When we were children, we would go to these assemblies in school that would teach us if we're ever on fire to stop, drop, and roll. And the reason they teach us to do this is because if we just run around like a chicken with our head cut off while we're on fire, all we succeed in doing is make that fire worse and burn out of control. Oxygen feeds fire. Just as anger feeds the fire in the souls of the person who has experienced childhood trauma when they are in a stressful situation.
Anger resides in most of us trauma survivors, most likely more than others. We are angry, even when we're not thinking about our trauma. But we have a right to be angry. Even if the world tells us we don't. But running around like a chicken with her heads cut off and reacting instead of stopping and assessing before we act, will only feed that fire and make it worse. So why do we never learn to do better?
If we want to figure out how to stop this terrible cycle in our lives, we have to put our minds to Buddhist thought. I'm not saying Buddhist religion, I'm talking about the ideas that Buddhism teaches us. Which partially starts with the Eightfold Path but ends in a much bigger place.
So, before we act, we stop, we assess how we feel, we assess the situation, we assess what we're thinking, we assess how what we will say will make the other person feel, and we assess our anger levels. It seems like a lot to ask in the moment, but it is way better than just reacting. If we want to untangle this mess in our brains, the mess that childhood trauma has left for us to clean up, we have to learn to step out of our old ways of doing things, like reacting without thinking, and learn a new way instead.
And by the time we're done assessing, our anger levels should have dropped so we can think clearly enough to act. If they haven't, we either need to assess more or we need to walk away until we cool down. If you don't have the option to walk away then you have to find coping mechanisms that help you calm your anger. Because in Buddhism anger is something like an intoxicant. It deludes our brains into saying things or thinking things differently than we would if we were sober. You shouldn't make big decisions for your life when you are intoxicated. But when anger is your intoxicant, that means you should not respond to a negative situation until the anger clears from your body. Otherwise you risk making things worse and end up in an endless cycle of anger that never seems to end.
The quickest way for me to have anger clear from my body is to use understanding. This means to stop taking the other person's behavior personally and try to understand where they're coming from even if they are completely wrong. I am not saying to see their point of view on things (though that's good too), but to see where their behavior is coming from. Perhaps the person feels shame, or they are reacting from their own childhood trauma, or maybe someone made them angry earlier. The idea isn't to know exactly why the other person is doing what they are, but to make a good educated guess as to why.
Because once you can understand why another person acts the way they act, you have no reason to be angry because it is not personal towards you. A great book on this is called "The Power of Knowledge" by Don Miguel Ruiz (also "The Four Agreements" but the same author, but the first deals with this subject only). This book teaches us that we are not the center of someone else's life, but rather they are (and we're just their supporting cast) and everything they do or say stems from within themselves. Their actions and reactions stem from how they feel, from past experiences they've had, from their trauma, or even just their own ego. And the way people behave towards us has nothing to do with us at all, even if we feel it does.
For example: if someone is in a good mood, they may respond to something you do or say in a normal and non-reactive way. But if someone is in a bad mood and they respond to that same something that you did or said by flying off the handle into a rage. Neither one of those responses from them has anything to do with you and everything to do with how they feel in the moment. Knowing this is right understanding, which is step one of Buddhism. And this is the first step on the path to true happiness in life. This is the first step to untangling that mess of chaos in our brains.
So, if you want to live a life that is intentional and one that you are more in control of, then you need to learn to stop, assess, and then act when you're in a stressful situation. Anything less than that and rather than putting the fire out, it will just keep burning out of control.
