Your journal prompts this week:
How does lingering anger reappear or come back up for me, and how do I respond?
How does holding onto this anger serve me?
In what ways does holding onto this anger not serve me?
If I could pinpoint exactly what I am truly angry about in these situations, what would it be?
What steps can I take to begin to feel and release this anger in a way that serves my highest or most authentic self?
Confession: I can be quick to anger. I blame my Aries moon. My initial reaction, most often in private, can be quite fiery. Sometimes this presents itself publicly, but a calmer state of mind usually prevails in front of others. Usually.
But even when the calmer state is presented publicly, my anger can still linger underneath the surface, ready to pounce when something reminds me of whatever injustice I believe I experienced. I say "believe" because I can recognize that there are always multiple sides to a story.
Often we never fully know the other side of the story because when we're angry at someone, angry at each other, we aren't willing to be open and share our deeper feelings hiding behind the anger. We often just want to stay angry to prove that an injustice occurred.
I think this is true for a lot people in my age group, but I grew up in a house where emotions weren't always well expressed or managed. Anger over ultimately minor, non-life threatening things, was often held onto. We were taught that the best thing to do when someone wronged us was to cut them off, shut them out for good, and if any type of outside authority was involved, get even by snitching on them. Or, alternatively, the other option I was taught was to completely squash the emotion and pretend like it wasn't even there and act like everything was normal, just to get by.
Both are rather extreme ends of the spectrum, and due to the traumatic experiences the adults around me had as children themselves, this was most definitely a survival tactic.
They lived their lives in survival mode, so we learned to live that way too, even when the threats were ultimately minor, even when matters could have been more easily resolved with some time and perspective.
I can think of two big examples in my life of people who "screwed me over," where it was very clear that all parties involved (including myself) had little perspective or control over their emotions in the matter. And yes, some anger, years later, still lingers.
The first is one I've written and spoken about before, in an essay about how the word "team" triggers me. As you might guess, I was part of a team, an unpaid intern at a startup. At the time, it was just myself and the founder running this website, which was essentially a blog. I wrote a lot of original content for it.
I stuck with it because I genuinely liked it, and the founder promised a paid position. After months of working without pay, she sent me a contract that started out paying me very little, much less than we had discussed. This was less than ideal but not a deal breaker. It was some of the other language in the contract that bothered me. I had to sign away the rights to any original writing or blogging I did for her. I felt offended by this because she so often referred to me as being like her co-founder, but this contract made it clear where I stood. When I questioned the contract, she said she needed someone truly committed to her business, and it sounded like I might not be. It made me realize that I was putting in a ton of free time and work and hope into something that wasn't really mine at all and would not ever be. And was that something I wanted?
When I quit, it was messy. It was not too long after the holidays, and I had even watched her cat for her over the holidays while she out of town. She gave me three gift cards as a thank you for that, and for my work. The largest one of them was for $500 to the Apple store. I was thankful I had at least been given this gift for my time. Well, I was until I tried to use the gift card a few months later, when I found out she had called Apple and claimed the card was stolen so that it could be reissued directly to her.
Our relationship certainly could have ended on better terms, and I do own that, but to take away that money, that gift, felt like a slap in the face at all the hard work I'd done.
I debated taking her to small claims court, but my dad assured me it wasn't worth it. Did I really want money from a person who behaved like this? Did I really want to interact with her again for $500? I realized no, I did not.
And not surprisingly, the other situation I still have anger over also involves money. It is a past landlord who kept our full deposit. When my husband and I moved to San Diego, we rented an apartment from a guy on Craigslist, which probably should have been an indicator that things would go wrong. There were some ultimately minor issues with the place, but the real trouble started when he decided he wanted to sell the place just a couple months into our lease.
My father had passed away just three months before this move, and both my husband and I were adjusting to working from home together in a one bedroom apartment. Naturally, our space was quite cluttered. The landlord pressured us to take showings when it was convenient for him and to keep the place how he wanted it to look, which was near impossible with two people sharing such a small space and working from home. And to be honest, I just didn't have the mental or emotional capacity with all that had recently happened in my life to spend hours making the place look like no one actually lived in it.
We eventually agreed to part ways before the lease ended, and while he told us he would give the deposit back, he ended up keeping it and sicking his daddy lawyer on us to threaten lawsuits if we tried to take him to small claims for the money. There was some ludicrous language in the letter they sent us, claiming we were disgusting slobs or something similar to that, and that we purposely sabotaged the sale of his unit, so they should get to keep the money.
In lieu of my dad, since he was no longer with us, this time I did talk to a lawyer. Much like my dad, he said it just wasn't worth it for the amount of money it was. The underlying message: sometimes people just suck.
I'd love to say that this was the end of it for both stories, but unfortunately they continued with me because of the anger that lingered. I spent hours wondering if I really was disloyal, if I really was a disgusting slob. But years of good working relationships and landlord relationships later, I know this not to be true. But it still gets me sometimes, and sometimes I think that's what I'm really angry about: how they've made me question myself. But this is ultimately something I can control.
Even when we feel like it is illogical to hold onto something, to fight some small injustice we believe has occurred, we struggle to loosen our grip. A common phrase best describes why, and that is, "It's the principle of the matter." We think people shouldn't be allowed to behave this way, and therefore should be taught a lesson.
But this hanging on to "the principle of the matter" is likely what drove the people who wronged us to behave the way they did in the first place. And so I remind myself, do I want to be that way too? Do I want to hang on to that energy for the rest of my life, creating unnecessary conflict wherever I go?
Releasing my own anger is truly a lifetime practice because the conditioning that causes me to hold onto this anger runs deep. And it runs deep in so many of us, which I think is why we continue to hurt one another, even unintentionally, even over ultimately inconsequential or minor things.
I wish petty things like this wouldn't happen to any of us, that we could all rise above it, but these are little opportunities to learn to let go—to let go of the outcome we thought we wanted, to let go of the anger, to let go of the conditioning around how we handle and express our anger, and to let go of our individual need to always be "right."
They say every person is going through a struggle you know nothing about. And while the phrase is overused, it is true. I was struggling in ways both of these people didn't fully understand and were unaware of, and so I'm sure they had their own struggles that they had no interest in sharing with me.
It is important to remember that everyone is human. We all have our moments, and these less than perfect interactions and moments we have with one another do not have to define us forever.
I am not disloyal, I am not a slob, but in those moments, this was very much true to someone else. They had boiled me down to the simplest definition that suited them. And you know what, I did the same to them.
The real solution is not to get even or to try to prove anything. It is to learn to manage the anger. It is to do better, one interaction at a time.
I encourage you to explore how you hold onto anger and why with the journal prompts above.
As always, if you want me to pull an Oracle or Tarot card for you this week for some guidance, you can also let me know in the comments below.
With much love and gratitude,
Marcy
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