There’s a great deal of anger within you right now. And you’re going to need to release that anger or find ways to resolve that anger, ideally with the help of others in order to move forward in life and get unstuck from where you are right now. You feel stuck because you’re fighting yourself internally. There is part of you that is fighting to remember the past, stay in the past, and resolve the trauma or issue that you’ve faced in the past that keeps getting triggered – namely by toxic relationships and disrespect in relationships as you try to move forward in your life. And in general, disrespect from people that you encounter in the world. That is something that is triggering these deep seated feelings of anger within you. This in particular is a righteous anger. It is completely normal and understandable and valid to feel angry when you experience disrespect in your day-to-day life.
The reason why it can feel so challenging to move on from these disrespectful encounters with people in your day-to-day life is because it’s not just the disrespect you’re dealing with on its face in that moment. There’s also a lot of disrespect that you’ve dealt with when you were little as a younger person. That gets triggered every time you encounter that disrespect in your current life. That, in fact, is the source of you experiencing these repeat events of that disrespect and that anger being triggered.
Disrespect is not a naturally occurring thing. It’s not normal. People who disrespect you are not viewing you as part of themselves, as part of being one with the universe. Plants don’t disrespect each other. Animals don’t disrespect each other. There’s a certain kind of unity or oneness that exists in all other levels of being. But when there’s a level of disconnect with universal oneness, that disrespect manifests. This is not a matter of dismissing that behavior or saying that “hurt people hurt people” and “they’re not worthy of your time or energy so ignore them.” It is actually appropriate for you in this situation to deal with that disrespect in a more straightforward manner.
Being able to explore therapy modalities or see a professional in some way, shape, or form that can help you walk through and talk through and figure out coping strategies to deal with the anger triggered by experiencing that disrespect could be very helpful for you. Also, don’t just assume that talk therapy could be the best option for you in this situation. There are many different forms of therapy that you could also find helpful. Modalities of therapy that have more to do with somatic experiencing, dance, music, art, play, these all could be helpful avenues for you to express yourself and to return to yourself in a way physically in your body and emotionally in a way that helps you to be present with the anger you’re feeling and to experience your emotions in a healthy way that allows them to move through your body and not just feel like they’re getting stuck in your body.
This not feeling of the emotions that are coming up is what’s causing the feeling of stuckness in your external energy. There’s a stagnation or a dam built in your internal energy and that’s manifesting as a stuckness in your externally manifested energy. You were being disrespected as a child not because you did anything wrong or because you deserved it but because the adults around you were not emotionally mature enough to handle the raising or the caretaking of a child. And so part of you blames yourself for why that happened because there’s this automatic thing oftentimes where children blame themselves for the behavior of their parents because we’re too young to realize that people that hurt us that are adults or are older can also be flawed. They’re also human. They make mistakes. They are not prepared adequately for how to deal with the emotions of a child when they haven’t even gotten to the point in their own evolution that they are able to in a healthy way handle their own emotions.
So the first thing that you should know is that it wasn’t your fault that the adults around you when you were a child didn’t handle your anger well, that they tried to punish you for expressing anger and they were not supportive and were able to listen to you and be present with you while you were experiencing feelings of anger. You might have been demonized as a child, even up through your teenage years and into your young adulthood, until you might have been able to separate yourself from those adults. You might have experienced being scapegoated, being treated as a “black sheep,” being pathologized and pointed to as having mental health issues or there being something “wrong” with you, even though that’s not the case at all. You were a perfectly normal functioning human being. You just were experiencing a certain range of the emotional spectrum, and they did not like needing to be the person responsible for helping you understand and learn how to manage those emotions in a healthy way.
The second thing is that, although you may have blamed yourself for how the adults in your life treated you when you expressed things like anger or any emotion that has negative connotations placed on them by current popular society, it’s time to stop participating in that behavior now, because constantly blaming yourself or over-attributing, over-blaming yourself for the ways that other people treated you is still something that is carrying over into your life today. It can be a form of self-gaslighting and a way that you are being dismissive towards yourself with regards to how you’re feeling and the reality of your situation, which is that, even though the way other people treated you was inappropriate, it is still your responsibility now to do the work, the introspective work, and the emotional work, the healing work, to seek help and to educate yourself on what healthy relationships with emotionally mature people and emotionally healthy people look like. To start to inch yourself, through deliberate practice, closer to a healthy emotional baseline and to start to focus on building those healthy, emotionally mature and rich relationships that you are desiring.
Once you’re able to do that, even if you feel like you haven’t made as much progress as you’re wanting in as short a time period as you’re wanting, you’ll start to notice aspects of your life start to lighten – the energies that you’re dealing with in your life will start to lighten – meaning you might experience less emotional cloudiness, feelings of mood swings, feelings of extreme emotionality towards one end of the spectrum or the other. You might feel a bit more emotionally level and experience more emotional clarity, which is being able to, from an almost more distant perspective, recognize when some emotion feels triggered, and to be able to almost as a third party observer, witness and experience or feel that emotion occurring, but also maintain a certain aspect of mental clarity that allows you to understand that you are not your emotions, you’re not getting swept away with your emotions, you’re able to understand your experience: ”I’m experiencing this feeling of ‘X’ (insert the name of the emotion here). This is what triggered it, and this is what I can do to help myself through feeling this emotion and being present with this emotion.”
