"If you do everything the "right" way, life will go your way. If it doesn't go your way, you will be entitled to a settlement which requires life to compensate for it."
Life. Isn't. Fair.
Life carries challenges.
Life gives us hard stuff and easy stuff.
I can do everything "right" and the shit can still hit the fan.
As a mother, I am equipping my children to handle all of life's ups and downs by allowing them to experience the reality of life, with all the good, bad and the ugly. I will do my best to protect them from pain that I can keep away and teach them to keep away from, but I cannot keep all pain away. Life has pain, it also has pleasure though.
Shielding my children from all pain is shielding my children from learning important life-lessons. My best bet is to help them build a tolerance level for pain through teaching and modeling to them how to cope with it. I can provide modeling to my children with how I myself feel pain through grieving, and trusting my body and my God to guide the process in ways that don't involve harming myself and/or others as part of this process.
Just like me, my children DO have the right to feel angry at whomever or whatever they feel angry at. But, just like me, they do not have the right to harm others or themselves because of their anger.
I want to teach, model and affirm these core-beliefs surrounding anger to serve as a guide in their relationship with anger:
- You CAN set boundaries with your anger without having to fear its existence.
- You CAN feel angry while NOT harming the person you feel angry towards.
- Anger doesn't travel solo, there are hidden emotions underneath it, search for them with God's help.
- If you think that expressing the emotion of anger only helps you be in control, you will be held hostage by anger.
- Being angry doesn't mean being mean.
- Anger is a normal human emotion. It is more harmful to resist feeling it, then to allow yourself to feel it.
- You are not responsible for managing other people's anger. Whenever you either volunteer or accept that role, expect disappointment and resentment.
- Do not hold other people responsible for managing your anger for you, when you do, expect disappointment and resentment.
- Expressing big and intense emotions of anger does not mean someone needs to be harmed by them.
- Others may feel uncomfortable in their own skin while you're appropriately discharging anger (without harming yourself or others as part of the process), and that is OK.
- How other people feel in their own skin while you appropriately express your anger has nothing to do with you, but them.
- Appropriately expressing anger that does not harm self or others is not culturally "normal", it is hazardous only to the ego or false-self.
- Whenever possible, express it with those whom you trust and feel emotionally safe with.
- If you do not feel this is possible with any of the people you are in relationship with, re-evaluate the health of your relationships..healthy relationships can contain anger without being extinguished by it.
Live well and learn to dance in the storms of life. You CAN dance with anger, not be overcome by it. It is something I can personally vouch for in saying it will serve you well to learn to dance with anger, not around or under it.
