Controlling Your Emotions
Sometimes you will find barriers to getting what you want because of your negative emotions, such as angers and fears. You can use the GWYW techniques to deal with these emotions, too, and get them out of the way just as you can use these techniques to overcome bad habits.
First let’s deal with the emotions. Your positive emotions such as love and joy are great motivators in stimulating you to get what you want because you enjoy the results and feel more creative and productive. Your negative emotions such as anger and fear can also provide a benefit at times by protecting and defending you. They can warn you about things that might hurt you or they can mobilize you to strike back at something harmful. For example, the flight or fight response triggered by danger is a survival mechanism, as applicable to the corporate jungle as the real jungle and to problems in personal relationships. Instead of fighting a hostile lion with a weapon or running away, you fight a corporate or personal adversary to win in a power struggle, or go along or retreat if you can’t.
At other times, however, these negative emotions can stand in the way of achieving your goals. Such as when you have unreasonable fears and anxieties or when you lose control of your emotions. If you don’t control your anger or frustration, you can blow something small into a big insult that turns into a feud. And that will not only make you feel worse but can also result in you losing a job or not getting a desired promotion. Even when an uncontrolled explosion seems to achieve its immediate purpose, it can still have long-term negative effects on relationships and on personal satisfaction. By contrast, if you stay in charge of your emotions or turn anger into a diplomatic or creative way of asking for or going after what you want, you can avoid problems and achieve your goals.
How Uncontrolled Emotions Can Stand in Your Way
You can probably think of numerous examples when giving in to uncontrolled emotions can lead to exactly what you don’t want. That’s what happened to Mary who was in a custody battle with her ex-husband, Duncan, over their teenage son. Duncan was offering to share joint custody, but she was so angry with him because he had broken up with her after several years due to her growing involvement in local political groups and his career requiring extensive travel. When he was finally promoted to a position where he would be home more, the emotional distance between them had grown too much. While she agreed divorce was for the best so they could each get on with their lives, her discovery that he was seeing and planning to a marry another woman made her burn with rage. So even though Duncan would be living an hour away in an upscale suburb, she didn’t want him to see their child. It was her only way to punish him. And the thought of another woman stepping into the picture as the stepmother made her feel even angrier and determined to keep him and their son apart.
Her insistence led to a screaming fight on the phone, which ended with her saying, “Talk to my lawyer.” This was followed by fights with her lawyer who urged her to work out a joint custody agreement with Duncan since he was in a position to provide their child with a good home. This approach made sense, but her anger made her refuse and led to a series of family court hearings. This only increased the legal bills and resulted in a judge ruling for joint custody and spelling out a formal agreement of who had the child when. Meanwhile, her son saw the raging battle and turned against her for being unreasonable and was uncommunicative with her. In the end her anger led her to undermine the relationship with her son that she wanted as well as running up costly legal expenses that led to the joint custody result anyway.
For a moment her expression of anger had made her feel better since she initially put a barrier in the way of Duncan seeing their son, but the results were self-destructive both for herself and for her child. Had Mary been able to control her emotions and been willing to discuss alternatives rationally, she may have been able to work out an amicable arrangement that would have preserved a better relationship with her child and saved time, money, and stress.
How could she have achieved that result? By taking some time out to calm down, using some calming self-talk, or using a physical trigger to remind herself that she was getting irrationally angry and needed to do something to calm down.
Controlling the Expression of Emotions
to Get What You Want
While the uncontrolled expression of emotion can be self-destructive like in Mary’s case, the controlled expression of emotion can be just what you need to achieve the desired effect if used at the right time. The following techniques can help you channel and control your emotions so you express them in creative ways or avoid expressing them in ways that will be destructive to yourself and others. This way you can express your emotions or hold them back as appropriate to the situation.
Since anger is the most destructive of the negative emotions, we will focus first on how to control and channel your anger as well as any feelings that can trigger it, such as jealousy, envy, resentment, or feelings of betrayal. You can apply these techniques to controlling and channeling other negative emotions, too.
Recognize Your Feelings
The first step toward getting your feelings under control and channeling them is to become aware of how you feel. Then you can acknowledge these feelings and stop yourself from expressing them in an inappropriate way or at an inopportune time. It is clear that you are angry if you yell or scream, tell someone off, or otherwise demonstrate anger. But even before these outward expressions there are mental or physical signs of anger. If you are aware of them before you explode, you can short-circuit the process and mentally decide if you want to express your anger or not. In fact, domestic violence support groups that try to help one partner overcome their violence against the other partner use such an approach. They help the abuser become aware of the signs of their anger so they can hold themselves back and channel it away from abusing their partner. You can use the following exercise to help you recognize the signs of anger before you express them in destructive ways.
Picking Up on the Signs of Anger
Get in a calm, relaxed frame of mind. Focusing on the screen in your mind’s eye, think back to a time when you were angry. See the scene appear before you like a film. Then imagine you are winding the film back to a time before the incident occurred that provoked your anger. Watch the scene unfold.
Now pay attention to how you experienced this. Be aware of the sensations in your body and of how you are holding yourself. Notice any changes in your muscle tension. Notice any changes in your self-talk or the thoughts going on in your mind. Notice how you are feeling when you are angry or are becoming angry.
Then let go of that image. Turn the projector off or rewind the film. Feel yourself releasing any anger and experience that release. Then notice the differences in how you feel now and how you felt before. Be aware of the way you felt when you were angry or becoming angry compared to when you are not. Now repeat the process to see if there are other ways you experience becoming or being angry, or to become more aware of the way you felt by using a different anger scenario than the first example.
