Enter Label: Rage, a story of a one-legged duck (swimming in circles)
I can participate in increments, small, but unimaginable in June. I’m exposed. I may talk to someone, and then they return to their summer’s day, or two months of summer days, before we speak again. All the while, I remain on the bench, the old lady sitting next to Forrest Gump. A faint echo replays. Did they complain about a thunderstorm in Miami? Only I am keenly aware of how fortunate it is to be under those dense blue skies! Strangers on the street turn into targets of scorn, the ease of their demeanor, effortless airs, laughter. I feel utterly gremlin. They aren’t suffering enough to know what is going on in world. A pithy, angry thought all but swallowed by the jealousy it exudes on the way out of my mind.
Indeed, a pronounced but maladaptive side effect of being just abisel (yiddish for a little) recovered is you reach that Circle of Friends moment when Minnie Driver says:
It's like taking me to the top of the mountain and showing me the world, and then marching me back down, and saying, "That's what you can't have Benny, you silly great fat article.”
I’m out of the 24/7 prone state, and a very minor player in this large world. I’m a frustrated pawn. Frustration is anger. Anger creates pain. Anger, once you are in pain, is turned toward the pain. The pain cannot be eliminated without addressing the anger, which unbeknownst to you is now a simmering rage. The hyper vigilant nervous system becomes a one-legged duck, swimming in circles.
Anger is the greatest obstacle to creating a healthy, pain free life. It separates you from yourself, those closest to you and life, and it is impossible to move forward unless you can use strategies to process it and move forward.
My brand of rage is mature. Years of pruning and development. It’s tied up in chaotic experiences, strong principles, hatred of injustice, heritage, the whole gambit. And now, it’s been in this oxygen-less state of illness, stealing time from my life, my daughter, my family, my friends, my dreams. How does one face it?
It helps to understand what it is. To date I’ve viewed it as a light switch that goes off, blood drains downward, my jaw electrified, and there’s suddenly an echo of a door being slammed, me now in a staircase somewhere. Was that me? Will they come get me? Despite my experience with anger, I’ve never really been in a situation that forced me to address it sufficiently. No real consequence but people losing respect for me, and the time that group of guys broke my nose, and the time…well…we don’t have all day.
Back then, all advice seemed general. Hokey. But now I cannot get functional without addressing it. When I lose my cool now my head lights up like a Chevy Chase Christmas decoration. As always, the peculiarities of life are found at rock bottom. All the things you thought were too simplistic, become the greatest truths in rock bottom.
Many pain patients bury their anger so deep that they will rate themselves as anything but angry, so as to avoid coming to terms with it. Hard to believe, however, that a chronic pain patient feels no anger. Dr. David Hanscom describes anger in layman terms:
When a basic need isn’t met, like breathing or eating, we experience anxiety. Which triggers action to resolve the problem. If our attempts fail, our body kicks in with adrenaline, which increases the odds of us meeting our needs. The net result is anger, which occurs because of our loss of control. So anger is anxiety with a chemical kick. With anger, your body is now fully adrenalized.
Suleika Jaouad , a writer and advocate, had cancer in her 20’s and recently, a reoccurrence. She is currently undergoing chemo. She understands what it feels like to be alone, in isolation, even perhaps more pronounced by the presence of a celebrity husband, Jon Batiste, Grammy Award winner, Late Night Show Band lead, whose deserved rising star is unstoppable at the moment.
As Suleika writes in Isolation Journals, a newsletter and community she has cultivated for promoting creativity as a tool for survival:
In the year leading up to my leukemia relapse, my beloved Jon and I had made so many plans. There were dinners with friends and birthday parties and weekends away. There was our trip to Paris, which was supposed to be a celebratory return, where we were going to explore the city together, then travel by some fancy overnight train with three other couples for a weekend trip to Venice.
But time after time, I found myself in bed, utterly exhausted or sick or both. I canceled plans, canceled plans, then canceled more plans. During our trip to Paris, I spent that whole week in our hotel room, not a fancy train in sight except maybe in a fever dream.
All those months, I felt so much shame about not being able to fully participate in my life, especially with Jon.
I’ve been careful this time to make sure that my emotional and physical well being does not hinge on one person, and it’s been such a better experience—not just for my relationship, but for me. If Jon is unavailable, it doesn’t destabilize me or cause friction the way it once might have.
It’s not just positive thinking that’s going to get you to that kind of enlightenment. Positive thinking alone quite literally doesn’t work on a biological level. Hanscom again:
Positive thinking occurs in the conscious part of the brain and has no chance of suppressing your body’s powerful survival reaction. It’s a gross mismatch. Although you may keep your mind in a positive place, your body’s response to the negative input will continue.
So what are real tips for handling anger, and not just punch-a-pillow tips. Across many methods, the overlap seems to be figuring out how to create a separation, a barrier, between yourself and a situation, in which you can build in your response, a space wherein you can feel or acknowledge anger, not suppress it, and decide what to do about it. Whether through meditation, deep listening, or reprogramming practices, you are trying to get to a point where you can choose the response most advantageous to your nervous system.
Strategy #1: Reject the Victim Role
I didn’t get this one at first but it makes sense and it’s pretty powerful.
No matter how righteous your indignation, it’s a result of someone or something else. So in effect, it only exists because you have made yourself a victim. Changing your status as a victim is hard, especially as it relates to pain. Pain is not just a story you tell yourself, it’s a lived experience, it is, in fact, quite undeniably, robbing you of your joy. So feeling like a victim makes absolute sense. Choosing not be a victim needs to be an intellectual choice accompanied by reprogramming tools to be effective.
