Vanquishing the Stages of Anger

Nine years ago, I attended a weekend workshop called Script Writing.

No, it had nothing to do with the art of writing.

It was a follow-up to another workshop I had attended a few months prior, Transactional Analysis (TA) 101.

No, it had nothing to do with business or banking.

Both focused solely on one thing and one thing alone – the self.

I found out that I was carrying truckloads of baggage and emotional trauma from my childhood that I had not yet processed and released.

We all do, you know - carry baggage. Some of us are much more severely wounded with very evident trauma such as rape, other forms of abuse, the death of a parent and so on.

For the others, the baggage is less evident, more subtle but it still lurks beneath the surface, ready to come out in an unsavoury scenario.

One of my traumas? Moving to a new country smackdab in the middle of my adolescent years, leaving behind my friends, a school I loved, a home I adored and the boy I liked. Given enough time, we might have even begun dating. Alas, it was not to be.

The move affected me for years, impacting all the decisions I made, going forward. The advantages of living in another country meant that I could have had my pick of universities abroad. The fee would have been cheaper and the colleges more accessible.

But I refused. I wanted to come back to India, pick up the life I had been forced to leave behind, a few years ago. I wanted to hear my mother tongue, watch films in theatres with screaming crowds, fall in love with a native boy and attend college in the city I had had to leave behind.

And so, that’s just what I did – all of it.

Was it the best option for my education? No. I could have had a far superior learning experience in universities abroad.

Do I regret my decision? Definitely not. They gave me some of the best years of my life.

The decision to move back to India, however, was one I made in anger. It was not anger that developed, spur-of-the-moment. It was anger that I had carried around ever since I’d been made to move, anger and resentment at my parents for foisting upon me a decision over which I had no control.

The Script Writing workshop brought home this fact. And it also brought me face to face with another realization.

All my life, I’d been called short-tempered and I’d thought I was a generally angry person.

But as I delved into my life, I came to realize that what I was expressing as anger in the form of harsh words and cruel taunts was not anger at all.

It was hurt.

I was deeply hurt by life and I was expressing it as anger.

I saw that the root of anger is never anger itself. Never. It is, in fact, just the topmost stage – the outer layer, if you will. Beyond this, there are many stages of anger. Script Writing helped me uncover the first few.

The instant I realized that my anger was stemming from hurt, I knew I had to change the way I communicated. If I could express in real-time that I was feeling hurt and needed to take a step back from the situation, the anger I was feeling would begin to dissipate instantly because I was addressing the reason behind it.

Boyfriend forgot to wish me for my birthday? Instead of calling him and yelling my lungs out, I called him and said, “I don’t know what possible reason you could have for not wishing me. But I want you to know that it really, really hurt me. I expected a lot and you let me down.”

Hey, it wasn’t a perfect start 😊 The stinging rebuke was still there. But the more I began practising saying exactly what I was feeling, the more anger began leaving my system.

The best side-effect? I experienced an immense sense of peace.

I had always thought that to be at peace, one had to become a yogi or a Zen monk, practise meditation for hours and live in a monastery.

But here I was, feeling it, just by working on the emotion of anger.

Peace was in my hands! I didn’t need to go anywhere or do anything special to attain it – all I had to do was work on myself and keep working on myself.

I had discovered the answer to one of life’s biggest questions.

How to be at peace with yourself?

Work on yourself.

When we are at peace, we automatically begin to radiate it to the people around us. When they begin to work on themselves, they radiate peace to still more people and so on and so forth.

Just like charity begins at home, world peace begins with the self.

It’s that simple.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s jump right in 😊

And if there’s ever a TA 101 workshop in your city, without a doubt, go for it! It will be the beginning of an irreversible change in your life.