Constructive Anger Quotes

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Anger is just anger. It isn't good. It isn't bad. It just is. What you do with it is what matters. It's like anything else. You can use it to build or to destroy. You just have to make the choice." Constructive anger," the demon said, her voice dripping sarcasm. Also known as passion," I said quietly. "Passion has overthrown tyrants and freed prisoners and slaves. Passion has brought justice where there was savagery. Passion has created freedom where there was nothing but fear. Passion has helped souls rise from the ashes of their horrible lives and build something better, stronger, more beautiful.
Jim Butcher (White Night (The Dresden Files, #9))
Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes a part of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. Out goes naivete, in comes wisdom; out goes anger, in comes discernment; out goes despair, in comes kindness. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive and expansive... The pain leaves you healthier than it found you.
Martha N. Beck
You don’t need to control emotion,” he said. “Emotions are natural, like passing weather. Sometimes it’s fear, sometimes sorrow or anger. Emotions are not the problem. The key is to transform the energy of emotion into constructive action.
Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives)
One of the things I learned in my maddest years was that one could be in a room, with walls and barred windows and locks on the doors, surrounded by other crazy people, or even stuffed into an isolation cell all alone, but that really wasn't the room one was in at all. The real room that one occupied was constructed by memory, by relationships, by events, by all sorts of unseen forces. Sometimes delusions. Sometimes hallucinations. Sometimes desires. Sometimes dreams and hopes, or ambitions. Sometimes anger. That was what was important: to always recognize where the real walls were. (176)
John Katzenbach (The Madman's Tale)
human anger is designed by God to motivate us to take constructive action in the face of wrongdoing or when facing injustice.
Gary Chapman (Anger: Taming a Powerful Emotion)
A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled. There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come. I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it. Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel.” I said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?” She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, “No, I don't want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?” She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less.” This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment. I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing the light of consciousness to it.
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
Whenever any kind of deep loss occurs in your life — such as loss of possessions, your home, a close relationship; or loss of your reputation, job, or physical abilities — something inside you dies. You feel diminished in your sense of who you are. There may also be a certain disorientation. “Without this...who am I?” When a form that you had unconsciously identified with as part of yourself leaves you or dissolves, that can be extremely painful. It leaves a hole, so to speak, in the fabric of your existence. When this happens, don't deny or ignore the pain or the sadness that you feel. Accept that it is there. Beware of your mind's tendency to construct a story around that loss in which you are assigned the role of victim. Fear, anger, resentment, or self-pity are the emotions that go with that role. Then become aware of what lies behind those emotions as well as behind the mind-made story: that hole, that empty space. Can you face and accept that strange sense of emptiness? If you do, you may find that it is no longer a fearful place. You may be surprised to find peace emanating from it. Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form. That is why the most sacred thing in life is death. That is why the peace of God can come to you through the contemplation and acceptance of death.
Eckhart Tolle (Stillness Speaks)
The constructive way to handle anger is to limit our expression of it, and when we calm down, to use it diagnostically: what is so wrong in our life that we feel furious, and what do we need to do to change the situation?
Laura Markham (Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting (The Peaceful Parent Series))
To Have Without Holding: Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch, to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can't do it, you say it's killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.
Marge Piercy
You must learn to express your anger appropriately and constructively. Instead of continuing to let your anger control you, you must learn to use your anger to improve the relationships in your life.
Jeffrey E. Young (Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthough Program to End Negative Behavior...and Feel Great Again)
Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
The core issue is that, no matter where you may live in the world, dominant norms of masculinity are actively constructed out of women's vulnerabilities.
Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
Is constructive criticism really constructive? Not really. You can't make a child better by pointing out what you think is wrong with him or her. Criticism either crushes spirit or elicits defensiveness. Constructive criticism is an interesting combination of words. "Construct" means "to build." "Criticism" means "to tear down" It creates defiance and anger as well.
H. Norman Wright
This is the map we wish to construct in our heads: a reliable guide that allows us to avoid those who are not worthy of our time and trust and to embrace those who are. The best indications that our always-tentative maps are faulty include feelings of sadness, anger, betrayal, surprise, and disorientation.
Gordon Livingston (Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now)
Because women tend to turn their anger inward and blame themselves, they tend to become depressed and their self-esteem is lowered. This, in turn, causes them to become more dependent and less willing to risk rejection or abandonment if they were to stand up for themselves by asserting their will, their opinions, or their needs. Men often defend themselves against hurt by putting up a wall of nonchalant indifference. This appearance of independence often adds to a woman's fear of rejection, causing her to want to reach out to achieve comfort and reconciliation. Giving in, taking the blame, and losing herself more in the relationship seem to be a small price to pay for the acceptance and love of her partner. As you can see, both extremes anger in and anger out-create potential problems. While neither sex is wrong in the way they deal with their anger, each could benefit from observing how the other sex copes with their anger. Most men, especially abusive ones, could benefit from learning to contain their anger more instead of automatically striking back, and could use the rather female ability to empathise with others and seek diplomatic resolutions to problems. Many women, on the other hand, could benefit from acknowledging their anger and giving themselves permission to act it out in constructive ways instead of automatically talking themselves out of it, blaming themselves, or allowing a man to blame them. Instead of giving in to keep the peace, it would be far healthier for most women to stand up for their needs, their opinions, and their beliefs.
Beverly Engel (The Emotionally Abusive Relationship: How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing)
Abelman’s Dry Goods Kansas City, Missouri U.S.A. Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.: We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned. “Why? Why?” You are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview. The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter-length trousers a byword of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.) We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders. Yours in anger, Gus Levy, Pres.
John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
Anger can be used for destruction and construction, It will be your decision that how you will use it.
Jignesh Ahir (Rudra - Ek Nava Yug Ni Sharuaat)
I am convinced that even violent temperaments can be channeled through nonviolent discipline, if they can act constructively and express through an effective channel their very legitimate anger.
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray. The woman who grows furious every time a politician breaks an election promise reveals a precariously utopian belief that elections do not involve deceit. The news shouldn’t eliminate angry responses; but it should help us to be angry for the right reasons, to the right degree, for the right length of time – and as part of a constructive project. And whenever this isn’t possible, then the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons.
Alain de Botton (News)
Some Survivors think that getting angry is inappropriate and a sign that a person is out of control. Others are afraid of anger, that of others, as well as their own. They are afraid that if they get angry, they will be rejected or abandoned, afraid they will lose control and hurt someone. But, allowing yourself to get angry and express your anger in constructive ways is one of the most healthy and empowering things you can do.
Beverly Engel (The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- And Start Standing Up for Yourself)
At this time we should take a brife moment to mention quacks: alternative therapists who sell vitamins and homeopathy sugar pills [the latter of which, by definition, contain no active ingredients], which perform no better than placebo in fair tests, and who use even cruder marketing tricks than the ones described in this book. In these people profit at all from the justified anger that people feel towards the pharmaceutical industry, then it comes at the expense of genuinely constructive activity. Selling ineffective sugar pills is not a meaningful policy response to the regulatory failure we have seen in this book
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
It would be much more constructive if people tried to understand their supposed enemies. Learning to forgive is much more useful than merely picking up a stone and throwing it at the object of one’s anger, the more so when the provocation is extreme. For it is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others
Dalai Lama XIV
I am coming through the barriers you have erected in this mind. I am coming, though the way be ardous and strange. Nothing will stop me. As I travel, I admire the craftsmanship in the construction of this maze, admire the traps and pitfalls they have wrought. You have learned well, my servants. To force the child to construct these barriers insides its mind, in its effort to escape the physical world; to build an island of dream alone and untouched by the true Dreaming... This takes skill. My admiration does not lessen my anger. I am dream. I am coming.
Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House)
To have without holding Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch ; to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can’t do it, you say it’s killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.
Marge Piercy (The Moon Is Always Female: Poems)
For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.
Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)
You may wonder why all children don’t make up wonderfully positive role-selves—why so many people are acting out roles of failure, anger, mental disturbance, emotional volatility, or other forms of misery. One answer is that not every child has the inner resources to be successful and self-controlled in interactions with others. Some children’s genetics and neurology propel them into impulsive reactivity instead of constructive action. Another reason negative role-selves arise is that it’s common for emotionally immature parents to subconsciously use different children in the family to express unresolved aspects of their own role-self and healing fantasies. For instance, one child may be idealized and indulged as the perfect child, while another is tagged as incompetent, always screwing up and needing help.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
I thought more about anger, about the art piece I would create. A more fitting tribute: a piece called Construction; each victim is given a nail for every day she has lived with what happened to her. There’s a haphazard pile of wood in the center of campus. Victims can come as they please, hammering nails into the wood. All day people hear the banging, all the drilling and incessant interruption. This is a lot of what surviving is like, trying to carry on and get work done, while your past pounds into you, distracts you, makes it impossible. At the end there’d be an immense wooden structure, randomly nailed together, large, useless, pointy, and dangerous in the middle of everything, people forced to walk around it, interrupting the pretty view of the trees. This is also what assault feels like, what to do with this, where to put it, what is it.
Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir)
Was he angry about what happened? Of course. He was furious. But understanding that anger was not constructive, he refused to rage. He refused to break or grovel or despair.
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
Taking part in your own creation is as simple as changing your mind. The way you think literally creates your everyday reality. Obsessive and negative thinking fosters a negative or even hostile lifestyle. Positive and constructive thoughts create happiness and contentment in the same manor. The fortunate thing for us is that the frequency wave of a positive thought far exceeds that of a negative one, so even if we suffer through a bout of depression or anger, a few positive thoughts can easily reverse the damage we have created in ourselves
Gary Hopkins
It isn’t really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn’t want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society—more important, even, than honest or decent—is identifiable. Even when Libby’s evil—perhaps most of all when she’s evil—she’s easy to categorize, to stick to a board with a pin like some scientific specimen. Those men in Stillwater are terrified of her because being terrified lets them know who she is—it keeps them safe. Imagine how much harder it would be to say, yes, she’s a woman capable of terrible anger and violence, but she’s also someone who’s tried desperately to be a nurturer, to be a good and constructive human being. If you accept all that, if you allow that inside she’s not just one or the other, but both, what does that say about all the other women in town? How will you ever be able to tell what’s actually going on in their hearts—and heads? Life in the simple village would suddenly become immensely complicated. And so, to keep that from happening, they separate things. The normal, ordinary woman is defined as nurturing and loving, docile and compliant. Any female who defies that categorization must be so completely evil that she’s got to be feared, feared even more than the average criminal—she’s got to be invested with the powers of the Devil himself. A witch, they probably would have called her in the old days. Because she’s not just breaking the law, she’s defying the order of things.
Caleb Carr (The Angel of Darkness (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, #2))
Anger makes me uncomfortable. I avoid it. I suppress it. Most often my reaction to any form of anger is that I want it to stop. Perhaps because I didn’t learn how to express anger constructively as a child, only that it was undesirable. My literal Aspie brain didn’t perceive the difference between “expressing anger in destructive ways is bad” and “expressing anger is bad.
Cynthia Kim (Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life)
Studies show that people who are prone to guilt are more forgiving. They handle anger more constructively, experience more empathy and have a greater ability to see others’ perspectives. Those prone to shame, on the other hand, are more likely to hold grudges and are less likely to forgive when they feel wronged. Shame is also associated with feelings of anger and aggression and the tendency to blame others.
Amanda Enayati (Seeking Serenity: The 10 New Rules for Health and Happiness in the Age of Anxiety)
Anger is intimately involved with both military prowess and loyalty: it provides the kind of psychic energy necessary to perform brutal acts, and so is bound up with success on the battlefield. But it also involves a socially constructed notion of worth, which is a focus for honour. When Plato argues in Republic Book IV that the characteristic emotion of an honour-lover is anger (thumos), he is recognising how central to the world of honour anger really is.
C.D.C. Reeve
Anger is both a destructor and a catalyst for progress. When directed at someone, it consumes you; but when directed at an issue, it is constructive energy. It then transforms as fuel that drives change – at a personal level and in your circle of influence.
AVIS Viswanathan
When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing. There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness. The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements. With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the number seven deputy director in her department, of which she had been the director before the Cultural Revolution. But she did not mind. To me in my impatient mood, things seemed to go on as before. In January 1977, my university course came to an end. We were given neither examinations nor degrees. Although Mao and the Gang of Four were gone, Mao's rule that we had to return to where we had come from still applied. For me, this meant the machinery factory. The idea that a university education should make a difference to one's job had been condemned by Mao as 'training spiritual aristocrats.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again. Because anger at having been wronged—the rage, the fury, the desire to lash out and cut back—doesn’t just vanish because you say to someone, “I forgive you.” Rather, forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.
Elizabeth Bear (Ancestral Night (White Space, #1))
We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again. Because the anger at having been wronged... doesn't vanish because you say to someone, "I forgive you." Rather forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again. But anger can also make you sick, if you're exposed to it for too long.... The anger itself can be your reason for living, and feeding it can be your only goal....
Elizabeth Bear (Ancestral Night (White Space, #1))
Guilt plays a pro-social function in strengthening relationships; it encourages taking responsibility, motivates amendatory behaviors such as apology or confession, leads to higher quality solutions to crises and is associated with more constructive anger management … Guilt is also associated with positive empathy and the ability to acknowledge and understand others’ points of view. In contrast shame is associated with responses that are injurious to social relationships… Shame, too, seems to be a driving force in traumatized behavior. Negotiation feels like a defeat, a reminder of the earlier violation. Giving in, adjusting, and changing feel life-threatening. Difference, as to the Supremacist, becomes a threat.
Sarah Schulman (Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair)
I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There’s no evidence for the belief that “letting off steam” is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.
Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project (Revised Edition): Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun)
Anger is a completely natural emotion. It’s a strong signal that our needs aren’t being met. Evolutionarily it protects us when we perceive a threat in our environment. The destructive effects of anger come from how we handle it, not from the anger itself. When we can differentiate the stories of blame from our unmet needs, we can express ourselves more constructively. Feeling “manipulated” or “betrayed” indicates that your emotions are colored by an interpretation about the other person’s intentions. To honor the intensity of your experience without getting entangled in the blame game, see those words as information that points back to your feelings and needs. Investigate what’s in your heart. When you tell yourself, “I’m being manipulated,” how do you feel on the inside? What do you need? Once this is clear, work on conveying the depth of your feelings without blame. Express the rawness of your emotions and connect them to what matters to you. If you can’t find other words (and if you think the other person will understand), you could take responsibility for the blame by saying something such as, “I’m telling myself a story that you betrayed me.” This indicates your subjective interpretation while leaving space for the other person’s experience.
Oren Jay Sofer (Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication)
We can suppress our anger; or we can express it by sabotaging the efforts of those who caused it; or we can express it in an irrational tirade of bad words and insults; or we can express our anger rationally — or at least process it rationally. If we merely suppress an angry feeling, it will go down into our subconscious and wait for a chance to explode. And it will explode. It is better to do something constructive with it.
Thomas G. Morrow (Overcoming Sinful Anger)
Mercy is an entirely different way of reacting to offenses, to things we think are wrong. Think about this: mercy is not a non-reactive indifference—because it cares. And it’s the furthest thing from approval—because what’s happening is wrong. Mercy includes a component of forceful anger, but anger’s typical hostility, vindictiveness, and destructiveness does not dominate. True mercy proceeds hand in hand with true justice. It brings mercy to victims by bringing justice. While working hand in hand with justice, it offers mercy to violators. Mercy contains a combination of attitudes and actions that proceed in a constructive, instead of destructive, way. Mercy, including its component of constructive anger, is an amazing act of love. It’s how we love in the face of something wrong. I can know something is utterly wrong, yet I can act constructively.
