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Posts tagged with “angry”

5 Tips to Help You Stop Being a People Pleaser

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“One of the most freeing things we learn in life is that we don’t have to like everyone, everyone doesn’t have to like us, and it’s perfectly okay.” ~Unknown

I have a confession to make: I am a recovering people pleaser.

If I had a dollar for every time I did something that I didn’t want to do because I didn’t want people to be angry or disappointed if I said no, I would be a rich woman.

I say that I am recovering because, as with any ingrained pattern, sometimes I slip back into the tendency to put other …

How to Let Go of the Pain of Anger and Blame

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“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” ~Nelson Mandela

Has anger ever filled you up so completely that you felt you’d explode?

Two months after I had a baby I suddenly found myself inextricably angry. Yes, I felt the joy and happy stuff that everyone tells you about.

But having a daughter also triggered a flash flood of buried anger, blame, and resentment. And it was all directed to one person—my mother.

A therapist told me once that my mother had “verbally abused” me. That launched a fifteen-year process of rehashing and blaming my …

Letting Go of Anger: Forgiveness Is a Choice and a Process

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“Forgiving someone doesn’t mean condoning their behavior. It doesn’t mean forgetting how they hurt you or giving that person room to hurt you again. Forgiving someone means making peace with what happened. It means acknowledging your wound, giving yourself permission to feel the pain, and recognizing why that pain no longer serves you. It means letting go of the hurt and resentment so that you can heal and move on. ~Daniell Koepke

My father leaned back in his overstuffed recliner, eating the double-chocolate raspberry gelato I had just bought for him as he stared entranced at the television.

His feeble …

40 Ways to Let Go of Anger Right Now

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“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.” ~Buddha

Anger is merciless.

It leaves you feeling torn up inside.

Your head pounds. Your jaw locks. And your muscles scream. Every inch reels in pain with the electric shock that shoots through you.

You can’t eat, or sleep, or function like a rational human being.

You’ve good reason to be afraid of unleashing that screaming monster of rage lurking inside you. You’ll likely lose control, lash out, and retaliate.

Even though you have been wronged, you’ll end up feeling guilty, ashamed, even horrified by …

How To Stop Being A Slave To Your Emotions

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“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Would you describe yourself as emotional?

Do you feel like your mood can change instantly according to what happens in your day?

Then you may be a slave to your emotions.

Being an emotional person and leading with the heart can both be great qualities. Leaning into our feelings allows us to be more self-aware and helps connect us to others. But if we allow our emotions to dictate how we live our lives, …

Dealing with Anger Storms Without Causing Destruction

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“Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

There is an elderly lady—I’ll call her Ms. A—living in my mum’s village. She regularly shouts at people as they pass by her house walking their dogs.

She can be quite intimidating really. She even followed my mother up the road on one occasion, much to Mum’s alarm. My mum, unlike me, now avoids walking past her house, even though it’s a good route for her to take when walking her dog.

Ms. …

How To Respond When Someone Takes Advantage of You

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“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” ~Maya Angelou

Several months ago, I moved into a new house. During the inspection of my old house, I was expecting to receive my whole security deposit back.

I didn’t. The landlady took advantage of the situation and withheld part of my deposit.

She charged me the price of cleaning the whole house even though I was only renting a room in the house. And she charged for me something that was already damaged when I moved in, falsely …

Pacing Yourself When You Want the Pain to Stop

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“The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.” ~Eckhart Tolle

I was in pain.

My legs hurt, I felt nauseated, my heart thumped hard and fast, and I labored for every breath.

I was halfway up a steep, three-mile hill, and I was so exhausted I could barely keep my bike upright.

My mind tried desperately to solve this problem: “Should I stop? I should stop. No! I’ve done this hill in the past without stopping—what’s the problem this time? I hate this! Why is this so painful?”

I glanced over at my …

How to Use Your Anger to Help Yourself

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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.” ~Carl Jung

I’ve experienced many degrees of anger throughout my life.

There’s the fleeting and mild kind of anger that hit me when I realized I forgot to pack my toothbrush, or when a friend was tardy again for our morning hike.

Then, there’s the corroding and strong kind of anger that I felt when I discovered that my husband had been lying to me for months.

Half-truths about his after-work activities and the people he met during those activities led to an affair, and …

5 Simple Ways to Quickly Resolve Conflict with Your Partner

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“Don’t make a permanent decision for your temporary emotion.” ~Unknown

You have a small disagreement with your partner, and before you know it, it escalates into a big fight. Sound familiar?

