anger season
we're in it whether we like it or not
One thing I love about teaching and practicing yin yoga is how it invites you to confront various emotions and patterns associated with the various seasons of the year - even the so-called darker emotions. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Daoist thought break the seasons down as follows:
grief - fall
fear - winter
worry/anxiety - transition times between seasons + late summer (which is the fifth season according to TCM)
excess joy - summer
and anger, which is associated with the liver organ and spring.
So over the course of the year, when I stick with my practice, I am sorta forced to deal with these emotions even if I don’t want to or if I’ve stockpiled* them in some way, which is my proclivity. In this newsletter, I said that 56 percent of my time in therapy has to do with recognizing my own worth outside of what I do or produce; the other 44 percent is probably spent on feeling my feelings. So the seasonal yin yoga practice is like preventative medicine when it comes to feeling my feelings: even if I’ve neglected to do so in the normal course of life, when that emotion’s season comes around, I’m probably going to have to deal with it. As a bonus, the wisdom of TCM tells us that the emotion associated with each season is more likely to come up during its associated season and nature supports us in processing it more in its corresponding season.
So when anger season comes, yin invites me to reflect on any unfelt anger, to feel it, and to try to get curious with/about it. Because I have been angry about so much over the last year, this spring is inviting me to get curious about ALOT 😳
Many therapists say that anger is a secondary emotion - meaning that it’s a cover for something else. But TCM considers anger one of the seven primary emotions. It isn’t inherently good or bad; it just is. The danger is when it isn’t balanced, so it causes problems when it’s either under or over expressed. When we repress our anger, we don’t speak up ourselves, we internalize it, and we often become resentful. When we go in the other direction and over express our anger, we get ragey. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle where our anger drives us to action and justice.
I like how TCM talks about anger. It tells us that it is a natural inclination to being hurt or seeing someone or something else get hurt. The dangers are when it’s excessive or repressed. This way of thinking about it takes the judgement out of it, which has enabled me to get more in touch with my anger and, occasionally, to embrace it.
I don’t want to repress my anger about the disappointments, failures, and hurts of the past year, but I also don’t want to live there. So here’s what I’ve been trying to do this spring:
Cut down on my news consumption. I just needed to cut off the source of new frustrations for a bit. I am a person who thinks it’s important to know what’s going on in the world, so I’ll be back at some point, but, for a season, I needed to decrease some of the inputs.
Make myself journal about what I’m mad about. All freeform. No judgement. Half the time I don’t even do it in a journal - I just write on a scrap piece of paper and recycle it when I’m finished. The point is to let it be and let it out; I don’t need to go back and reread that stuff.
In my actual journal, I’ve been trying to take note of where I’m letting my anger get away from me and here are a few things I’ve been noticing this spring: getting upset with the kids about something legitimately dumb, ranting with old friends about something I’ve ranted about a million times already and need to let go of/move on from, seeing where my anger is pushing me into lethargy or worse instead of action.
I’m not sure what to do with any of that quite yet, but turning down the volume of anger-inducing inputs and the writing it down is helpful nonetheless. It’s keeping me feeling things instead of numbing or ignoring them, and it’s got me curious, which, for me, is where all of the good stuff starts.
*Brené Brown says that there are six primary ways that we tend to deal with our emotions in an unhealthy way and seeing my own patterns in various situations or relationships has really helped me. P
erhaps they’ll help you to name your tendency too? She calls these ways that we “offload hurt:”
Chandeliering – Hurt that is packed so far down that it can’t possibly resurface but the smallest comment/mistake/feedback can trigger rage or shame.
Bouncing Hurt – Using anger, blame, and/or avoidance when getting too close to emotion
Numbing – Taking the edge off emotional pain with _____. (Ex. food, video games, Netflix, YouTube, etc.)
Stockpiling – Packing down and building up the pain until my body and/or mind are not well.
The Umbridge – Overly sweet and nice when in reality you feel resentful, hurt, and/or frustrated.
Being High-centered – Not being able to move back and pretend something does not matter but moving forward could mean I lose control of my emotion.
Rants and raves
👍 I really liked these boundary scripts from Melissa Urban around kids and Covid, something I’ve been having a little anxiety about with summer coming. Spoiler: do not read the comments.
👍 The kids and I finally finished L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle this week. I think we had been listening to it a few times a week since before Christmas. It was so good and sparked so many great conversations with the kids. And I can’t get these lines out of my head since I first heard them: “Fear is the original sin. Almost all of the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.”
👎 Adulting. I told Grant this week that I would like to request a sabbatical from adulting, especially laundry. We’re all four just crawling to the finish line with the school year, I’m supposed to be going back in the office in person next month, and everything feels just a little aggravating at the moment (irritability is anger’s cousin, so it’s not surprising).
Stuff worth sharing this week:
A new and improved Oregon trail in which the designers paid Native historians to help make it historically accurate. I listened to this story at first, and it was so great to hear someone that got it wrong being willing to listen to those they harmed about how to make it better.
As I’m writing this, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks and distancing in most settings! I was fully on board with masks while we didn’t have any other options, especially once the science proved that Covid spread primarily by aerosol transmission, and I’m excited not to wear masks everywhere anymore because I’m fully vaxxed, especially outside, which has seemed for awhile now to be Covid theater. At this point, I think we need to help as many people on the fence about getting vaccinated to get vaccinated, and I think looser mask guidance, based on the science as we know it, helps us do that. I don’t think this (or anything, really) is going to win over any anti-maskers, but I think whatever we can do to get people with logical concerns about the vaccine to get vaccinated, the better. (Side note: I definitely plan to put those cloths masks back in rotation at the beginning of every flu season.)
I loved these thoughts and am thankful to have friends like these:
I also wrote down that line “You were born with a limitless/Supply of encouragements/Use every one of them” for my bathroom as a reminder.
I’ve decided that this is the energy I’m taking into this summer:
Seasonal pic of the week
Our weeks right now are a little nutty with kids’ activities. In between carting them around the other night, I made Grant and Wendell do some birding with me in the “back 40,” as we call it (it’s in the back, but I’m not sure where the 40 came from). Wendell scared most of the birds away, but it was just the #naturetherapy we all needed in the midst of a harried week - I highly recommend it!
Cheers to getting curious with your anger in the week ahead!
Sara
I think I live in anger season, heh. I hope your transition back to being "in office" is peaceful, Sara.