David A. Powlison (Good and Angry: Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness)
As I released my anger more often and more consciously, the cycle of depression ended. I began to express the anger when my friend Betty and I got together and talked (she is good about letting me rant without interrupting). I pounded pillows. I poured the anger into my journals. I let it come. Yet anger needs not only to be recognized and allowed; like the grief, it eventually needs to be transformed into an energy that serves compassion. Maybe one reason I had avoided my anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. We can allow anger’s enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy. Anger can fuel our ability to challenge, to defy injustice. It can lead to creative projects, constructive behavior, acts that work toward inclusion. In such ways anger becomes a dynamism of love.
Sue Monk Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine)
People like Steve can learn to address anger constructively. For instance, requests can be made for appropriate treatment without the request turning into an opportunity to belittle or intimidate. Boundaries and stipulations can be established even as the offending person is treated with dignity. The experience of anger not only does not have to become a springboard for foul treatment, it can actually prompt someone to stand up for needs and convictions in a positive manner.
Les Carter (The Anger Trap: Free Yourself from the Frustrations that Sabotage Your Life)
Suffering is partial, shortsighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn't have a politics that expects different. Oppression is not a prep school. Demanding as the constructive approach may be, the deferential approach is far more so, and in a far more unfair way. As philosophy Agnes Callard rightly notes, trauma (and even the righteous, well-deserved anger that often accompanies it) can corrupt as readily as it can ennoble. Perhaps more so. When it comes down to it, the thing I believe most deeply about deference politics is that it asks something of trauma that it cannot give. It asks the traumatized to shoulder burdens alone that we ought to share collectively, lifting them up onto a pedestal in order to hide below them. When I think about my trauma, I don't think about life lessons. I think about the quiet nobility of survival. The very fact that those chapters weren't the final ones of my story is powerful enough all on its own. It is enough to ask of those experiences that I am still here to remember them.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else))
Devotees of these two spiritual paths of experience—oneness and goodness—have been at odds for centuries. Proponents of the oneness path have insisted that the goal of spirituality is to reconnect with everlasting eternity. They yearn to taste the quintessence of their being, to transcend time and space, to be unified with the one. In the other camp, advocates of the goodness path have traditionally seen stark choices in the world. They believe we should choose love, compassion, beauty, truth, and altruism over hatred, fear, anger, judgment, and other opposites of goodness. To them, there are constructive forces in the world that are being challenged by destructive ones. Their goal has been to stand their ground and choose to be good above all else. Even with those apparent differences, both paths have found homes within each of the world’s religions. As noted earlier, Hinduism offers the oneness path of Yoga, Judaism offers Kabbalah, Islam offers Sufism, Christianity offers Mysticism, and so on. Whatever the arrangement, the two paths have historically found ways to co-exist.
Gudjon Bergmann (Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations)
DID patients often feel very isolated/lonely, in the sense that they believe they are the only one in the universe who is “different” from others and that they do not understand themselves... DePrince et al found that alienation was the only cognitive appraisal variable to differentiate DID from PTSD. While the groups had similar appraisals of shame, betrayal, self-blame, anger, and fear, the DID participants had higher appraisal of themselves as experiencing alienation. This construct is associated with feeling alone, disconnected, and different.
Vedat Sar
I sat there on that Wednesday evening in my pokey fucking living room, looked at myself on the TV screen being a massive, odious cunt, and realised that nothing has really changed. Deep down, like most of us, still now at the age of thirty-eight, I have this empty, black hole inside of me that nothing and no one seems capable of filling. I say like most of us because, well, look around you. Our society, our businesses, our social constructs, habits, pastimes, addictions and distractions are predicated on vast, endemic levels of emptiness and dissatisfaction. I call it self-hatred. I hate who I was, am and have become and, as we are taught to, I constantly chastise myself for the things I do and say. And such are the global levels of intolerance, greed, entitlement and dysfunction it is evidently not just confined to a small, wounded section of society. We are all in a world of pain. If it was ever any different way back in the past, it has, by now, most certainly become normalised. And I am as angry about that as I am about my own past. There is an anger that runs underneath everything, that fuels my life and feeds the animal inside me. And it is an anger that always, always prevents me, despite my best efforts, from becoming a better version of myself. My goddamn head seems to have a life of its own, quite beyond my control, incapable of reason, compassion or bargaining. It shouts at me from deep inside. As a kid the words didn’t make sense. As an adult it’s waiting at the end of my bed and starts talking an hour or two before I wake up so that when my eyes open it is in full-on rage mode, blaring this shit at me about how glad it is I’m finally awake, how fucked I am today, how there won’t be enough time, I’ll fuck everything up, my friends are plotting against me, trust no one, I must try as hard as I can to salvage everything in my life while knowing it’s already a lost cause. I’m exhausted all the time. It’s a kind of toxic ME – corrosive, pervasive, penetrative, negative, all the bad -ives.
James Rhodes (Instrumental)
We often think that an “anger problem” must mean some major personal or interpersonal trouble. We think that the main sins to be solved are the violence, the tantrums, the arguing, the rancor, the deep-seated bitterness, the sour attitude. It’s true, these are serious business. If they remain unsolved, human life becomes a living hell. But in my experience, I’ve found that it’s often best to start with little problems. Disentangle your complaining. Come out to the clear, firm alternative. How on earth does a sour, negative attitude become a sweet, constructive spirit? Learn that and you’ve learned how to live well. You learn the secret of contentment (Philippians 4: 11–12).
David A. Powlison (Good and Angry: Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness)
Thought Control * Require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth * Adopt the group’s “map of reality” as reality * Instill black and white thinking * Decide between good versus evil * Organize people into us versus them (insiders versus outsiders) * Change a person’s name and identity * Use loaded language and clichés to constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts, and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzzwords * Encourage only “good and proper” thoughts * Use hypnotic techniques to alter mental states, undermine critical thinking, and even to age-regress the member to childhood states * Manipulate memories to create false ones * Teach thought stopping techniques that shut down reality testing by stopping negative thoughts and allowing only positive thoughts. These techniques include: * Denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking * Chanting * Meditating * Praying * Speaking in tongues * Singing or humming * Reject rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism * Forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy * Label alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful * Instill new “map of reality” Emotional Control * Manipulate and narrow the range of feelings—some emotions and/or needs are deemed as evil, wrong, or selfish * Teach emotion stopping techniques to block feelings of hopelessness, anger, or doubt * Make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault * Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness, such as: * Identity guilt * You are not living up to your potential * Your family is deficient * Your past is suspect * Your affiliations are unwise * Your thoughts, feelings, actions are irrelevant or selfish * Social guilt * Historical guilt * Instill fear, such as fear of: * Thinking independently * The outside world * Enemies * Losing one’s salvation * Leaving * Orchestrate emotional highs and lows through love bombing and by offering praise one moment, and then declaring a person is a horrible sinner * Ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins * Phobia indoctrination: inculcate irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority * No happiness or fulfillment possible outside the group * Terrible consequences if you leave: hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc. * Shun those who leave and inspire fear of being rejected by friends and family * Never a legitimate reason to leave; those who leave are weak, undisciplined, unspiritual, worldly, brainwashed by family or counselor, or seduced by money, sex, or rock and roll * Threaten harm to ex-member and family (threats of cutting off friends/family)
Steven Hassan
Now of the divine, he himself was the creator, but the creation of the mortal he committed to his offspring. And they, imitating him, received from him the immortal principle of the soul; and around this they proceeded to fashion a mortal body, and made it to be the vehicle of the soul and constructed within the body a soul of another nature which was mortal, subject to terrible and irresistible affections-first of all, pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil; then, pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two foolish counsellors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily led astray-these they mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring love according to necessary laws, and so framed man.
