How to Manage Anger: Understanding the Shadow Within
Acknowledging and integrating the Shadow – our dark side that is home to negative emotions like anger and greed -- is a significant part of the individuation process in Jungian psychology . This involves recognising and accepting the Shadow aspects of the self, resulting in a more complete and balanced self-awareness . It helps reduce the power of the Shadow to influence behaviour unconsciously and reduces the tendency to project the Shadow onto others. It also recognises the shared humanity in us all.
In a broader cultural context, collective recognition and integration of the Shadow could potentially lead to increased understanding and tolerance, reducing societal division and conflict. Swiss psychiatrist and analytical psychologist Carl Jung says. “The best political, social and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
When you feel angry, and you yell and throw things, you tend to blame somebody else or a specific situation or circumstance, a failure, and so on, for this anger that is now rising like volcanic lava, erupting from your core, making you spew fire and brimstone, scorching everything within sight. It is only when you acknowledge the fact that you are angry, that it is your reaction -- to that person, situation, circumstance or failure that is making you a living volcano -- that you can even hope to rein it all in and find ways to calm down, to overcome this destructive outburst, to reflect so that you can respond in a rational manner.
Kaaren Maezen Miller, a Zen priest, admits that she wasn’t an angry person until she became a Zen Buddhist. “Sure, I yelled. I slammed things, I broke things. But I wouldn’t have called myself angry. It was always another person making me angry. How was that my fault?” She further says, “The night I flung my wedding ring across the lawn during an otherwise piddling argument with my husband, the truth began to dawn: I was a really angry person. But there was hope because I was an angry person with a Zen practice.”
With regular practice of zazen, just sitting, Miller says, she has learnt to slow down and acknowledge her negative emotion, resisting its pressure and not giving in to anger. Katherine Hepburn is believed to have said, “No one can make me feel humiliated without my permission.” We could extend this thought to anger, and say, nothing or no one can make me angry without my permission. When you allow anger to enter your space and take over, things spiral out of control. The key to your space is with you, so why invite this destructive emotion into your sanctum sanctorum, your inner space, your very being?
Learn how to look at anger, J Krishnamurti would say. In his book, Freedom from the Known he says: “One of the most common expressions of violence is anger. When my wife or sister is attacked I say I am righteously angry; when my country is attacked, my ideas, my principles, my way of life, I am righteously angry. I am also angry when my habits are attacked or my petty little opinions. When you tread on my toes or insult me I get angry or if you run away with my wife and I get jealous, that jealousy is called righteous because she is my ‘property’. And all this anger is morally justified. But to kill for my country is also justified. So when we are talking about anger, which is a part of violence, do we look at anger in terms of righteous and un righteous anger according to our own inclinations and environmental drive, or do we see only anger? Is there righteous anger, ever? Or is there only anger?”
Freedom from violence and anger means everything to Krishnamurti – even more important than sex, food, and position, because “This thing is corrupting me,” he says. “It is destroying me and destroying the world, and I want to understand it, I want to be beyond it.… I can do something only if I am beyond anger myself, beyond violence, beyond nationality.”
When you sense that an emotional storm is brewing, just observe it, acknowledge it, and stay calm and collected. Meditate. Count. Do not allow that intruder to grab you. Whoever or whatever is making you angry, it is you who are angry, so you have the power to also not be angry. Become a witness, observe, acknowledge, move on with loving detachment. The moment you get attached, you become a victim; you will get vandalised.
In a broader cultural context, collective recognition and integration of the Shadow could potentially lead to increased understanding and tolerance, reducing societal division and conflict. Swiss psychiatrist and analytical psychologist Carl Jung says. “The best political, social and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
When you feel angry, and you yell and throw things, you tend to blame somebody else or a specific situation or circumstance, a failure, and so on, for this anger that is now rising like volcanic lava, erupting from your core, making you spew fire and brimstone, scorching everything within sight. It is only when you acknowledge the fact that you are angry, that it is your reaction -- to that person, situation, circumstance or failure that is making you a living volcano -- that you can even hope to rein it all in and find ways to calm down, to overcome this destructive outburst, to reflect so that you can respond in a rational manner.
Kaaren Maezen Miller, a Zen priest, admits that she wasn’t an angry person until she became a Zen Buddhist. “Sure, I yelled. I slammed things, I broke things. But I wouldn’t have called myself angry. It was always another person making me angry. How was that my fault?” She further says, “The night I flung my wedding ring across the lawn during an otherwise piddling argument with my husband, the truth began to dawn: I was a really angry person. But there was hope because I was an angry person with a Zen practice.”
With regular practice of zazen, just sitting, Miller says, she has learnt to slow down and acknowledge her negative emotion, resisting its pressure and not giving in to anger. Katherine Hepburn is believed to have said, “No one can make me feel humiliated without my permission.” We could extend this thought to anger, and say, nothing or no one can make me angry without my permission. When you allow anger to enter your space and take over, things spiral out of control. The key to your space is with you, so why invite this destructive emotion into your sanctum sanctorum, your inner space, your very being?
Learn how to look at anger, J Krishnamurti would say. In his book, Freedom from the Known he says: “One of the most common expressions of violence is anger. When my wife or sister is attacked I say I am righteously angry; when my country is attacked, my ideas, my principles, my way of life, I am righteously angry. I am also angry when my habits are attacked or my petty little opinions. When you tread on my toes or insult me I get angry or if you run away with my wife and I get jealous, that jealousy is called righteous because she is my ‘property’. And all this anger is morally justified. But to kill for my country is also justified. So when we are talking about anger, which is a part of violence, do we look at anger in terms of righteous and un righteous anger according to our own inclinations and environmental drive, or do we see only anger? Is there righteous anger, ever? Or is there only anger?”
Freedom from violence and anger means everything to Krishnamurti – even more important than sex, food, and position, because “This thing is corrupting me,” he says. “It is destroying me and destroying the world, and I want to understand it, I want to be beyond it.… I can do something only if I am beyond anger myself, beyond violence, beyond nationality.”
When you sense that an emotional storm is brewing, just observe it, acknowledge it, and stay calm and collected. Meditate. Count. Do not allow that intruder to grab you. Whoever or whatever is making you angry, it is you who are angry, so you have the power to also not be angry. Become a witness, observe, acknowledge, move on with loving detachment. The moment you get attached, you become a victim; you will get vandalised.
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