Emotions

Ambivalence Around Anger Issues

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It might sound counterintuitive but if you are struggling with anger issues you’ve got to isolate all the positives, all the things your anger does for you, all the areas in your life where it helps you and supports your endeavors.

Regardless of the proposed lifestyle change there is always going to be ambivalence, simultaneous conflicting feelings around the object in question, and you’ve got to address both sides of the coin or you’ll likely encounter resistance that will derail your change without you really knowing how or why. Just because you’re not consciously aware of the factors responsible for your ambivalence doesn’t mean these factors don’t exert a profound influence on your behavior.

In the case of anger, you might not like how you feel after you’ve unleashed it, you might not like the destructive results that tend to accompany it, or you might not like how the people around you have begun to perceive you and relate to you, but there are surely things you appreciate about your anger too. Maybe how powerful it makes you feel, or how focused, or the way it motivates you to act instead of stand pat when you’re trying to right some wrong. Maybe it’s the sense of relief when you can release all that psychic pressure that has built up.

What it comes down to is that if you do a cost-benefit analysis and find that the benefits outweigh the costs then there is no reason for you to change, and even if you’re feeling a lot of pressure from the controlling environment you probably won’t. But if you find, like most people do, that the costs outweigh the benefits, then this conscious insight will be a powerful motivator to help you on the journey because it will be based on your own appraisal of the facts not on what others are telling you to do.

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