You then get dreadfully grumpy. You stick your head in the ground like an ostrich and ignore your partner. You think that you have the right to be grumpy or even angry.

You’re in “war” mode now, and you want to win the battle. You dig a trench, jump into it, and arm yourself with weapons.

You barely listen to a word your partner says, and all you want …

When Someone Blames You: How to Cope with Misdirected Anger

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“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.” ~Robert Brault

My ex-boyfriend is angry with me.

I met him soon after he had broken up with his then fiancée, and he thought he was ready to move on, but wasn’t. After many months of messing me about, we ended it. I cut off contact because it still hurt me and I still cared for him.

Eventually, I wrote to him to see if I could get some closure and to consider if we could salvage a friendship. His reply was scathing, vitriolic, angry. He blamed …

How Forgiveness Enables Us to Stop Hurting Ourselves

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“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and realize that prisoner was you.” ~Lewis B. Smedes

I was planning a seminar event with one of my good friends. (Let’s call her “Randi.”) It was a great match; she had event planning and design expertise, and great energy in front of an audience. I understood the structure of such an event, and I authored much of the content.

It was a powerful presentation and we were going to be a great team bringing the material to life. We spent months putting the seminar together: rehearsing, setting the date, booking the …

For Every Minute You Are Angry

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How to Keep Our Thoughts from Making Us Miserable

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“Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” ~William Shakespeare

I thought I knew what happiness was. I experienced it, and did so for a while—that is, what I thought was happiness.

What I was calling happiness was merely an emotion. Emotions, feelings that arise in the body, come into existence when we have thoughts related to them.

When I have certain thoughts having to do with anger, then I will feel, actually physically feel, angry. When I have thoughts that are positive, then I will feel the feeling, or emotion, that we call happiness.

In …

Release Your Anger by Choosing to Lose

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“Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.” ~Alice Miller

I was quietly watching a documentary with my wife when the phone rang. An icy voice informed me that I was supposed to be at work at 6:00; it was already 7:00 PM. It was my boss.

Great, that’s all I needed—an unexpected night shift with a resented supervisor.

In my worst mood, I jumped in my pants at quantum speed and then ran toward the train station on the other side of the street.

Although the road seemed clear, a car was approaching and the driver didn’t …

4 Steps to Process Your Emotions So They Don’t Zap Your Energy

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“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert

I felt zapped. Depleted. Drained. Out of gas. And I wasn’t sure why.

  • Enough sleep? Check.
  • Enough exercise? Check.
  • Enough nutritious food and vitamins? Check.
  • Health check-ups and tests up to date? Check and check.
  • Reasonable schedule? Check.

I thought I felt this way because I’d recently had surgery to remove a sizeable tumor.

But that had gone smoothly, and I was fully recovered and back to my regular schedule.

However, there was one thing that I noticed since the surgery: I …

Forgiving In a Situation That Feels Unjust

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“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.” ~Unknown

There I was: numb from a conclusion of a dismissal based on a finding that there was “no reasonable prospect of success.”

Harassed, bullied, victimized, stalked both in-person and online, the Human Rights Tribunal tossed me into another discarded pile of victims to be ignored by the courts because a group of goons were cleaver enough to hide the body of proof.

My assailants comprised of four individuals. One was a divorced teacher …

5 Steps to Learn from Anger

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“Don’t wait for your feelings to change to take the action. Take the action and your feelings will change.” ~Barbara Baron

How do you feel about anger? Growing up, I always felt that anger was “bad.” In school and at home I learned that anger made people do “bad” things, and anger was a source of “evil” in the world.

I didn’t want any part of that! So, when things happened that made me angry (for example, getting bullied at school), I’d ignore the feelings of anger until they “went away.” I’d go home and cry, feeling these emotions …

Forgiving the Unforgivable and Ending Your Own Suffering

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“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” ~Malachy McCourtro

I was completely unprepared for the emotional hailstorm that bombarded me when, back in 2001, I learned that my wife had been having an affair with my best friend of twenty-plus years.

My normal, predictable life (which I absolutely loved, by the way) had been virtually shattered overnight. Not only did it culminate in a very bitter war (see: divorce), it also marked the onset of a toxic poison that had begun to work its way into my veins: resentment.

It began with …

How My Anger Led Me to Forgiveness and Peace

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“Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.” ~Alice Duer Miller

As an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, I had become accustomed to keeping secrets. Silence, I was taught, was a good thing. It protected people that I loved.

So for over a decade, I carried the dark and overbearing weight of my past in secrecy and in silence, believing I was the only one in the world who’d ever experienced such abuse—until I learned from a college workshop that one in four women and one in five men fall …