Love the catching fish, pitching the baseball, and all swimming around in the lake. Life is good.
Cycling between “life is good” and anger moments is understandable and perfectly normal.
Feelings are born from our irrational subconscious self. Our emotions influence our thoughts and beliefs.
Thoughts reside in our logical conscious reasoned self. Thoughts influence emotions and also beliefs.
Beliefs are deep core values that are very slow to change. The inner work of self is discovering what one’s beliefs actually are; and you’d be amazed at what you “believe”. A common example is a belief in justice and retribution. The need to see our wayward spouse get their comeuppance.
We discover our believes, strengthen those which we are proud of and serve us, craft those which we aspire to, and alter or discard beliefs that do not serve our lives and how we want to live. Once one’s values are organized, their slow changing makes them excellent headings for one’s life.
However, that is the long view and we still have our feelings vacillating.
Feelings are fleeting. They are quick to rise and quick to extinguish. Feelings are real and completely temporary unless reinforced.
Consider this as an example, imagine I said something to you really offensive. You’d get angry or hurt instantly. That’s how quickly feelings can spring to life. That angry feeling then unknowingly influences your thoughts and then you are thinking angrily towards me. Now, both thoughts and feelings are influencing and reinforcing each other.
Control. We only can control our thoughts, actions, and reactions.
A couple of really important parts here. Firstly, we have no direct control over our emotions. Secondly, we can, and that’s the biggest part, can, it’s a choice, can exert direct control over our thoughts, actions, and reactions.
Anger is a normal part of grief. Emotions are a healthy part of life. Letting go. Letting the anger wash over you. However it is stated, is finding, is learning actually, how to stop reinforcing your undesirable feelings. Remember feelings are temporary and will flit if not reinforced.
The three items so far discussed - emotions, thoughts, and beliefs - make three lanes on our road of life. These are the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual lanes. There is one more lane which is the physical lane which makes the four lanes or paths we all travel.
We are all in our four different cars somewhere along our highway. Usually one’s intellectual car is well placed and in the present moment, after all that is our conscious self and our directly controllable self.
Our emotional car seems to zoom around, stop, even go backwards, at times. It’s ok. One learns how to control their thoughts and influence their other “cars”.
An interesting thing about our cars and our life’s lanes or paths, you only really drive one car at a time. We switch instantaneously between various cars. Still, we only drive one at a time. If you are focused on an intellectual problem the worries and pain of emotions fade away. Likewise being consumed by grief and sadness keeps one from performing their best at other tasks.
A caveat, for accuracy, since being accurate is one of the tools for detachment and self awareness. In reality our minds are incredible and do perform tasks simultaneously. Driving one and only one car at a time is a simplification. It holds true for the majority of our focus. If you are 90% focused upon balancing your cheque book that leaves 10% for everything else. Recall the zombie like state after BD. Now that was close to 100% consumed by emotions and disbelief. Just staring , not eating, man oh man what crazy times.
Anyhow, your anger towards XW, OM2, and XMIL is being reinforced. It is real, temporary, and being supported by other parts of your life, your thoughts, and your convictions. One learns to uncouple their feelings from that reinforcement. Remember, the realm of feelings is our subconscious. And that is an irrational landscape. Ties between various aspects of our life and grief and physical world need not, and usually do not, make sense in a rational and logical way.
For example, right after BD I could not make coffee. I mean I could place the filter in the cone, fill it with coffee, pour in the water, but I could not press the button to start the brewing. I know. Crazy right? Well actually, just irrational. Irrational means sans reason; it’s not crazy.
Another thing is the word “but”. Usually what we say after “but” is a justification for our action. “But I could not press the button.” Actually and accurately, I would not press the button. Of course at the time I didn’t realize I was reinforcing my despair. Pressing that button meant that W had left, was cheating, my life was forever changed, over, finished, etc… Not so! Lol. Yet, at the time that’s what I felt. Irrational as it was.
I’ve learnt and employed several strategies over the years for uncoupling those irrational ties. Successfully let go of anger, fear, ego, vengeance, etc… No one strategy will work completely or in every case, it takes a multi-faceted approach.
Physical activity. That is completely within our direct control. When angry go do something. Something not related to the anger. We are working to uncouple not reinforce. Lol.
Go work out, run, clean the yard, dig the garden, etc. Sweat the anger out of you. This pulls your focus away from the emotional car and places you in the physical car. So many things are happening, you are lessening your focus on your anger, therefore letting it go, and crafting a new and better irrational tie based upon whatever triggered the anger in the first place.
That’s a pretty neat thing as well. Triggers. Emotions are triggered by thoughts, events, and such. Rewrite your response to those triggers.
That leads to rationalizing the irrational. This is an excellent tool for uncouple our fear response and works equally well for other emotions. Fear is particularly troublesome as it highjacks and freezes us. Hard to gather one’s intellect while in the grip of fear.
Basically, look at the chain of coupling. Through event, trigger, all the way to anger or fear or whatever. Our emotions are irrational. Our thoughts are rational. Arrest the domino effect of your irrational chain with reason and logic. Exerting a rational view upon this slows the cascade of emotional response. It buys you precious time to adjust your focus. Once proficient, you can rationally extract yourself from an emotionally highjacked moment rather easily.
Once you dig deep and find the true irrational cause and rationalize it, understand it, it’s power greatly diminishes. In this way we break that chain and stop the anger moments.
A general tip regarding all of this. Brute force is not best. In fact it doesn’t work. You are working to alter that which you do not have direct control of; that which you can only influence. You need to come at things gently and kind of sideways. Patience and faith are virtues that will be tested.
Once your cars are all lined up, all side by side purring along together, peace and contentment are found.
Of course the most important car is on the spiritual path. Those slow to change convictions that influence everything.
Lol. Perhaps another time, I’ve used up quite a bit of your thread already.
Have a great day.
D
Feelings are fleeting. Be better, not bitter. Love the person, forgive the sin.
We are working to uncouple not reinforce. Lol.