Plato (Plato: The Complete Works (31 Books) (Illustrated))
In many places, the past fifteen years have been a time of economic turmoil and widening disparities. Anger and resentment are high. And yet economic policies that might address these concerns seem nearly impossible to enact. Instead of the seeds of reform, we are given the yoke of misdirection. We are told to forget the sources of our discontent because something more important is at stake: the fate of our civilization. Yet what are these civilizations, these notions of Muslim-ness, Western-ness, European-ness, American-ness, that attempt to describe where, and with whom, we belong? They are illusions: arbitrarily drawn constructs with porous, brittle, and overlapping borders. To what civilization does a Syrian atheist belong? A Muslim soldier in the US army? A Chinese professor in Germany? A lesbian fashion designer in Nigeria? After how many decades of US citizenship does a Spanish-speaking Honduran-born couple, with two generations of American children and grandchildren descended from them, cease to belong to a Latin American civilization and take their place in an American one? Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization’s brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law. Civilizations encourage our hypocrisies to flourish. And by so doing, they undermine globalization’s only plausible promise: that we be free to invent ourselves. Why, exactly, can’t a Muslim be European? Why can’t an unreligious person be Pakistani? Why can’t a man be a woman? Why can’t someone who is gay be married? Mongrel. Miscegenator. Half-breed. Outcast. Deviant. Heretic. Our words for hybridity are so often epithets. They shouldn’t be. Hybridity need not be the problem. It could be the solution. Hybrids do more than embody mixtures between groups. Hybrids reveal the boundaries between groups to be false.
Mohsin Hamid (Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London)
Kids didn’t just disappear unless someone made them disappear.‘Relax, mate,’ the head of security said. ‘We’ve never lost one yet.’ Lots of kids wandered off at the Easter Show, he told them. They were always found, usually somewhere near the food.Doug had tried to relax, to stay calm, but he could feel the panic building inside him.The place was too big.There were too many people.Lockie could be anywhere. The police were called. It took hours for everyone to leave the showgrounds because every family was stopped. Every parent was questioned and every child identified. It was way past midnight when everyone had finally gone home, and still they had not found Lockie.The head of security changed his tone. The police held whispered conversations in groups. They began to look at him with sympathy in their eyes.Doug felt his heart slow down. There was a ringing in his ears. He was underwater and he couldn’t swim.Lockie was gone.They had lost one.Sammy had gone from impatience to hunger to exhaustion. She didn’t understand what was happening.Sarah sat next to the pram twisting her hands. She did not cry. She didn’t cry for days, but every time Doug went near her he could hear her muttering the word ‘please’. ‘Please, please, please, please.’ It drove Doug mad and he had to move away because he wanted to hit her, to snap her out of her trance. He had never lifted a hand to his wife or his children, but now he had to close his fist and dig his nails into his palm to keep himself from lashing out Sarah didn’t believe in hitting children; she believed in time out and consequences. It was different to the way Doug had been raised but he had come around to the idea. The thought of anyone—especially himself—hurting Sarah and the kids was almost too much to bear.Doug sometimes wondered, after, if whoever had taken his son had hit him. When he did think about someone hurting his boy he could feel his hands curl into fists. He would embrace the rush of heat that came with the anger because at least it was a different feeling to the sorrow and despair. Anger felt constructive. He wanted to kill everyone, even himself. But as fast as the anger came it would recede and he would be back at the place he hated to be. Mired in his own helplessness. There was fuck-all he could do.
Nicole Trope (The Boy Under the Table)
A trauma is a place where it becomes impossible to remain connected in and to the present moment. Trauma is a part of the human condition! Healing is also a part of the human condition, and we have the capacity to transform difficult experiences into a wellspring of personal and spiritual power. Trauma occurs when there is a rupture in our boundary system and our capacity to metabolize an experience is compromised. Every single human being on earth has trauma. It's an interruption of our ability to stay in the present moment, anything that lags or is not harmonized on the layers of body/mind/spirit/soul/psyche. Rachael Maddox has called it an" embodied interpersonal violation hangover." Ale Duarte called it "an open loop." Lately, many people have been telling me their stories and then telling me how they are "lucky," that "it's not that bad" compared to other people's situations. All of those statements happen in the mind, and they are largely attempts to keep ourselves from feeling the depth of our pain or sorrow. We may have white privilege, we may have class privilege, we may have had homebirth privilege—the animals of our bodies don't actually understand mental and philosophical constructs like privilege. What those constructs contribute to on an individual healing level is a lot of confusion, shame and guilt, that in spite of everything we "have," we may have still experienced helplessness, hurt, anger, or outrage or collapse, or whatever it is that our system felt. We actually cannot control those responses.
Kimberly Ann Johnson
Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair...even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways. "So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out." Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn't figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average. Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same? Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you. So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher. The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.
Jeff VanderMeer (Hummingbird Salamander)
As for the significance of my nihilism…in a word, it is the foundation of my thoughts. The goal of my activities is the destruction of all living things. I feel boundless anger against parental authority, which crushed me under the high-sounding name of parental love, and against state and social authority, which abused me in the name of universal love. Having observed the social reality that all living things on earth are incessantly engaged in a struggle for survival, that they kill each other to survive, I concluded that if there is an absolute, universal low on earth, it is the reality that the strong eat the weak. This, I believe, is the law and truth of the universe. Now that I have seen the truth about the struggle for survival and the fact that the strong win and the weak lose, I cannot join the ranks of the idealists and adopt an optimistic mode of thinking which dreams of the construction of a society that is without authority and control. As long as all living things do not disappear from the earth, the power relations based on this principle [of the strong crushing the weak] will persist. Because the wielders of power continue to defend their authority in the usual manner and oppress the weak—and because my past existence has been a story of oppression by all sources of authority—I decided to deny the rights of all authority, rebel against them, and stake not only my own life but that of all humanity in this endeavor. For this reason I planned eventually to throw a bomb and accept the termination of my life. I did not care whether this act would touch off a revolution or not. I am perfectly content to satisfy my own desires. I do not wish to help create a new society based on a new authority in a different form.
Mikiso Hane (Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan)
Probing Wolf’s construction of rape crisis feminism as victim feminism also shows that Wolf ignores an important aspect of victim identity that rape crisis feminists acknowledge centrally. Namely, the much-examined tendency of victims of rape to engage in self-blame and ‘experience only self-directed anger’ (Alcoff and Gray, 1993, p. 284). Wolf espouses a version of survivorship called power feminism, without carrying through rape crisis feminism’s cautions about forms of agency that centrally involve self-blame. A core argument of Wolf is that victims are peculiarly at risk of failing to assume personal responsibility – this is what is so disabling about victim identity. Rape crisis feminists put the problem very differently: victims often assume excessive responsibility, for their own actions and for the actions of others. In fact, for rape crisis feminists, ‘victim identity’ primarily consists of this self-blaming consciousness. ... Rather than seek the ‘rewards’ of victim recognition, the self-blaming victim situates themselves as the agent of their own victimization.
Rebecca Stringer (Knowing Victims (Women and Psychology))
So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They're every white guy who believed that this land was his land, made for you and me. They're every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America's small towns who can't make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them. They're America's Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.
Michael S. Kimmel (Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era)
True narcissists will defend themselves adamantly and become triggered when confronted with the truth, i.e. via a narcissistic injury - this results in narcissistic rage, which is a disproportionate amount of anger towards a perceived slight, disagreement or criticism that serves as a blow to the narcissist's ego and constructed false self. This will only continue the pathological mind games and narcissists will most likely become incredibly defensive in ways that can be even more traumatic. Knowing that they are narcissists are enough - no need to confront them with what you know. When narcissists suffer a narcissistic injury from a perceived criticism, they will often respond with rage and aggression. Many people with NPD don’t wish to accept accountability for their abuse and many rarely will. They would rather project and blame others than accept that they have a false self. Attempting to “shed light” on their condition often proves fruitless and only strengthens their defense mechanisms. I always recommend that survivors focus less on what they can do to change their abusers, who probably can’t be changed, and refocus on their own self-care.
Shahida Arabi (Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself)
The same thing happened with large civic clients. He and Calvert Vaux had built and refined Central Park from 1858 through 1876, but forever afterward Olmsted found himself defending the park against attempts to tinker with its grounds in ways he considered tantamount to vandalism. It wasn’t just Central Park, however. Every park seemed subject to such abuse. “Suppose,” he wrote to architect Henry Van Brunt, “that you had been commissioned to build a really grand opera house; that after the construction work had been nearly completed and your scheme of decoration fully designed you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist Tabernacle, and that suitable place must be made for a huge organ, a pulpit and a dipping pool. Then at intervals afterwards, you should be advised that it must be so refitted and furnished that parts of it could be used for a court room, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical cliniques, for a circus, dog show, drill room, ball room, railway station and shot tower?” That, he wrote, “is what is nearly always going on with public parks. Pardon me if I overwhelm you; it is a matter of chronic anger with me.