As Dr. David Hanscom says:
How victimized do you feel about your pain and circumstances surrounding it? How angry are you that no one seems willing to listen to you, believe you, or care about your pain? How attached are you to your victim role? How willing are you to look at whether it’s running you life.
The victim role is universal. The willingness to take an honest look at is not. Asking yourself all the above questions will help you get closer to moving out of this role - and out of the Abyss. The only way of it it is through you. If you are not aware you are in, you will remain there.
To change your status, an exercise:
Acknowledge the victim status.
Ask what is upsetting me? Acknowledge that you are blaming a person or situation for making you angry. Say I blame so and so for such and such for making me upset. Understand that now you are playing a victim role, a universal feeling.
Write: I am allowing myself to be a victim of so an so or such and such.
Then choose not to be a victim. Date it and put it where you will see it ever day.
Victimhood is so powerful that you will never wake up one morning and feel like “I don’t want to be a victim anymore.” You have to make a mental choice. You will fail many times but don’t stop efforts. Just commit to being honest with yourself.
You may even still feel you are a victim of the pain, but you don’t have to be the victim of the anger.
Strategy #2: Deep Listening
When it comes to conversations that make you angry, or situations where you find yourself increasingly reactive, my self compassion and mindfulness coach, Jessica Dixon, advises:
We often think the feeling that is triggered (anger, etc) is the enemy, but I'd try to get curious about how the reactive response is problematic, not the feeling. We allow the feeling. We pause to choose the response. Trying to commit to listening is a beautiful practice of pausing, because it brings in the possibility of really hearing the other person and not just quickly believing the story you are telling yourself about what they are saying. Aim to do this every time, but success is starting with actually doing it even 10% of the time. Momentum will build from a small start because you start to disrupt the automatic patterns of your brain.
I like this one because if you can do nothing else, you can just let your ears operate, and purse your lips together to ensure nothing comes out. I have started to do it, and I must admit I have a little bit of a cheating system going on. When things reach a boiling point, I will turn around as if tidying something, and repeat to myself “Deep Listening, Deep Listening, Deep Listening” while the other person is talking, such that I don’t hear every word. As I build my resilience to stress, of course, the plan is to actually listen deeply, but one step at a time!
Strategy #3: Acceptance
Anger manifest is the weight of resistance. Rigidity. The corset strapping in the heart, lungs, and diaphragm. The antidote for resistance is acceptance.
I do a 10 minute meditation where I identify the emotion of anger, and then go deeper to call out other emotions, anxiety, regret, feeling left out, etc. and I say, yes, yes, yes, to them aloud, over and over. I allow them to be.
By saying yes to them audibly, while breathing deeply, I accept them, and some of that rigidity floats away. When the rigidity floats away, the emotion becomes less intense and expands from the center of my chest to diffuse throughout my body. Access to more surface area makes the emotion less powerful.
At times, I just wander around saying, grumbling, yes.
Tara Brach has some wonderful meditations on acceptance. Click!
Strategy #4: Tich Nhat Hang, Anger, a Buddhist Approach
Tich’s book Anger really spoke to me many months ago. It was the one of the first books I read that got me started on this journey of discovery. His advice centers on communication skills, specifically compassionate listening, loving speech, and of course, mindfulness. I took the general principles but not the application back then, (a big theme of relapse to be addressed later).
Tich is against suppressing anger, or letting it ventilate, aka, punching a pillow. In his view, it just stokes the energy, and makes it grow. He believes we should treat it with mindfulness, and tenderly embrace the anger and energy within with awareness, again through mindful breathing or mindful walking.
He compares anger to a painful knot in your back, an accumulation of toxins, which you massage in order to get out. In the same way mindfulness is the practice of massaging the consciousness. He encourages one to practice mindful breathing or walking everyday to always make sure there is good circulation, and no stagnant emotion that just grows bigger and bigger in the basement of your soul waiting to explode.
For approaching a dispute, he offers the following format for loving speech…”Darling I am Angry, I Suffer. I Am Doing My Best. Please Help Me.” Each choice intentional.
Darling I am Angry, I Suffer - this sets the stage for truth, and love. You are communicating the anger actually pains you. Tich urges that you do not keep anger in for more than 24 hours. If you don’t think you are capable of approaching the matter in that time frame, you get up and practice mindful walking and breathing, and if you still can’t, you write a letter.
I am Doing My Best - means you refrain from acting out in anger. You are practicing your own teachings. You are leading by example instead of trying to convert someone else first. You are embracing your anger like a baby, and taking good care of the baby by addressing it in this way.
Please Help Me - this is the language of true love. You are telling the other person that you can only get out of this stage of suffering, this anger, with their help.
Strategy #5: Learn to co-exist
You can’t eliminate all stressors. You can’t always transform anger into a positive energy. You may not even be able to practice acceptance or deep listening. So just practicing how to co-exist with it is useful tool.
One method suggested by Dr Luskin is to do a meditation that involves lying on the floor and visualizing a difficult person or situation. Remain calm and relaxed while holding the picture in mind. You are training your body to live with this emotion without needing to stifle it or losing control.
I was going to add a sixth strategy on Forgiveness, but I’m waiting on the seminal book by Dr. Luskin, Forgive for Good, so we can save that for later.
As always, there is fear, there is anger, but there is also a lo of love thanks to having precious community that allows me to go through this cycle of emotions.
I bid you adieu this week with Minnie Driver’s fabulous curls and jawline in mind!