In Stage Three you identified how your integrity is being threatened. The next question is: How anger is hindering you in reestablishing that integrity? How is anger harming you in this situation? How is it taking away from your needs, desires, and goals?

If you are locked into an anger pattern then you aren’t moving forward to resolving the conflict and clarifying your boundaries. This is the irony of anger: on the one hand it is there to protect you, but on the other hand if it gets stuck, if the intelligent energy behind that anger isn’t expressed, it keeps you from resolving things.

So in my example from the Stage Three article, when people interrupt me and I get angry, I shut down and retreat into my silent anger. Yes my anger arises to protect me and there is intelligence in that, but the intelligence gets frozen if I stay angry and don’t act on that intelligence. So the frozen quality of anger prevents things from moving forward.

So just to recap, the exercise in this step is to look at your anger, look at your needs, and examine how anger is keeping you trapped, keeping you from taking care of yourself. In my example, I would write, “Anger is keeping me from working this problem out, because when people interrupt me and I get angry, I shut down and I fail to see there are actually solutions available.”

By Craig Mollins