Lately, as a result of some rather deep experiments, I have been exploring my own emotional reactivity. When faced with situations I find offensive, threatening, stupid, or aggressive, I usually feel a combination of fear and anger, regardless of what options are at play. When egregiously invoked, these specific emotions are effectively crippling. In fact, they produce sub-behaviors that become ways of living. These are deadly traps, and many people live and die never having escaped them.

Last night, I decided to examine a situation in which ‘I have every right to be angry’. It goes on once a day, early in the morning. This is about the 180th time it has awakened me to a hellish racket over the past ~200 days.

As I went to bed the night before, I carefully examined the situation from a relatively objective perspective and I realized that these emotions were, in fact, structured -methods- I had developed throughout my lifetime. That I could actually select other methods.

The problem is that some of the most pernicious and least useful methods at our disposal are the most aggressively self-promoting and seductive. Thus it is possible to develop and become deeply habituated to their enaction long before one recognizes the threat. This, in fact, appears to be the basic soil of psycho-emotional peril.

Once I saw it was a structured response, I realized I could probably suspend it, and then, from the state of suspension, trace out the missing effects to see what was gained or lost, in a manner of speaking.

The results were fairly astonishing.

My test stimuli began on time this morning, in fact, it started, literally, with a bang that shook the walls. As I began to react, I reminded myself of my previous considerations and slipped into an observational mode. Primarily, in this case, I was suspending the anger response. All the avenues of it, and the stories that support it. The justifications. The history. The suppositions. The rights. All of it. The event became rather boring. Not very interesting at all. Actually, not worth the effort to be upset about.

Result: The negative impacts of the event, cognitively, emotionally, and metabolically, which would ordinarily be severe, were negligible. The positive impacts of the event were dramatic, and immediate. I learned like mad. Since I was not reacting, and seeing the ways reactivity would ordinarily drive me around like a car attacking itself, what I got instead of a crisis was depth, understanding, change, and growth.

Anger is not without its purposes or place. So, too, fear. But when out of place, and this is most of the time, they are often crippling or catastrophic (or both) to everyone involved. Particularly the angry person.

While it’s true that ‘I have every right to be angry’, I have -more- right to peace. That starts here. With the realization that I am learning to see my habituated responses, to set them aside, and to develop new and more humane ways. Survivable ways. Ways that transform hardship into fuel for growth… and then, ignite that fuel.

I learn.