Affairs always bring anger. Whether you express it or not, admit it or not, there’s anger. Anger can energize you to take action; it can also be toxic when internalized.
Dealing with Internalized Anger <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad that you are here with me today. The topic we’re going to be dealing with today is dealing with internalized anger.
Affairs and anger, they seem to go together. Affairs always bring anger with you.
With the anger, whether you express it or not, whether you admit it or not, the anger is there. I know that there’s some of you that think “Well gee! Since I keep it on the inside it’s not really anger”. You’re fooling yourself.
Anger is impacting your body
Some of you have the anger and it’s chewing up in your body. You may be grinding your teeth, your blood pressure going up, your stomach’s in knots. But you’re not wanting to admit it to yourself.
When your body is giving you signals like that there’s anger. And you’re going to need to deal with it.
That is part of what’s behind the topic for today, the getting you to deal with all this internalized anger. This anger can energize you to take action and I realize there are some positive benefits to the anger.
The anger many times gives you the motivation to go ahead and make changes in your life. But it also, in more cases than not, turns very toxic.
Internalized anger is toxic
When the anger becomes internalized I can guarantee you it’s toxic. That’s the type of anger that we’re going to be dealing with today, this toxic type of anger where things have been internalized. Where we take it in and either don’t admit it, or we want to keep it there for a long time.
The thing is, as humans, we were never designed to handle anger well. Especially this internalized type of anger.
When the anger gets to the point where it’s affecting body systems it’s been internalized. If you’re going around doing a bunch of cursing and name-calling, these are definitely signs that you have got anger going on. There should be flashing yellow warning lights alerting you that there is danger.
If you’ve got worsening somatic issues, it’s not that the affair causes somatic issues, the stress of the affair and the anger often makes them worse. That’s some of the reasons why we’re going ahead and dealing with this today.
The solution, I call it “the bad breath solution”. Because if you’ve got a problem with bad breath you have to admit it, you’ve got to deal with it, and you’ve got to remove the source. That’s as simple as it gets today.
1. You’ve got to be honest with yourself about what you’re feeling. If you’re feeling anger admit it. I find one of the big obstacles is that some people grow up learning to be respectable, be it through what they learn in church or the segment of society that they grew up in, it may not be respectable to admit that you’re angry.
You’re going to have to set aside that pride, you’re going to have to set aside those ideas, and be honest with yourself about what you’re feeling right now. That’s admitting the issue.
Once you admit the issue then the second step.
2. You’re going to have to deal with it. Dealing with it involves either resolving anger or letting go of it as soon as you can. Some people say “Yeah, I’m angry”, but they choose not to deal with it at that point.
That’s not a good solution. Once you admit it you’re going to need to deal with it right away, as soon as you can. I was going to say as soon as possible, but a lot of people want to put off possible until the last possible moment.
That’s not going to work. Waiting only makes it worse. Not only does it make it worse, it drags the pain out.
Something that could have only put you in pain and misery for a few hours has been stretched out to a few days, a few months. I don’t know about you, but I would rather get over my pain in a short period of time rather than stretch it out over a long period of time.
Some of you may need to stretch it out for a period of time because you feel like you need to do penance. I don’t see the logic in that, but you feel like you need to.
In terms of my advice and direction, ‘Get rid of it as soon as you can’.
3. You’re going to need to turn off the anger at its source. Many times this involves replaying trigger events, because there’s the events of the affair. And in most cases those events are already in the past.
What happens, you find yourself replaying them or rehearsing them. Whatever you want to call it, almost like a movie in your head. You keep going over and over what happened.
You’re going to have to turn off that movie projector, turn off those trigger events. Because when you’ve got the internalized anger, replaying those events is like putting gasoline on a fire. It gets the anger going again. If you’re going to get rid of the anger you’ve got to turn off the source.
The Bad Breath Solution
Going back to my comment about the bad breath solution, after you admit that you’ve got a bad breath problem you deal with it, and then you remove the source. You quit doing whatever it is that gave you the bad breath in the first place.
If it’s eating onions, you cut out the eating onions. If it’s eating garlic you cut out eating garlic. If it is something in the way that you’re brushing your teeth, you quit doing whatever it was that you were doing wrong.
Likewise the things that are getting your anger going, quit doing it. Those images, those instant replays, that you’ve got to stop doing.
Go ahead and start this process of admitting it, dealing with it, and removing the source. It will help you through the affair recovery process.
One of the best ways of removing the anger is through forgiveness. You’ll still need some ways of learning to keep it away, yet forgiveness is a good starting point. In the video, “Forgiveness: Stop the Pain, Tear down the Walls and Remove the Roadblocks” I’ll guide you through ways of reducing your anger via forgiveness.
When you do forgiveness in the right way, it’s not an easy solution. Although it gives lasting results, the process requires honesty. When you’re ready for that kind of honesty and want relief, the material in the forgiveness video is for you.
Best Regards,
Jeff
