By Charles Barnard
What parent hasn’t struggled trying to be slow to anger when dealing with their child who has entered either the terrible twos or theocratic threes? Being a parent provides numerous trials and tribulations and without a mindset of love parenting can become very toxic for you and your child. If you truly want to become more loving, how do you control anger especially when you have to deal with difficult, unreasonable, or in other ways infuriating people?
Emotions are an incredible biological function. Emotions have a purpose. All emotions are not always rational. Anger is no exception. You can become angry at legitimate rightful injustices. It is a rational and loving response to become angry when you see or learn about an injustice done to someone. In that context anger is not necessarily negative. Emotions such as anger become negative when we hold onto them and do not properly deal with the emotion. Anger can also be a negative when it is irrational or if it is self-seeking, which is often the case. When we are angry because someone said something we perceived as a personal attack, that anger could be irrational because we may be so self-centered in that moment we miss interpreted the communication. We are seeing this more in more in the world of politics and in the cancel culture that seems to becoming more prevalent.
Two powerful tools for gaining control of your anger in the moment, or learning to become slow to anger are learning your anger strategy or program and learning to change your physiology in the moment. The latter is the most immediate and powerful. Changing your physiology will change your state. Your breath is the quickest, surest way to take charge of your physiology followed by changing your body posture and or muscle tension.
We have all probably done it unconsciously – sighed deeply – to change our present state. Whether we have done that to control our nerves before some event we were anxious about or to calm us down when we were feeling anger bubble up, most of us have experienced the power of breathing to change our state. The key is recognizing immediately when anger is triggered and instead of reacting to the anger you control your emotional state with one or more deep breaths and slow exhales – a couple of big sighs. Once you have controlled the initial anger you can rationally try to get clarity, reinterpret, and think about the how best to respond. Breathing interrupts the anger pattern and allows you to contemplate response options. Beyond the breath, you can also relax your body. With the deep breath, you may want to open up your hands, stretch your arms down by your side, lift your head, and relax your shoulders. When anger hits we often curl our hands (make a fist even), bend our arms, and get tense in the shoulders. Reversing that with the breath will dissipate the anger.
The best way to train yourself to do that is through visualization and role playing. You can simply think of situations that typically make you angry and as you visualize make the imagery and sounds as real as possible. You will inevitably begin to feel the anger. The moment you do, sigh, relax your body, and begin to think of possible responses to that given situation. The more you do this the more you will be prepared for a future situation where you will be slow to anger. Again, the trait is being slow to anger, it is not, not becoming angry. We should be angry at some situations, but we should be handling that anger in a manner that is appropriate for the situation. I am not arguing that we should not react to anger; we just need to be in control of it and let it happen slowly or let it go if that is the most appropriate response. Remember, Jesus became angry and turned the tables of the money changers in the Jewish temple.
The other tool that can be very useful is knowing your anger program. What are the steps that lead to an anger outburst. The first part of the step is the trigger. What are the different things that cause you to become angry? After the trigger occurs, what do you do next? Do you say something to yourself? Do you visualize something happening? Do you hear someone else say something? What comes next in the process. You keep repeating that line of questioning until you get to your anger reaction. Now, if you have what is known as a synesthesia pattern where you have the trigger and you immediately go to the outburst you will really need to work on interrupting that pattering through visual rehearsal, breath and body work. It is quite possible you may need to see someone to help you deal with that depending on how explosive your response can be. Generally speaking, the more steps in your process the slower you are to become angry, which is the desired outcome in most situations.
As with any of the other parts to our mindset training, it can be very, very challenging to do this on your own. In fact, statistics will tell me that upwards of over 90% of you will not do this on your own. Those numbers may be even higher for teens which is why they rely so heavily on parents to help them get the training and hold them accountable. I encourage you to first check out our Growth Mindset Training Academy site and then consider as a first step our breakthrough training, which often is a game changer for people all by itself.