I have heard of therapist and psychologist suggest to individuals that it is a good idea if you are angry to go and take it out on your pillow. One person in fact bought a soft object from me that was made for swinging to be used by her client to hit objects in her room – just to get the anger out. So what do you think about this? I believe that if we take to hitting things when we are angry that we are practicing what we would really like to do. In fact we may one day when we are really angry not be able to control ourselves and actually do what we have practiced for all of those years, except this time it may be a real person.
We see this sometimes when someone, usually a man, who cannot control themselves, puts their fist through the wall. Eventually they will hit someone and create some very difficult situations for themselves. So what is the answer? We need to check in with our feelings and recognize that we are feeling anger. When we check in we may recognize that the feeling is not anger as much as it is frustration, jealousy, embarrassment or some other feeling. Once we recognize this we can ask ourselves, How can I calm down? It may be one of the four ways we suggested in an earlier post, or it may be another way that works for us. Then the question is, how do I solve this problem?
How to solve the problem is always interesting because we have an entire list of ways of doing this. Next time we will examine solving the problem.