Anger Detox

How to release anger and other negative emotions

What you resist, persists

The first thing to say is that resistance never gets rid of anything. There are people trying to manage their anger, get rid of their insecurity etc. Or get rid of things they don’t like in the world. It’s not working.

We resist like a knee-jerk response. It’s the normal thing to do. Look at social media like X (Twitter) — it’s full of opinions of what’s wrong with other people or the world and it doesn’t solve anything, it just gets people more angry and more powerless.

There’s another way. It’s embracing everything, including what you don’t like, which is where your power is.

I like to do my “What’s Good About…” List which is like a Gratitude list but for everything that’s on my mind, even the feelings I’m not that keen on.

Embracing emotions

I remember the cycle of getting angry about something, and then feeling guilty about getting angry. “Why would I still be feeling angry about that?”, I’d tell myself, “surely I should be more advanced and be over emotional immaturity?”. This is the start of what I call the anger cycle, guilt, anger, guilt, anger — it doesn’t stop when you get into it.

Having negative emotions is not emotionally immature — all emotions are good — it’s just about learning a new way to deal with them.

So instead, I embraced it. I embraced the anger. I embraced the guilt. I embraced the situation happening — all of it. I looked for the good in it. I realised this was a great thing that the anger was being triggered to be released. Nothing had gone wrong — in fact, the opposite. So I looked firstly in the emotion itself — there’s a passion there, there’s an intensity. And then I looked for the good in the situation itself.

What’s Good About negative emotions

What came to me is how we attract situations that trigger emotions for the purpose of releasing them. We want to embrace these emotions as they come up and get released — and remind ourselves that this experience is serving us, and that nothing has gone wrong. It’s not that we are wrong for feeling these emotions — quite the opposite, we need to be congratulated for attracting these “detox” experiences and then feeling our feelings as the release is happening.

These shaming theories that talk about how we must have equanimity in everything — have no emotion, be non-reactive — can just silence and suppress people and trap their emotions. It might be easier for other people around you if you were docile — but it’s not so good for you. It stops you evolving and changing for the better by keeping your emotions repressed. Instead, you want to learn unconditional love of self — which includes unconditionally loving all parts of you, even the negative emotions. This unconditional self-acceptance is key.

And so it’s perfectly normal to have intense negativity come up in relationships. It’s a good thing. It’s how we sometimes release anger (and other negative emotions). It always happens when the time is right to do so. Those cyclical arguments over the same thing, like why haven’t you done the washing up? The answer is to embrace it all. That’s one thing that relationships are there for, to help you release what isn’t serving you and detox from the patterns that have been holding you back. These patterns are going to keep coming around again until you embrace them and let them go, so you might aswell do it now.

You’ll find practices such as the “What’s Good About…” List in my books Emotional First Aid and Feel Better, No Matter What out now from Watkins Publishing. http://instagram.com/michaeljamesbe