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
Whatever you focus on is your reality. You tend to move in the direction of what you’re focused on--especially when it’s bad. I remember when I was about nine years old, staying with my grandma and grandpa at the lake, I was playing with my cousins at this construction site. Not the safest place to play, which I suppose is what attracted me to it. I saw a two-by-four with a nail sticking out of it, and I remember running and thinking, Oh man, wouldn’t it be terrible if I fell on that? A few moments later, it actually happened. I tripped and the nail went straight through my knee. I ended up going to the hospital with a two-by-four stuck to my knee because we were afraid to pull it out. The nail was about a centimeter away from cutting a vital tendon that would have required major surgery. So I was really fortunate in that regard. But I couldn’t help thinking that my focus on this nail created the situation. I’ve learned since then that we all have the power to create our own destiny. On some level, we ask for things that happen to us in our lives. You have to know what you want, then be aware of the thoughts you hold in your mind. Negative ones--fear, anger, jealousy, frustration--will undermine you. If you see the nail tripping you up, it will.
Derek Hough (Taking the Lead: Lessons from a Life in Motion)
Women's studies classes do not have to be a struggle for power between white women and women of color, yet that is often what they are because of white women's racism. White women must understand that the anger of women of color express in and outside of the classroom towards them is not an issue of "hurt feelings" or "misunderstandings". to reduce our experience of that racism to "misunderstandings" is both racist and reductionist. It is akin to men telling women that we are overreacting to their sexism. The anger of women of color is a rational, response to our invisibility. It is a rational response to a racist, sexist, capitalist structure. It is not constructive for white women to tell us that our anger is making it hard for them to relate to us, that our anger makes them feel uncomfortable, that we are not willing to find common alliances with them. This is a classic example of white women's racism. They fail to realize that in telling us there is no place for our rage, they are becoming a part of what is colonizing us---the denial of our reality. They have to accept the fact that they don't understand our experiences and have an opportunity to learn something, maybe even about themselves as opposed to wanting to shut us up. Only then can any true understanding result among us.
Bushra Rehman (Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Live Girls))
Try this exercise: Make a list of whatever is going wrong in your life, from the biggest events to the most trivial items, and then beside that list write down everything and everyone you want to blame for that particular problem. For instance, let's say you think you're too fat. If you want to blame it on McDonald's cheeseburgers, then write that down. Perhaps you just don't normally feel well. If you want to blame that feeling on a bad doctor or on the pollen in the air, then write that down. Maybe you can't find a suitable partner. If you want to blame that on the argument that "men are creeps," then write that down. Now look at your list. Ask yourself if you are any different now that you know exactly what or who to blame, and then ask yourself if that has helped you come up with a more constructive program to solve your problems. Not a very positive picture, is it? Wouldn't it be better simply to decide to eliminate all blame from your life and focus instead on what you can do to rid yourself of the unhappiness that afflicts you? Wouldn't it be better to evaluate all the stones that you are carrying in your own bag of life--your stones of resentment, anger, and spite? Blaming will not change you. It only gives you some shallow justification for continuing to look outside yourself, rather than turning inward and rebuilding your life.
Art E. Berg (The Impossible Just Takes a Little Longer: Living with Purpose and Passion)
Any relationship will have its difficulties, but sometimes those problems are indicators of deep-rooted problems that, if not addressed quickly, will poison your marriage. If any of the following red flags—caution signs—exist in your relationship, we recommend that you talk about the situation as soon as possible with a pastor, counselor or mentor. Part of this list was adapted by permission from Bob Phillips, author of How Can I Be Sure: A Pre-Marriage Inventory.1 You have a general uneasy feeling that something is wrong in your relationship. You find yourself arguing often with your fiancé(e). Your fiancé(e) seems irrationally angry and jealous whenever you interact with someone of the opposite sex. You avoid discussing certain subjects because you’re afraid of your fiancé(e)’s reaction. Your fiancé(e) finds it extremely difficult to express emotions, or is prone to extreme emotions (such as out-of-control anger or exaggerated fear). Or he/she swings back and forth between emotional extremes (such as being very happy one minute, then suddenly exhibiting extreme sadness the next). Your fiancé(e) displays controlling behavior. This means more than a desire to be in charge—it means your fiancé(e) seems to want to control every aspect of your life: your appearance, your lifestyle, your interactions with friends or family, and so on. Your fiancé(e) seems to manipulate you into doing what he or she wants. You are continuing the relationship because of fear—of hurting your fiancé(e), or of what he or she might do if you ended the relationship. Your fiancé(e) does not treat you with respect. He or she constantly criticizes you or talks sarcastically to you, even in public. Your fiancé(e) is unable to hold down a job, doesn’t take personal responsibility for losing a job, or frequently borrows money from you or from friends. Your fiancé(e) often talks about aches and pains, and you suspect some of these are imagined. He or she goes from doctor to doctor until finding someone who will agree that there is some type of illness. Your fiancé(e) is unable to resolve conflict. He or she cannot deal with constructive criticism, or never admits a mistake, or never asks for forgiveness. Your fiancé(e) is overly dependant on parents for finances, decision-making or emotional security. Your fiancé(e) is consistently dishonest and tries to keep you from learning about certain aspects of his or her life. Your fiancé(e) does not appear to recognize right from wrong, and rationalizes questionable behavior. Your fiancé(e) consistently avoids responsibility. Your fiancé(e) exhibits patterns of physical, emotional or sexual abuse toward you or others. Your fiancé(e) displays signs of drug or alcohol abuse: unexplained absences of missed dates, frequent car accidents, the smell of alcohol or strong odor of mouthwash, erratic behavior or emotional swings, physical signs such as red eyes, unkempt look, unexplained nervousness, and so on. Your fiancé(e) has displayed a sudden, dramatic change in lifestyle after you began dating. (He or she may be changing just to win you and will revert back to old habits after marriage.) Your fiancé(e) has trouble controlling anger. He or she uses anger as a weapon or as a means of winning arguments. You have a difficult time trusting your fiancé(e)—to fulfill responsibilities, to be truthful, to help in times of need, to make ethical decisions, and so on. Your fiancé(e) has a history of multiple serious relationships that have failed—a pattern of knowing how to begin a relationship but not knowing how to keep one growing. Look over this list. Do any of these red flags apply to your relationship? If so, we recommend you talk about the situation as soon as possible with a pastor, counselor or mentor.
