Understanding Anger

I recently experienced anger again and so many questions arose. Why was I angry? What caused this anger? Was my anger justified? Did I perform the right action? Was it worth being angry? I wanted to look closely at this experience and determined where this anger came from.

The background and specific circumstances to the incident are irrelevant. We have all been angry at someone and most of these situations arise because "he did something so wrong that he needs to be put back into his place". A typical response to anger is to march over there, raise your voice, point out his errors, and fix the situation. How many times does this solution work? Will the person ever look back and say "You're correct, I'll do what you think is right."? As soon as he opened his mouth to respond in a cool, calm manner, I realized that I lost control and I my actions were wrong.

Before my anger arose in me, I was sitting there feeling no animosity towards the situation. Then in a blink of an eye, I lost all control. If I did not have control, who gained control over me? The unconscious mind. Understanding the mind takes much insight and perspective into one's life. The unconscious mind decides what music you enjoy, comes up with that awesome gift for your girlfriend, and is the driving force behind spontaneous living room dance parties. It has many other great processing functions associated with it as well. The other side is the conscious mind which has a global perspective on situations and is highly logical. It slowly analyzes situations and is primarily used when making big decisions, such as should I take a new job offer. Both parts of the mind are very important to being successful and have their own strengths and weaknesses. I will go into more details on these differences in subsequent blogs.

While listening to the situation unfold, my conscious mind was analyzing the facts of what he did and gaining the global perspective by looking through his eyes at the situation. While it was in control, it realized that his actions were legitimate and he did not do anything wrong. The unconscious mind was looking at these facts and valuing them and rapidly coming to its own conclusion. Then I heard a new piece of information and the unconscious mind processed this information to be the worst possible thing to occur. The conscious mind also agreed that this was not good and gave full control to the unconscious mind to do what it wanted, which was to be angry. The unconscious mind had tunnel vision and disregarded all the information I collected. It did not care what anyone else said. It was ready to do anything needed to solve the problem.

If one reaches this point, there is little one can do. One should try to avoid giving full control to the unconscious mind because it lacks that global perspective. It does what it wants with little regard of others or what is best for you! One can sometimes anticipate the unconscious takeover by seeing that the mind is processing things extremely rapidly. At this point, if you focus on your breathing and clear out your mind, you may avoid a bad situation.

If my conscious mind was in control, there would have been a different outcome. I would have went in there and approached him with empathy. We could have both resolved the situation and came up with an amicable solution.