I have just responded to a question about anger management and it got me thinking, I have worked with lots of clients with this issue all over the world, from New York to London, Portugal to Queenstown and the requests seem to be the same, ' I want to control my anger.'
Let's think about this for a moment, what does this request actually mean? Well, in the first instance it assumes the anger can be controlled, that the anger is then only controlled and is now lurking in the background ready to pounce at any given moment. It assumes that anger is a possession of that person and they have to have it, that's the deal, so the best outcome is to just control it. It also assumes that the client is not too sure of what they would rather have, for instance rather than the statement above (which is so commonly used on the questionnaires my clients complete prior to our sessions) if the client said " I want to have my calm self back" then this tells us that they were once calmer. Now this has to be true in all cases, a client must on a daily basis experience calmness, even if it is only when they are sleeping. So the question really is how do we get back to the default settings, the programme we were born with? Rather than control the anger let's look at what it is that creates it and deal with that.
It's getting back to your authentic self, the real you, the one you fondly look at through those rose tinted glasses, except we know that it is not real, just your perception of the past you. Yet you were born with calmness, stillness and a beat that tunes into the universal intelligence. How do I know this? Because you are here, you wake every day, you breath, you heal, you learn, it is hard wired into you and all that needs to happen is a little reminder of how to get back to that clean slate, the factory settings.