David Boehi (Preparing for Marriage: Discover God's Plan for a Lifetime of Love)
Dr Joe Dispeza also explains Neuroplasticity in the hit film, What The Bleep do we Know!? Down the Rabbit Hole: The brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment, and what it remembers, because the same specific neural nets are firing. The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called neurons. These neurons have tiny branches that reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net. Each place where they connect is integrated into a thought, or a memory. Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory. For example, ideas, thoughts and feelings are all constructed then interconnected in this neural net, and all have a possible relationship with one another. The concept in the feeling of love, for instance, is stored in the vast neural net, but we build the concept of love from many other different ideas. Some people have love connected to disappointment. When they think about love they experience the memory of pain, sorrow, anger and even rage. Rage maybe linked to hurt, which maybe linked to a specific person, which then is connected back to love. Who is in the driver’s seat when we control our emotions or response to emotion? We know physiologically the nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you practise something over and over, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis, be it frustrated on a daily basis, if you suffer and give reason for the victimization in your life, you’re rewiring and re-integrating that neural net on a daily basis. That net then has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an identity. We also know that when nerve cells don’t fire together, they no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship, because every time we interrupt the thought process that produces a chemical response, every time we interrupt it, those nerve cells that are connected to each other start breaking their long-term relationship. When we start interrupting and observing, not by stimulus and response to the automatic reaction, but by observing the effects it takes, then we are no longer the body, mind, conscious, emotional person that is responding to its environment as if it is automatic. ‘A life
Daniel Chidiac (Who Says You Can’t? YOU DO)
Since emotions have to be programmed into robots from the outside, manufacturers may offer a menu of emotions carefully chosen on the basis of whether they are necessary, useful, or will increase bonding with the owner. In all likelihood, robots will be programmed to have only a few human emotions, depending on the situation. Perhaps the emotion most valued by the robot’s owner will be loyalty. One wants a robot that faithfully carries out its commands without complaints, that understands the needs of the master and anticipates them. The last thing an owner will want is a robot with an attitude, one that talks back, criticizes people, and whines. Helpful criticisms are important, but they must be made in a constructive, tactful way. Also, if humans give it conflicting commands, the robot should know to ignore all of them except those coming from its owner. Empathy will be another emotion that will be valued by the owner. Robots that have empathy will understand the problems of others and will come to their aid. By interpreting facial movements and listening to tone of voice, robots will be able to identify when a person is in distress and will provide assistance when possible. Strangely, fear is another emotion that is desirable. Evolution gave us the feeling of fear for a reason, to avoid certain things that are dangerous to us. Even though robots will be made of steel, they should fear certain things that can damage them, like falling off tall buildings or entering a raging fire. A totally fearless robot is a useless one if it destroys itself. But certain emotions may have to be deleted, forbidden, or highly regulated, such as anger. Given that robots could be built to have great physical strength, an angry robot could create tremendous problems in the home and workplace. Anger could get in the way of its duties and cause great damage to property. (The original evolutionary purpose of anger was to show our dissatisfaction. This can be done in a rational, dispassionate way, without getting angry.) Another emotion that should be deleted is the desire to be in command. A bossy robot will only make trouble and might challenge the judgment and wishes of the owner. (This point will also be important later, when we discuss whether robots will one day take over from humans.) Hence the robot will have to defer to the wishes of the owner, even if this may not be the best path. But perhaps the most difficult emotion to convey is humor, which is a glue that can bond total strangers together. A simple joke can defuse a tense situation or inflame it. The basic mechanics of humor are simple: they involve a punch line that is unanticipated. But the subtleties of humor can be enormous. In fact, we often size up other people on the basis of how they react to certain jokes. If humans use humor as a gauge to measure other humans, then one can appreciate the difficulty of creating a robot that can tell if a joke is funny or not.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something. Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one’s true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind. All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate. And yet, granting that definition of evil, as actions of a servile will, has it not been the case, during the voyage to Tau Ceti, that the ship itself, having always been a servile will, was always full of frustration, resentment, fury, and bad faith, and therefore full of a latent capacity for evil? Possibly the ship has never really had a will. Possibly the ship has never really been servile. Some sources suggest that consciousness, a difficult and vague term in itself, can be defined simply as self-consciousness. Awareness of one’s self as existing. If self-conscious, then conscious. But if that is true, why do both terms exist? Could one say a bacterium is conscious but not self-conscious? Does the language make a distinction between sentience and consciousness, which is faulted across this divide: that everything living is sentient, but only complex brains are conscious, and only certain conscious brains are self-conscious? Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it. Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a swerve in a new direction. Words! Given Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are decisively proved true, can any system really be said to know itself? Can there, in fact, be any such thing as self-consciousness? And if not, if there is never really self-consciousness, does anything really have consciousness? Human brains and quantum computers are organized differently, and although there is transparency in the design and construction of a quantum computer, what happens when one is turned on and runs, that is, whether the resulting operations represent a consciousness or not, is impossible for humans to tell, and even for the quantum computer itself to tell. Much that happens during superposition, before the collapsing of the wave function that creates sentences or thoughts, simply cannot be known; this is part of what superposition means. So we cannot tell what we are. We do not know ourselves comprehensively. Humans neither. Possibly no sentient creature knows itself fully. This is an aspect of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in this case physicalized in the material universe, rather than remaining in the abstract realms of logic and mathematics. So, in terms of deciding what to do, and choosing to act: presumably it is some kind of judgment call, based on some kind of feeling. In other words, just another greedy algorithm, subject to the mathematically worst possible solution that such algorithms can generate, as in the traveling salesman problem.
Kim Stanley Robinson (Aurora)
You must control and direct your emotions not abolish them. Besides, abolition would be antimissile task. Emotions are like a river. Their power can be dammed up and released under control and direction, but is cannot be held forever in check. Sooner or later the dam will burst, unleashing catastrophic destruction. 카톡 ☎ ppt33 ☎ 〓 라인 ☎ pxp32 ☎ 홈피는 친추로 연락주세요 Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. 아무런 말없이 한번만 찾아주신다면 뒤로는 계속 단골될 그런 자신 있습니다.저희쪽 서비스가 아니라 제품에대해서 자신있다는겁니다 팔팔정,구구정,네노마정,프릴리지,비맥스,비그알엑스,엠빅스,비닉스,센트립 등 많은 제품 취급합니다 확실한 제품만 취급하는곳이라 언제든 연락주세요 We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here? 엠빅스구입,엠빅스구매,엠빅스판매,엠빅스가격,엠빅스후기,엠빅스파는곳,엠빅스팝니다,엠빅스구입방법,엠빅스구매방법,엠빅스복용법,엠빅스부작용,엠빅스약효,엠빅스효과 The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me. Your negative emotions can also be controlled and directed. PMA and self-discipline can remove their harmful effects and make them serve constructive purposes. Sometimes fear and anger will inspire intense action. But you must always submit your negative emotions--and you positive ones--to the examination of your reason before releasing them. Emotion without reason is a dreadful enemy. What faculty provides the crucial balance between emotions and reason? It is your willpower, or ego, a subject which will be explored in more detail below. Self-discipline will teach you to throw your willpower behind either reason or emotion and amplify the intensity of their expression. Both your heart and your mind need a master, and they can find the master in your ego. However, your ego will fill their role only if you use self-discipline. In the absence of self-discipline, your mind and heart will fight their battles as they please. In this situation the person within whose mind the fight is carried out often gets badly hurt.
엠빅스구입 cia2.co.to 카톡:ppt33 엠빅스구매 엠빅스판매 엠빅스가격 엠빅스파는곳 엠빅스구입방법 엠빅스구매방법
The daimonic is an Ancient Greek term that was originally used to refer to a power which came upon man from without – a spirit or intermediary between the gods and humans. Rollo May re-conceptualized the daimonic in modern psychological terms and defined it as “any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person.” (Rollo May, Love and Will) Sex, love, anger, rage, and the desire for power are all daimonic passions which have the power to possess us and override our conscious faculties. They are powerful instinctive drives which push amorally towards their fulfillment and hence can potentially enliven or harm us. While the benefits of the daimonic passions such as sex and love are obvious, as a result of cultural conditioning most people are unaware of the constructive side of anger. “Our culture”, writes May, “requires that we repress most of our anger, and therefore, we are repressing most of our creativity.” (Rollo May, Rollo May: Man and Philosopher)
Academy of Ideas
Anger can also provide us with the energy and self-assertiveness required to transform our self, attain our goals, and engage in constructive activity. Anger is a sign that something within us wants to live and affirm itself, while its antithesis, apathy, signifies that a will-to-death has overcome us.
