What Is Anger? Anger Is Self-Hypnosis

In this series of articles I'm exploring how negative emotions actually have their roots in positive intentions.

Anger feels like a negative emotion, but anger is about fairness and justice. It is a message from you to you to say something is not right. Anger is an emotional reaction that gives you strength to fight your corner when wronged. If you become the emotion though, you are likely to do things that you will later regret.

Anger can be a detrimental emotional trance. Trance is a narrowing of focus. Hypnosis is a form of trance. In a stage show someone might be hypnotised to believe that their chair is hot, and the audience will enjoy the hilarity of the hypnotic subject leaping out of their chair flapping at their bottom. Their chair is not hot, but hypnosis has narrowed their focus onto one idea – their chair is hot. Their mind is so focussed on that one idea it becomes real to the exclusion of any evidence to the contrary.

If something happens to make you feel anger and you forget it is just a message from you to you that something's not right, then you become the message. Your mind narrows its focus on that one thing that was not right to the exclusion of everything else. That's why some people hurt those closest to them verbally or physically when angry. They are beyond rationality. The anger is as real to them as the chair is hot to that hypnotised person.

If you are able to experience anger as message though, you can experience the emotion less overwhelmingly while remaining able to think clearly and make measured judgements on what you should do and say. Is this a situation where you need to step up or walk away? What reaction is fair and just in your part so as not to exacerbate the problem?

If you're interested in how to protect yourself from your own detrimental emotional trances, I'd be very happy to talk with you.