Wipe the lens clean of Anger
It's hard to see what's ahead through the hazy red lens of anger, resentment, and shame. Here's how it happens and how you can wipe the lens clean.
A reader of the Divorce 101 newsletter posed this question:
❓How do people calm down, to see what’s best for themselves?❓
Our anger toward our partner, boss, neighbor, or the guy who cut you off in traffic can consume us, for a few minutes on the drive home, or the whole time the two of you are on the couch together watching Love Island.
😠As the anger flows, your vision goes. 😵
Both in the moment and in the long term, as every time you think about sitting on that couch together, the anger rises up again, and prevents you from seeing the future together with clarity and purpose.
In addition, you start to feel guilty about negative emotions like anger and it becomes a reinforcing cycle of anger leading to guilt, which leads to being angry at yourself, which leads to more guilt. And around we go. 🔄
So the starting point is to break that cycle by:
✔️Accepting emotions as normal, not negative.
✔️Understanding what/who has triggered them.
✔️The goal is to reach a point where you can recognize when the trigger and the emotion happen and see them both in a neutral way.
➡️For example, my boss delays the important to me meeting for the third time in a week (trigger), which makes me angry (emotion) and I can give that situation no more weight than if the break room was out of coffee creamer. ⬅️
🎉In fact, I take a moment to celebrate how I recognized and dealt with that emotion.🎉
Start by practicing on small things that irritate you, like missing a light in traffic, so that you are better prepared when more traumatic events pop up.
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Divorce is hard enough, why go through it alone?
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