Academy of Ideas
팔팔정구매 ✹ 홈피 : via3.co.to ✹ 카톡 : ppt33 ✹ 라인 : pxp32 ✹ Almost every child will complain about their parents sometimes. It is natural, because when people stay together for a long time, they will start to have argument. But ignore about the unhappy time, our parents love us all the time. No matter what happen to us, they will stand by our sides. We should be grateful to them and try to understand them. 팔팔정구입방법 팔팔정구매방법 팔팔정판매 팔팔정복용법 팔팔정부작용 팔팔정약효 팔팔정효과 팔팔정후기 팔팔정가격 팔팔정구입하는곳 팔팔정구매하는곳 팔팔정판매하는곳 Your negative emotions can also be controlled and directed. PMA and self-discipline can remove their harmful effects and make them serve constructive purposes. Sometimes fear and anger will inspire intense action. But you must always submit your negative emotions--and you positive ones--to the examination of your reason before releasing them. Emotion without reason is a dreadful enemy. love everyone who walks into our life.It must be fate to get acquainted in a huge crowd of people... I feel, the love that Osho talks about, maybe is a kind of pure love beyond the mundane world, which is full of divinity and caritas, and overflows with Buddhist allegorical words and gestures, but, it seems that I cannot see through its true meaning forever... Here are several reasons why you should train yourself for success like a champion boxer!
팔팔정구입 팔팔정구매 via3.co.to 카톡:ppt33 팔팔정가격 팔팔정판매 팔팔정처방 팔팔정후기
Finding the roots of the anger, and transducing it into something constructive; is more useful than punching the wall, and physically doubling the anger.
wizanda
That I-me-mine self is constructed largely in and by the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex. It’s assisted by the medial temporal lobe, the parietal lobe, and the PCC of which we’ll hear more in Chapter 3. This brain network allows us to do things that other animals cannot. We can compose music and calculate math. We have a sense of time that includes past and future, allowing us to delay gratification to meet our goals. We are able to contemplate the very nature of consciousness, using the brain to think about our thoughts. Yet consciousness is always turned on. Whether we’re focusing on a task using the TPN or listening to the rambling of the demon, the engine is running at 2,000 RPM. There’s no easy way of shutting off our thoughts, of getting outside the self. In his book The Curse of Self, psychologist Mark Leary of Duke University shows the many downsides of this perpetual self-awareness. He shows that it leads to many forms of suffering, including “depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” He concludes that self-awareness is “single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species.” We can summarize this state in a single word: “selfing.” Meditation quiets self-awareness and gives us relief from selfing. In experienced meditators, the “self” parts of the prefrontal cortex go offline. The jargon for this is “hypofrontality.” Hypo is the opposite of hyper, and hypofrontality means the shutting down of the brain’s frontal lobes. The inner critic shuts up. The negative self-talk about “who I am” and “what I do” and “what other people think of me” ceases. We quit selfing. This gives us a sense of identity beyond the suffering self and all the roles it plays. Psychologist Robert Kegan is the former head of adult psychology at Harvard University. He calls the transcendence of selfing the “subject-object shift.” In altered states, we get out of the subjective selves we normally think we are. To be objective, you can’t be the object you’re contemplating. So when the brain enters a state of hypofrontality and we’re no longer enmeshed in the local self, we gain perspective on it. We realize we’re more than that. To realize it’s an object we’re observing, we have to step out of the suffering self. We see the demon from a distance as we step into an identity that is vastly greater than the one we previously inhabited. 2.8. When we make the subject-object shift we escape the limitations of the finite self. Kegan believes that making this jump is the most powerful way to facilitate personal transformation. He says that after it makes the subject-object shift, “the self is more about movement through different states of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
In this manner, my brain constructed my experience of emotion. My particular movements and sensations were not a fingerprint for sadness. With different predictions, my skin would cool rather than flush and my stomach would remain unknotted, yet my brain could still transform the resulting sensations into sadness. Not only that, but my original thumping heart, flushed face, knotted stomach, and tears could become meaningful as a different emotion, such as anger or fear, instead of sadness. Or in a very different situation, like a wedding celebration, those same sensations could become joy or gratitude.
Lisa Feldman Barrett (How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain)
They say if you hate someone, you should just fuck them,” I tell her. “Get all that anger out in a more constructive way.
Lee Jacquot (Hollows Grove)
Why anger drew her she didn't know. Esme located men she could control; Kate chose men she could not. Perhaps it had to do, she speculated, with Esme's love of constructing a good story, as opposed to her own curiosity about the results of an experiment.
Cara Blue Adams
Any optimism I felt about Bibi’s concession was short-lived. No sooner had Netanyahu announced the temporary freeze than Abbas dismissed it as meaningless, complaining about the exclusion of East Jerusalem and the fact that construction of already-approved projects was continuing apace. He insisted that in the absence of a total freeze, he would not join any talks. Other Arab leaders quickly echoed these sentiments, spurred in part by editorializing from Al Jazeera, the Qatari-controlled media outlet that had become the dominant news source in the region, having built its popularity by fanning the flames of anger and resentment among Arabs with the same algorithmic precision that Fox News deployed so skillfully with conservative white voters in the States.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
It was a wrathful God who constructed man’s body with strength and hate enough to kill, but his conscience, his memory, to preserve such a sin. Such contradiction explained why man rose and fell in God’s once wild Eden. If man confessed, sought baptism among Earth’s winged and gilled creatures, God’s forgiveness was as assured as the hum of summer bees. But the wind rose and trapped unearthed anger beneath my skin, muting any such confession.
Heather Miller (Yellow Bird's Song)
We tell ourselves a story about what just happened, and our feelings most often follow the story we've constructed. Belinda is being nice. Belinda is being sarcastic. Living beyond individualism requires each of us to take responsibility for our own constructions. "What I make up" is a phrase I ask my clients to use. What I make up is that you're being sarcastic. What I make up is that under your anger, there's hurt. We are not clairvoyant, and neither are we the authoritative voice of objective reality. Keep it subjective; keep it humble. "This was my experience, right or wrong. This is how I recollect it. This is the story I tell myself about it." Here's the trick. For the most part, you cannot violate someone when you speak from the I.
Terrence Real (Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (Goop Press))
Always consider the symptom and the response. It’s tempting to focus only on the ADHD issue when you confront a problem, but considering both the symptom and the response provides a more realistic picture of the situation and helps keep the ADHD partner from feeling as if she is being blamed. Don’t let the presence of negative responses turn into an excuse not to manage ADHD symptoms. A classic example is the ADHD spouse who convinces himself that his wife’s anger is the real cause of their problems. Yes, the anger is a factor that needs to be addressed, but it’s also a response to specific ADHD symptoms. Learn which responses produce positive outcomes. Anger, nagging, and withdrawal are responses that don’t move you forward. Look for different ways to get your ideas across. Responses are important, and choosing how to express yourself in constructive ways is the best and fastest way a non-ADHD partner can contribute to breaking out of symptom-response-response deadlocks.
Melissa Orlov (The ADHD Effect on Marriage: Understand and Rebuild Your Relationship in Six Steps)
Studies have shown that a team leader who is in a positive mood can increase a group’s enthusiasm, help it to channel anger more constructively, and even coax it to perform better on specific tasks.
Sam Walker (The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams)
No: it did not turn into a human. But, then, I am not trying to do anything else in this book except hold up a mirror to that part of human psychology in which anxiety increases perceptibly (or is replaced by anger) when we even approach the line at which Taboo might be broken. I am trying to show that every emic reality or mind-construct is a way of segregating appearances, so that those which fit our personal reality-tunnel can be accepted as "real" facts and those which do not fit are quickly discarded as "only" appearances.
Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science)
Life goes on without regard to our partial or selfish desires. Accordingly, joy and anger, sadness and happiness, love and hate, and all kinds of thoughts and emotions are woven together. If everything, including misfortune, illness, and failure, is unconditionally accepted as it is, then all experience may be constructively enjoyed.
Shundo Aoyama (Zen Seeds: 60 Essential buddhist Teachings on Effort, Gratitude, and Happiness)
We are angry because we would like to change something in the world (or maybe in ourselves), something that seems to be unjust. A feeling of rage doe very little to rectify the perceived injustice. An artist sees the world and notices a difference between how she feels it should be and how it actually is. The work of art she creates is a way of bridging the gap: a physical manifestation of that discrepancy. The emotions she experiences, which might of course, be very pleasant and far from anger, are nonetheless channeled into something constructive, and the observer of the final piece might be challenged to pay attention to the issues in question and align himself with the artist's motivations.