What you’re developing here is a certain level of emotional intelligence and adeptness that will allow you to move through life in a way that is a lot more… not just level-headed, but calmer. It’s just a little bit more keen. Right now it seems like you can feel like emotions take you by surprise, or you feel like they sneak up on you and all of a sudden before you know it, you are experiencing a complete tidal wave of one emotion or another and you feel pulled under and you feel very dissociated and discombobulated – just kind of frazzled and just not in control of yourself. What you want to do is befriend your emotions and change your mindset around how you’re viewing their role in your life.
You are not a victim to your emotions and they’re not trying to attack you. They are simply information that comes in the form of energy that you’re able to feel within your body, and can also be triggered as a result of encountering different things in life that simply give you information as to what you need to do inward, where you need to go inward to resolve any lingering trauma or tells you information about how you’re feeling about something.
For example, let’s say you’re playing basketball and someone slaps the ball out of your hand and shoves you aside roughly. Your brain may recognize that “we’re playing a game of basketball. They’re not necessarily trying to be rude. They didn’t necessarily do it with mean or bad intentions.” But another part of you may feel very emotionally triggered – you felt like they were trying to disrespect you on purpose and they didn’t have to treat you like that, they didn’t have to shove you like that, they didn’t have to slap the ball out of your hands like that. You may feel triggered into feeling anger, feeling like you’ve been disrespected, feeling like you don’t want to interact with that person anymore or feeling slighted by that person. In response to this, instead of being able to have coping strategies to deal with the emotions in the moment and potentially make it through the rest of the game or decide that you want to leave the game in order to caretake yourself emotionally, you find yourself shutting down, being passive aggressive, and going into a negative thought spiral about yourself and potentially about that other person as well.
When we talk about you developing the skill and consciousness of emotional maturity. We mean that you can assess in that moment from a more disidentified perspective that doesn’t necessarily feel pulled in one way or another that: you feel disrespected and you feel like that person may have had a certain negative energy when they were interacting with you, even though it falls within the reasonable bounds of this game. You may decide consciously to say that, since you’re feeling emotionally triggered in a way that you feel like you wouldn’t be able to continue with the game without being distracted or feeling distracted, you’re going to sit out the rest of the game so you can go sit on the side and meditate and work on feeling your emotions, maintaining clarity through feeling the full processing of that emotion in your body. You may decide to leave entirely so you can go home and process exactly what that triggered for you and what it brought up. That is also completely appropriate. You may decide that this is something that you want to bookmark and put to the side but you still desire even more so than how intense that feeling is that you want to finish the game. So you make a mental note to yourself to revisit that feeling later, and you stay focused on being present in the game, you finish the game, and later when you are alone and you have time to yourself, you recall the emotion of that moment and go into a meditation to feel through the emotions that came up.
All of this emotional processing sounds like a lot of labor and work for things that may feel like they are happening constantly for you. But the reality is: to develop and make progress in your emotional development and to get unstuck in life. This is exactly what needs to happen. You need to spend more time with your emotions and have a mindset shift of taking your emotions seriously. They are not things to be shoved aside without conscious thought or ignored or thought of as inconvenient. Trying to move forward in your life and be successful at your career, at your relationships, at anything in life is going to be severely hindered, if not entirely blocked, by not being able to feel your emotions and allow them to move through your body without getting stuck.
Feel your emotions and allow them to move through your body with healthy processing strategies as opposed to just either bulldozing them or numbing them out. That’s ultimately one of the biggest mindset shifts that anyone can make in their life as current popular society definitely does not account for and potentially actively discourages centering one’s emotional self in their life. It may be seen as weak or petty or odd or overly spiritual in a way. But don’t let these potential negative connotations or stigmas or stereotypes stop you from doing what you know you need to do to enhance your life experience. Because ultimately, the message here is that you are more than capable of building a life full of joy for yourself and building a life that feels very good for yourself. But that life does not exist without proper, healthy, emotional processing.
So if you need to jettison a number of other practices or aspects, parts of your day, your schedule, your routine, in order to make more space for processing your emotions, now is a very good time to do that. The energy of this month in particular is very conducive to you being able to get rid of things that are standing in the way of your emotional prosperity. So wherever you are in time right now, take a thorough audit of your life, your daily routine, and all of the stuff, the things, the “busyness” that inhabits it – if you feel like you need more time and space to be able to sit with and process your emotions – take an audit of all of the things that you can get rid of in your life to make more time and space for the one thing that truly matters in terms of your relationship to yourself and your own authenticity. Because your truth matters. And when you don’t have the time and space to sit and be present with your truth, which often comes through in the form of experiencing emotional volatility, that can be absolutely devastating in every other area of your life.
So truly, this is a call towards doing more inner work and understanding how that inner work is not optional. It’s also not something to be done begrudgingly. It’s truly an act of loving yourself. So being willing to figure out ways to enjoy and embrace being with yourself and loving yourself in this way will truly transform your relationship with yourself and your improved relationship with yourself will also eventually reflect in your external reality as improved relationships with people around you, which is something that it feels like you are very much desiring deep down inside.
Everything you want is on the other side of fear. Everything you want is on the other side of making sure that you are correctly prioritizing your emotions much higher than you have been previously. Anything that doesn’t have to be in your life, remove it and make more space for your emotional processing and for learning how to, in a healthy manner, process your emotions, and that will help you to never get stuck in your life again. Your energy will be able to flow freely now through your body and your energy in terms of your forward movement in life will also be able to move freely as a result of this.