Hi, love. Today, we’re revisiting the process of letting go of anger. I know that it’s one of the trickiest emotions to let go of, so today, we will go deep into what you’re experiencing, what your choices are about, and how to move through it.
Did you know there are a lot of health consequences for holding on to anger, including heart disease? Diseases are driven by some of our more toxic, persistent emotions. I often think of my future self when I’m making lifestyle choices and doing healing work. When I’m 70, I don’t want to feel trapped by choices that I made in my past. This is my life. I always want to learn from and celebrate the aspects of my lived existence. There is also a part of the grief process or the healing process where you feel like you have ‘wasted’ so many years.
When we have conversations about chronic emotional patterns, it’s really because we women want to set ourselves up to have beautiful, abundant futures where we get to make the most of it and not feel regret for the choices we made in the past.
Anger in the Emotional Guidance Scale by Jerry and Esther Hicks
So y’all know I’ve been chatting about the Emotional Guidance Scale from the book Ask and It Is Given by Jerry and Esther Hicks. On this scale, there are several brands of anger, including hatred, rage, revenge, and blame, and there are also some emotions that I would say are ‘anger-adjacent,’ such as jealousy and discouragement. Once you understand where you’re at and the nuances between each type of anger, you can learn how to move on from it.
Types of Anger
Anger is such a valuable emotion. It helps us understand when some action needs to be taken.
It’s powerful, it motivates us, and it helps us know when we’re being treated very poorly or if there’s not a healthy boundary in place. In some ways, we women feel anger and it feels like an action, so it has its value. It’s certainly higher on the emotional scale than despair and hopelessness, where you have no power.
In my last article and podcast on anger, I said that you first have to embrace anger to release it.
Often, when an emotion becomes chronic, it’s because it’s something we women can’t get free of, and we haven’t allowed ourselves to fully express it.
We’re not willing to fully experience and validate our own emotional experience.
We talk about how good it feels to feel truly seen, validated, and heard by others. But often, it’s because we are not willing to go to the depths of what we see, think, feel, hear, know, and believe. After all, it’s so deep, dark, and scary. So many times, I’ve had clients say they are afraid if they fully ‘go there,’ they will never come out. The opposite is true. When we avoid and suppress, we get stuck.
When we women go to these deep places of anger, we take blame with us, and blame blocks us from integrating the lessons we’re learning from walking these paths.
Pinpoint where blame is contaminating your healing journey because that is where it’s interrupting your progress.
Emotions are meant to be like an ocean tide; they should come in and go out. Emotions are signals to help us understand what we like and what we don’t like. They are signals that help us enrich our lived experience.
Anger and Blame
Producer Joy and I discussed this while we were preparing for this episode. We went deep into how to decontaminate blame from our feelings. The idea that it ‘could have gone another way’ is blame. It’s blaming ourselves for our mistakes; it’s blaming our forefathers for their mistakes, and anywhere blame is activated, we cannot fully heal. But why does it matter?
I spent years trying to let go of my anger. Even though I actively tried to take full responsibility for my life after my divorce and trusted that God had a plan and a path for me. Even though I knew that intellectually, I couldn’t quite get it to shift or to release on a deep level. As a result, I had a chronic disease and a lot of noise in my mind.
Become the Person You Always Have Been
It’s important to understand that who we are as women is dictated so much by our genetics, our inherited traumas, and our souls.
How we experience life after divorce is determined by the lived experiences that have contaminated us.
A lot of times, people come to me for this deep work, and they are scared of who they are going to be after EMDR.
My answer is always: “You’re going to recognize her. Yes, there will be some adjustment periods, but who you are has been constant.”
You can move past generational traumas by peeling back these contaminated layers and becoming the person you always have been.
Accepting that something wasn’t ‘meant to be’ can be very hard for people.
The healing process allows you to be able to go into the depths of yourself, your journey, your relationships, your purpose, and who you were meant to be.
A lot of times, we women don’t give ourselves enough time to let go of anger and the space to fully collapse and follow our emotional paths. And it’s because we have too much responsibility and need more community. We are overburdened with the responsibility of modern living. We become focused on the wrong stuff.
How to Let Go of Anger and Start to Heal
How free do you wanna feel? We often just get in our own way. It’s hard to say “I need help” as we feel like help should be automatically provided for us. Anywhere blame is activated and we women feel like somebody else should be accountable for our journey and our healing path, we are not fully taking our power back. How free do you want to be, and how accountable are you willing to be for that freedom?
If your healing takes a long time, it’s probably because you’re avoiding asking for help more often. Figure out if you’re getting in your own way.
Healing is a process. We don’t know how to trade anger for letting ourselves off the hook. We don’t know how to trade anger for letting other people off the hook. We don’t know how to trade anger for celebrating your path. We don’t know how to trade anger for acceptance. We don’t know how to trade anger for self-love.
Why not let anger go and instead have some grace for yourself?
You’re learning by doing. Don’t be afraid to say, “I need help.” Look at the places where you’re not allowing yourself to fully feel and express your anger. Look at the places where you’re blocking yourself from feeling good about yourself.
We women were supposed to let go of anger and come here to create and play, love, and be loved.
You are so worthy of love and belonging. You are so worthy of being celebrated.
So is your ex, so is your mother-in-law, so are your parents, so are your children. Everybody gets a break because that is truly the path to a joyful existence.
I love you so much. Peace.
Divorce recovery coach Dawn Wiggins
...helps people crack open. Challenging the status quo, she integrates multiple modalities from EMDR to EFT tapping, journaling, homeopathy, and movement, embracing remedies that heal both the mind and body. Divorce recovery coach Dawn Wiggins is on a mission to deliver life-changing therapy in an accessible, scalable, affordable way and make waves in the world of mental health with the same enlightenment that happens in her office. Part science, part essential oils, pure magic.