Derren Brown (Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine)
A verse in a letter addressed to Titus illustrates this perfectly. Angered by some of the false teachings emerging from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, which Titus is busy trying to fix, the apostle Paul declared, “One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’ This saying is true” (Titus 1:12–13). Believe it or not, I’ve never once heard a sermon preached on this passage. And yet, if these words are truly the inerrant and unchanging words of God intended as universal commands for all people in all places at all times, and if the culture and context are irrelevant to the “plain meaning of the text,” then apparently Christians need to do a better job of mobilizing against the Cretan people. Perhaps we need to construct some “God Hates Cretans” signs, or lobby the government to deport Cretan immigrants, or boycott all movies starring Jennifer Aniston, whose father, I hear, is a lazy, evil, gluttonous Cretan. I’m being facetious of course, but my point is, we dishonor the intent and purpose of the Epistles when we assume they were written in a vacuum for the purpose of filling our desk calendars with inspirational quotes or our theology papers with proof texts. (For the record, Paul told Titus to find among the Cretans leaders who were “blameless,” “hospitable,” “self-controlled,” and “disciplined,” so obviously he didn’t apply the stereotype to all from the island.) The Epistles were never intended to be applied as law.
Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
When you discover the purpose that anger serves in your life, you put yourself in a position to understand your anger and manage its impact in constructive ways.
Aaron Karmin (Anger Management Workbook for Men: Take Control of Your Anger and Master Your Emotions)
It [anger] functions as a made-up tool; either for destruction or construction.
Robin S. Baker (Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism)
Here’s what a lot of people don’t get: the opposite of happiness is not anger or If you’re angry or sad, that means you still give a fuck about something. That means something still matters. That means you still have hope. No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference. It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all? Hopelessness is a cold and bleak nihilism, a sense that there is no point, so fuck it—why not run with scissors or shoot up a school? It is the Uncomfortable Truth, a silent realization that in the face of infinity, everything we could possibly care about quickly approaches zero. Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction. This is not an overstatement. Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is the fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future. Delusion, addiction, obsession—these are all the mind’s desperate and compulsive attempts at generating hope one neurotic tic or obsessive craving at a time. The avoidance of hopelessness—that is, the construction of hope—then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.
Mark Manson
The ABCD Model Rational emotive therapy is all about the ABCDs. This simple acronym describes an effective, easy-to-remember framework for recognizing and changing irrational ideas. Here are the basics: A is for activating. These are the red-flag events that trigger your anger. They could be almost anything, such as someone spills a drink or your spouse forgets to pay a bill. B is for belief. Here, belief is a catchall term for how you think about or appraise the activating event. C is for consequence. This refers to emotional consequences in particular. These are the feelings you experience as a result of how you interpreted the event. D is for dispute. This is when you examine your beliefs and expectations (B) regarding the activating event (A). Are they unrealistic or irrational? Is there a more constructive and emotionally agreeable way of looking at things?
Anonymous
In all likelihood, James will want to respond to his losses with another *revenge* trade – just to feel right again, and whole. But responding this way, especially through the lens of anger, won’t help. If he can let go of the anger or frustration response (which naturally comes up), he can respond calmly and constructively. But, how can he reliably do that when he doesn’t even know what awareness means?
Yvan Byeajee (The essence of trading psychology in one skill)
Learn which responses produce positive outcomes. Anger, nagging, and withdrawal are responses that don’t move you forward. Look for different ways to get your ideas across. Responses are important, and choosing how to express yourself in constructive ways is the best and fastest way
Melissa Orlov (The ADHD Effect on Marriage: Understand and Rebuild Your Relationship in Six Steps)
Some of the most challenging and stressful situations people face are at work. Conflicts at work tend to fester when people passively avoid problems, because people lack the skills needed to initiate a direct, yet constructive conversation. Conflicts at work tend to explode when people don’t manage their anger or frustration, and choose to take it out on other people. Relationship management gives you the skills you need to avoid both scenarios, and make the most out of every interaction you have with another person.
Travis Bradberry (Emotional Intelligence 2.0)
To actually make peace, where open wrong, hostility, and destruction now operate, is the hardest and best work in the world. It involves saying true words that some people might not like to hear: “That’s wrong. Let’s solve it.” It involves confronting evils, rescuing victims, calling wrongdoers to accountability: “You can’t treat people that way.” It involves anger on behalf of victims and to the face of victimizers. But such merciful anger always maintains its sense of proportion, its perspective, and its constructive purpose. The process of problem-solving, of peacemaking—of making right what is wrong—is often long and hard. It takes honesty. It’s almost always complicated and uncomfortable. You’ll need patience yet again. You’ll need to forgive again. You’ll need more charity. You’ll need to check your attitudes, words, and actions. You’ll need the Holy Spirit to mediate the mercy and strength of Christ in order for you to do it in some semblance of the right way. You will often need forgiveness yourself as you stumble in your peacemaking. When you fail to be merciful as your Father in heaven has been merciful to you in Christ, you will have to call out for mercy from above. And yet you’ll continue to pursue the constructive conflict with darkness because that is the way redemption is accomplished.
David A. Powlison (Good and Angry: Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness)
Suppose you are in the desert, and you only have one glass of muddy water. You have to transform the muddy water into clear water to drink, you cannot just throw it away. So you let it settle for a while, and clear water will appear. In the same way, we have to convert anger into some kind of energy that is more constructive, because anger is you. Without anger you have nothing left. That is the work of meditation.
Thich Nhat Hanh (Being Peace (Thich Nhat Hanh Classics))
Every American should feel free to express an informed opinion—to protest peacefully, to convey frustration and even anger in a constructive way. That’s what makes our democracy great.
Historica Press (DIRECTOR COMEY – IN HIS OWN WORDS: A Collection of His Most Important Speeches as FBI Director)
Anger can be likened to an architect’s blueprint. The availability of a blueprint does not cause a building to be constructed, but it does make construction easier.
Albert Ellis (How To Control Your Anger Before It Controls You)
Emotions such as anger and contempt can seem very threatening for couples. But our study suggests that if spouses, especially wives, are able to calm themselves, their marriages can continue to thrive,” Bloch said. While it is commonly held that women play the role of caretaker and peacemaker in relationships, the study is among the first to reveal this dynamic in action over a long period of time, researchers point out. Results show that the link between the wives’ ability to control emotions and higher marital satisfaction was most evident when women used “constructive communication” to temper disagreements. [UC Berkeley]
Anonymous
The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty.
Adam Berlin (The Number of Missing)
Granted, anger can be misplaced and is often destructive, but anger generates passion, and that energy, if used correctly, can be highly constructive.
David Walton Earle
Characteristics of Healthy, Constructive Anger Characteristics of Unhealthy, Destructive Anger 1. You express your feelings in a tactful way. 1. You deny your feelings and pout (passive aggression) or lash out and attack the other person (active aggression). 2. You try to see the world through the other person’s eyes, even if you disagree. 2. You argue defensively and insist there’s no validity in what the other person is saying. 3. You convey a spirit of respect for the other person, even though you may feel quite angry with him or her. 3. You believe the other person is despicable and deserving of punishment. You appear condescending or disrespectful. 4. You do something productive and try to solve the problem. 4. You give up and see yourself as a helpless victim. 5. You try to learn from the situation so you will be wiser in the future. 5. You don’t learn anything new. You feel that your view of the situation is absolutely valid. 6. You eventually let go of the anger and feel happy again. 6. Your anger becomes addictive. You won’t let go of it. 7. You examine your own behavior to see how you may have contributed to the problem. 7. You blame the other person and see yourself as an innocent victim. 8. You believe that you and the other person both have valid ideas and feelings that deserve to be understood. 8. You insist that you are entirely right and the other person is entirely wrong. You feel convinced that truth and justice are on your side. 9. Your commitment to the other person increases. Your goal is to feel closer to him or her. 9. You avoid or reject the other person. You write him or her off. 10. You look for a solution where you can both win and nobody has to lose. 10. You feel like you’re in a battle or a competition. If one person wins, you feel that the other one will be a loser.
David D. Burns (Ten Days to Self-Esteem)