You are now very comfortable, very calm, and very peaceful, although you are conscious of how you react when you are angry and know you may react that way in the future. These are the signs to look for when you feel yourself becoming angry in the future. Then, keeping these signs in mind, but feeling very comfortable, calm, and peaceful, let go of what you have experienced and return to the room.
Five Ways to Control Your Anger
Once you feel the signs of anger coming on, you can stop yourself from expressing it or channel it to avoid expressing it inappropriately or destructively, if you wish. The goal is to manage the expression of your feelings so you express them wisely. Following are five effective ways to stop, deflect, channel, or otherwise control your feelings of anger:
1) Ask for, or take, a time out. This is a way to get away from the situation or person who is causing you to feel angry. This time out also gives you a chance to calm down, get your feelings under control, and check assumptions or information that is causing you to feel angry. After all, you could be wrong. Time outs can be combined with one of the visualization techniques discussed later that can help you let go of and release or redirect your anger in a more positive way.
2) Use calming self-talk. By telling yourself calming things you direct your attention away from what is bothering you and counter the physical feelings that are contributing to your anger. Calming self-talk can also short-circuit any immediate impulse you have to lash out verbally or physically and help you feel more detached and less emotional about the situation. You may tell yourself things like, Calm down. Relax. This problem isn’t so important. You don’t have to react now. Don’t take this personally. Don’t let this bother you. You can also use self-talk to guide you into personal projection or detachment.
3) Use personal projection to remove yourself from the situation. In this case you imagine you are not there. You mentally go away or experience yourself stepping out of yourself and watching so you are no longer emotionally affected by the situation you are in. Although you are fully aware of and in charge of the process, you become like an observer or film director rather than an actor in your own film. You can use self-talk to guide you into this state, or simply visualize or experience yourself somewhere else.
4) Don’t take it personally. This is a good way to deflect the tendency to react defensively when someone’s negative or accusatory behavior is less due to something you have done than triggered by their own problems. If you can tell yourself, It isn’t me … he/she is just angry and is taking it out on me, you can distance yourself from the situation so you feel less upset and angry. Then you may find that if you just listen and don’t express your anger the other person will share what is really going on and the problem will resolve itself.
5) Let go of your anger through visualization. While some visualizations can be done quickly (even in the midst of the situation causing you anger), others take longer and generally require some private time. So this visualization technique is best when you apply it to an ongoing situation or you are able to take some time out.
Explained below are some examples of visualizations that can assist you to let go of any anger. Choose those that feel most comfortable to you, combine two or more visualizations, or create your own.
Five Visualizations for Releasing Anger
As you feel the anger rising within you, visualize it coming in like a beam of negative energy from the person or situation that is upsetting you. Then imagine this energy moving down within you and dispersing harmlessly into the ground.
Imagine a bubble, dome, or wall of white light of protection around you. This object is a barrier between you and the situation or person causing the anger. As you sit or stand behind this barrier you can deflect everything the person says or the events that produce anger. You are safe, isolated, and protected inside.
Projecting It Out and Eliminating It
Get in a very relaxed state and imagine a large screen in front of you. Then, imagine you are projecting the anger within you like a laser beam onto the screen. Next, imagine you are holding a raygun and shooting at that anger. Each time you zap it you experience the anger releasing and draining away.
Making the Person Causing the Anger Smaller
This method is especially suitable if the person causing the anger has a strong emotional hold over you. To release your anger, make that person seem smaller, less powerful, and less important to you. Start by seeing yourself talking to this person. See them doing whatever makes you angry. Then, as you talk, see this person shrink in size. Notice their voice becoming fainter and fainter. Meanwhile, you feel stronger and more powerful while this person becomes less powerful and important in your life. Then see yourself saying goodbye and leaving this tiny person while you feel very powerful. Finally, let go of this image and return to your everyday consciousness.
While this method can be a helpful release for some people, others may find it makes them angrier. Use it if you find it’s a helpful catharsis, but if you feel your anger level going up, don’t continue with this method. To use this technique, get into a relaxed state and imagine taking some action to appropriately punish the person who has wronged you. In the beginning, ask yourself, What can I do to get a just punishment or revenge for ________? Fill in the blank with a description of what the person has done. Then, like in a film, just sit back and observe what happens and let yourself enjoy it.
Afterward, let go of the experience and return to normal consciousness. When you do, notice if you feel better. If so, this is a good technique for you. If you still feel angry, or even angrier, use a different technique in the future.
Learn from the Experience to Release Your Anger
Although the approach of learning from an experience is a good way to later transform a bad experience into something that can benefit you, it can also be an anger-releasing technique. It helps release anger because knowing that the situation can later be used for your own benefit can help you feel better as it happens. This awareness can help you detach and see the situation in a more neutral way because you realize that you have the ability to transform what is negative into something positive. To use this technique, create a reminder to yourself to help you feel better. It can be something like telling yourself, I’ll be able to learn from or profit from this experience later, so don’t be so upset now.
If possible at the time, think, What can I learn from this situation that I can use in the future? Or How can I turn this situation into something from which I can profit? If you can’t ask these questions at the time the event is happening, ask them later in a quiet or private place. Consider how the bad experience you have just had can be used to teach you something, guide you in the future, or be turned into a stepping-stone to an opportunity that you gain something from. By reminding yourself that every experience has a positive potential and knowing that you can take some time later to realize these positive possibilities, you can help release your emotional upset and anger.