Anger and frustration

Believe it or not your anger and frustration are a perfect gateway to your inner experience and the inner-led change and cultural transformation our current crises demand.

Learning how to channel our anger and frustration rather than directing, dumping or projecting it onto someone else or ourselves, is the key to unleashing our passion for change. For within our anger lies the key to discovering what we are passionate about - and to harnessing the power and creativity to bring about that change.

Very few people have a healthy generative relationship with anger. We tend to fall into one of two camps - repress it and get burnt out, ill or depressed, or spew it out all over the place and hurt others. And whichever camp we find ourselves in it tends to damage if not break our relationships, and certainly prevents any real intimacy.

When we learn to relate with our anger and frustration in healthy ways we find ourselves more able to be authentic within our relationships - which is the key to intimacy and longevity.

A lack of role models

One of the main reasons that so few of us are in healthy relationship with our anger and frustration is that very few of us have people in our lives who role model a healthy relationship with anger. How many people do you know who are in conscious healthy relationship with their anger?

This is because as children very few of us had parents, caretakers or teachers who were able to support us to relate with our anger and frustration in healthy ways that felt safe and generative. We therefore developed an impressive array of 'survival strategies' to avoid feeling and expressing our anger.

This repression of our anger and frustration means that it becomes stuck and undigested in what we call our 'pain body - the place where all our undigested emotions get stored. What then happens is that every time something happens to evoke our anger or frustration, rather than us responding to the thing that is happening in that moment, our pain body gets activated and all the pent up anger and other emotions that are stored there get activated and unleashed - either on ourselves in the form of mental or physical illness, or on others.

Cultivating compassion and holding healthy boundaries

It is vital to cultivate both compassion and healty boundaries around all this rather than criticise ourselves and others for it. It is this compassion and the love that it unleashes, that holds the keys to healing and transforming trauma that underpins our lack of capacity to relate healthily with our anger, and all our emotions.

If you want to cultivate a healthier relationship with your anger and frustration - and to unleash the passion for change within it, we highly recommend you check out our sections on transforming trauma.