by Nathan Chua
“Let’s slow down here for a moment.” These are some words you would often hear me say to my clients. It sounds like a weird request. I can almost hear the client mumbling inside, “What does slowing down have anything to do with counseling? I am here to get some kind of resolution to my concerns and I only have just under an hour to talk about it!”
A big part of mindfulness-based therapies like ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is developing the capacity to slow things down. If we follow the news, we’d see how fast our minds work and how critical it is to slow down. We might have been witness to some incidents where a cop who has had a spotless record, all of a sudden commits a violent crime that upends a lifetime’s work and dedication. How does this happen? Well, I guess a more apt question to ask is “How quickly does this happen?” It’s a split second between our thoughts and actions. Unfortunately, without the functional understanding of what mindfulness is all about, it is easy to equate our feelings with bad behavior. I use bad behavior here because growing up, we normally get messages like, “Don’t get angry at your sister!” The statement implies that anger is something that inevitably leads to harmful results. In other words, anger predetermines hurtful behaviors. If put this way, it begins to sound a bit silly right? We cannot be exonerated for hurting someone physically simply by saying, “I just couldn’t help it. My feelings took over me.”
The problem with treating anger as if it were a bad emotion is it often ends up with a paradoxical effect of actually making us even more victimized by our own emotions. How many times have you and I heard statements like, “Won’t you do the same thing if you had to deal with such a stupid person?” Our minds love to give us reasons for what we do because without the ability to reason, we would not be able to solve our day-to-day problems. For example, reasoning can tell us that if we stay long enough under the sun in sweltering conditions, it can cause us to suffer a heat stroke. That reasoning ability is useful in that context. Unfortunately, if we use it with our anger, we can draw a conclusion that our anger can cause us to “feel bad” (like being baked under the sun) and consequently make moves to remove the anger from our system by hitting someone or yelling and screaming. Causation is logical and can be helpful for us to know how we can avoid external threats, but when applied to internal threats like emotions and thoughts, it can cause us to do things that do not match our deepest aspirations for ourselves.
So how do we handle our emotions of anger? Doesn’t spewing it out or running away from the contexts that produce our anger make sense? Yes, it does work at times. We can remove ourselves from the company of people who hurt us. But sometimes the very same people who can hurt us, are the same ones we care about deeply. And although we can say that staying away from such people who instigate our anger can be effective, there will always be situations when we meet other people who remind us of the same people we try to avoid. There is that old ACT saying that goes, “Where are you gonna go, where your thoughts don’t go.”
So here’s my tip for dealing with anger, think of it as a two-step process. There is that familiar feeling of anger, and that split second reaction that we do in the face of anger. If we can slow down and notice what just happened to trigger our anger, what we do in the presence of our anger, and the consequences of such, then we have had a mindful moment. Another mindful practice is to just notice the anger for what it is. It is something that we experience, not what we are.
Then we go on to noticing or minding what is important for us in those moments. What do we want to be about in those challenging moments? Are we going to do what our minds tell us will get us out of the angry feelings, or are we going to stay with the anger and still be what we set out to be in those moments? In other words, we as humans are capable of long-term thinking and seeing the bigger picture. If something or someone truly matters to us, then all else can fade into the background. We can stay grounded and be kind to the people that we love, who can also be the very people who can make us feel angry. Mindfulness of values tells us that there’s something more important here than just trying to get rid of the angry feelings we have. Like maybe your most cherished relationship is on the line…and it’s all worth the pain of anger. Pause, slow down, stay with it, and be kind.