“There is nothing wrong with anger.”
Do you agree with that?
Or does that statement immediately conjure up images of violence and aggression?
Anger has huge stigma attached to it.
We are paying for it though!
Avoiding, ignoring and suppression anger creates energy blockages in our bodies and relationships.
It even stops you from getting ahead in your career.
This is because ANGER contains life force, and by disconnecting yourself from anger, you disconnect your life force.
Anger, shame, blame, sadness, fear, anxiety are classified as negative emotions.
Happiness, excitement, peace and calm, restfulness, joy, friendly are labelled positive.
What’s wrong with that?
I hear you ask?
The short answer is Everything!
Everything you have ever learnt about emotions is completely wrong.
Emotions are central to everything we do, everything we think, everything we learn and everything we experience.
Here is the problem: If you believe that emotions are positive or negative, you tend to focus on the so-called positive ones, and avoid the allegedly negative ones.
You won’t develop the full range of emotional and social skills.
You end up being clueless around so-called negative emotions.
You might feel comfortable when everyone is happy, and when others are angry, sad, depressed or anxious, you might want to run away, or you go overboard making everyone happy again.
It is exhausting, all this wanting to do anything besides experiencing these ‘negative’ emotions!
And if you believe that certain emotions are antisocial, you will think that only a few emotions are acceptable in your relationships.
This doesn’t give you much room to grow!
After a while, your relationships will feel stale or stagnant and you complain about feeling trapped or smothered.
The key to living a vibrant, healthy and happy life is to stop labelling or polarizing emotions and become emotionally intelligent, by accepting all emotions as valuable.
Each one has their own job.
Its own skillset.
Each emotion is like a musical instrument.
Becoming emotionally intelligent and competent is like being the conductor of an orchestra, creating harmony by directing each musician.
Imagine leaving out the drums, or the bass, because you are scared of the rumbling sounds.
You would spoil the entire symphony.
When you stop dividing your emotions into good versus bad, positive versus negative, and observe what is actually going on; and learn how to experience them without demonizing them, your life will take on a new meaning.
Your relationships will lose their staleness.
You see the gift inside every emotion.
For instance, anger is needed to keep healthy boundaries.
I had to coach a client once, who simply allowed every male specimen to use her body!
“Much easier” she reckoned than getting angry with them.
This is how she maintained her friendships and she couldn’t see anything wrong with it.
To her, it was nothing to ‘get angry or upset about”.
When I asked her how she would feel if every Tom, Dick and Harry did this to her daughter, she got very angry and upset.
Over the months, this client was gradually able to connect with her anger and return this emotion into its rightful place inside her nervous system.
She now has healthy boundaries.
She knows how to do anger well.
The gift of anger is that it gives us a surge of energy to set things right when things are out of order.
All emotions are necessary.
Every single one of them brings you gifts and skills and strengths that you can’t get anywhere else.
There is no such thing as a negative emotion.
Tune into the above video to help you connect to your body and find potential energy blockages so you can release them.