For many people anger management can be a long slow path. Very often when I look at my own life and my state of mind, it seems that I’m just as angry as I always was. For example it’s so easy for me to disagree with people and make them wrong. If a friend says anything that is even slightly challenging to my way of life, my world view, my opinions, or my ideas, I tighten up inside and I put up an exterior wall of defense.

That wall takes the shape of cold and sharp a rebuttal of their challenge. The sad part is that their challenge was usually not meant as a challenge at all. They were simply expressing themselves, and their expression didn’t exactly fit my preconception of what I thought they should be saying. I take personally something that in no way was meant to be personal, which is heartbreaking.

When I see myself do this it saddens me greatly, and I often think, “I’m the same angry jerk I’ve always been.” However, the wiser part of me knows this isn’t true. The more clear headed me knows that I’m just feeling low self esteem, and that because I’m feeling down I project all kinds of negative ideas onto myself. I imagine that I have no virtue and only have bad qualities.

When stuck in these low moments, these moments of seeing myself with such a dark lens, an antidote is for me to look back, to step back from my situation and take a broader perspective. If I do this I realize that in the longer term view, I have made tremendous progress, and that even looking back over several months I can see myself getting softer, kinder, stronger, and more clear minded.

This is helpful to remember when I’m going through a tough time, to reflect on the bigger picture and to recall how much more negative and angry I was in the past, and to not get pulled into the belief that I haven’t made any progress.

Anger management, the path of letting go of anger is a life’s work. Everyone experiences some amount of anger, and for all of us we can always soften further, we can always become more kind, and we can always learn to be a more loving and upright human being.

By Craig Mollins