointment, or irritation, or pure rage. Some of us have gotten seriously sick trying to hold in so much anger. Some of us can only attract men who offend us, who make us angry, because we are so angry.

Putting a smiley face on our anger just makes it all worse, because on top of the authentic angry inferno anyone who stands next to us can sense (no matter how dense we think they are) we’re adding the disrespect of trying to hide it from them. We’re pretending it’s not even there — though it’s like a great big elephant sticking out of our chests. That angry elephant trumpets through our words no matter how hard we try to disguise it. When we pretend, we appear at best like automatons, at worst like liars. We can seem completely out of touch with ourselves and at the same time complain about how men can’t get in touch with their feelings!

So, what to do?

1. Agree that anger, even murderous rage, is just a feeling. It’s just energy. And it’s most likely covering pain. Because anger truly does feel better than pain, it’s a very worthwhile and helpful emotion.

2. Admit to ourselves that what we’re feeling is anger, and that it belongs to us, not to the man across the dinner table. Admit that it most likely has absolutely nothing to do with that man across the table. It may be anger from the last relationship, the last two dozen relationships, or our relationships with our parents. And then admit that if it is about the man across the table, and he’s said or done something clearly hurtful, you not only don’t have to tolerate it — you can handle the next step!. Which is:

3. Share it. This is not about venting, getting it out, or “communicating.” It’s about sharing your feeling state in order to both keep yourself healthy and deepen your relationship with another human being. Say “I’m feeling angry”. Period. If he asks you why –- say “I feel really angry. And hurt. And now I’m feeling confused. And now I feel a little silly even telling you”. Or “Ouch — that really hurt — it feels terrible”. (Notice I didn’t say “You made me feel terrible” or “That makes me feel terrible”, I just said “I feel terrible”.) It may seem like a little thing, and yet my work is based on the idea that these little things add up to big things, and then pretty soon your life has changed for the better and you’ve already lived through all those big changes that right now seem so terrifying.

Learn how to go a few rounds with him, responding in the moment — even if it gets to you screaming “Now I’m so angry I feel like hitting you! I don’t want to be here anymore!” and leaving the space.

If you have to do this a lot, you may want to look at why you’ve chosen to stick around with this man at all — which brings us right back to the question of why we hide the stuff in the first place. Is it because we’re afraid to look at what’s really going on in the relationship, what’s really going on in our hearts?

I know it seems too simplistic to just share your feeling state. We want to explain, to help him understand. Actually, we just want to slap him around. We want to punish him. And that gets us, and the relationship, nowhere.

So where does all this sharing of feelings get us? Every single woman I’ve taught to do this (including myself) has told me that it shifts the conversation. It shifts the entire relationship. Where there was once tension and a feeling of detachment, there’s now a feeling of play and connection. Sharing our feeling state is an outrageous act of bravery. Any man in the room can see that.

And any man can feel the utter authenticity and vulnerability of it. Any man can feel how much you must trust and respect him to be able to open up like that, without attacking him. Without so much as mentioning his name. And any woman who does this, even a little, experiences a freeing up inside.

All of a sudden all the pretense goes away, and the fear of dropping the pretense goes away. All of a sudden the need to defend, the need to be guarded goes away, and the fear of dropping our guard goes away. There’s suddenly nothing between you and your man. He can feel it. You can feel it.

Where it goes from there is out of your hands. And that, once you get used to it, is liberating. It opens the door and parts the curtain and gives you the chance to really let love walk in. And then it does.