Anger And Telling The Truth

Dr. Mort Orman here, and today I want to provide you with my final installment in this short, three-part series on how stress and telling the truth are intimately related.

In my initial article in this series, I shared my philosophy that the best way to eliminate stress from your life is to become better and better at telling the truth.

In my second article, I showed you how to apply this general principle to understanding why anxiety occurs for many individuals.

Today, I want to take a similar look at how anger and telling the truth are also related, much in the same way that anxiety is related to telling the truth (or not).

It’s just that this relationship is easier to see with anxiety…and not so easy to see with the emotion of anger.

Read on and I’ll try to explain why.

The Truth About Anger

As I previously did with anxiety, let me show you what we can say that is true (or close to being true) about anger?

Here are a few general statements we can make:

Anger is an emotion we experience from time to time.
As human beings, we can make ourselves feel angry whenever we want.
There are specific thought patterns that can trigger us to feel angry, whether we are thinking them consciously or unconsciously.
There are also specific action patterns that can result from getting angry, and many of these can make our anger feel worse or keep it going much longer than it should.
In our culture, we tend to believe that feeling angry, and expressing anger in certain situations, is a sign of being tough, being passionate, and being committed to excellence. We also believe that our anger—when we feel it—is justified, most of the time.

Once again, it’s not really difficult to state a few things that are true (or pretty close to being true) about anger in our lives.

But again, as we did for anxiety, let’s see if we can go even deeper.

Let’s see if we can acknowledge some “deeper” truths about anger that many people don’t know about and that some might actually disagree with—or perhaps even get angry about!

Deeper Truths About Anger

Here are a few deeper truths about anger in human beings:

Most people are not clear about the specific thought patterns which generate the emotion of anger for them and for all other human beings.
Most people are not clear that the action habits or behavior patterns they have developed (in response to feeling angry) can sometimes make their anger worse, or keep it going much longer than it should.
Human beings don’t get angry in response to things that happen in the real world outside them—they get angry because certain very specific “internal realities” get triggered inside their bodies, as a result of whatever might have happened in the external world. (We can also trigger off these same internal realities on our own, by our own thoughts, actions and beliefs).
The “internal realities” which produce our feelings of anger can be either true or false.
When our “internal realities” are “true,” it might be appropriate for us to feel angry, at least for a short while.
When they are false, we end up feeling angry for no good reason at all.
Most of the time when human beings are stressed by feeling angry, they are reacting automatically (and physiologically) to a false internal reality that has become triggered inside their bodies.

So, just like with anxiety, most of the time when you are feeling angry, it is because your body is actually lying to you!

Your body has become triggered to: a) have a false internal reality automatically appear within it (usually hidden from your view), and b) your body has also been triggered to automatically “believe” that your false internal reality is true!

And just as with anxiety, it is important to note that neither of these two automatic responses, which occur simultaneously and instantaneously within your body, is under your control.

You didn’t consciously make them happen (most of the time) and you can’t really do much to keep them from happening again, in the future.

But what you do have control over is what you choose to do once you (i.e., your body) becomes triggered to feel angry.

What Control Do You Have?

Well, as with anxiety or any other human emotion, you actually have several types of control.

There are a number of things you can do to deal with feeling angry, once you become aware that you have been triggered to experience this emotion.

And of the most effective things you can do, is simply tell the truth about whatever happened that triggered you.

You just tell the truth about the triggering event, and you also tell the truth about exactly how your triggered “internal reality” is actually false.

And the moment you connect with the “real truth” about whatever happened (both outside and inside of you), your anger will lessen, or in many cases, it will completely disappear.

As I previously pointed out, the big problem with this approach to understanding and dealing with anger is that our society discourages us from getting really good at telling the truth.

This is made an even more difficult when it comes to telling the truth about our anger (as well as other emotions like guilt and frustration), because unlike with anxiety, we seldom get clear feedback that our automatic assumptions are definitely wrong!

You see, with anxiety, we are usually feeling this emotion when we are predicting some future harm. We are very clear about the harm we are imagining, and we are also very clear when it doesn’t actually occur.

With anger and other emotions, on the other hand, we don’t get this immediate, real-world confirmation that our triggered internal realities have gone astray.

You have to figure this out for yourself, and if you don’t do the work that is needed, you may never get relief from your angry feelings.

This is why feelings of anxiety usually go away very quickly, while we can hold on to our anger for months or years or even decades before we finally figure out that we were angry because of some deep misperceptions.

You can literally be angry at someone for years, and then suddenly, one day, you view the past differently (and more truthfully) and…poof!…all your anger immediately disappears.

Having now explored this inverse relationship between feeling angry and telling the truth, in both myself and in all the many people I have worked with during the past thirty years, I can confidently tell to you that most of the time we are feeling angry, our anger is not really justified.

It is just our body lying to us, and our inability to notice that this is all that’s really happening.

So I hope you got some value from this article and the other two earlier ones in this series.

Talking about the relationship between telling the truth and our emotions (and other types of stress) is never an easy topic to confront.

But the more you take a look at it, the more you’ll be surprised by what you will likely find.

To your health, happiness and success,

Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com