I have been going through my own battle of emotional control. It seems as though once I think I have my emotions regulated, something comes up that shakes me and loosens the grip I thought I had over my emotional stability. I can point fingers at who I think is to blame but in truth, the only one I have control over is me.
It used to take me days to move through negative emotions but now, I am able to conquer them in the same day and even the same instance. This week, I am writing in an attempt to help teach you my experience on how to control your emotions such as anger, resentment, fear, stress, guilt, disappointment and a plethora of other negative feelings.
Negative Emotions
I don’t think it is possible to enjoy the positive emotions without first experiencing the negative. I am sure there would be some strong disagreement with me on this take, but how can you truly appreciate and understand the force of the positive emotion without first experiencing the negative?
Negative emotions include, but are not limited to:
- Anger
- Stress (Anxiety)
- Fear
- Guilt
- Disappointment (dismay, inadequacy, despair, sadness)
- Resentment (unforgiveness)
- Emptiness
Anger
When I was in my youth, there wasn’t a person that could look at me for too long without me feeling like I was ready to join Fight Club! My internal temperature would rise and my inner voice would be convincing me that I couldn’t allow anyone to even think they could try me.
This reaction wasn’t confined to strangers, it was also practiced and encouraged by my closest relatives (reading my blogs, you will understand the theme here). This created an environment for anger to thrive, and with it, comes resentment, disappointment, and guilt.
I had gotten into a few party fights and by this time, my father decided it was time to tell me about my behavior. I went downstairs to his mancave in an attempt to explain to him why I needed to punch the lights out of people. As I was explaining myself, I told my dad “She made me so mad, I had to fight her” in which my dad replied “People don’t make you anger, you let yourself get angry.”
It was the first time I had heard that I could control the way I reacted to other people. I started to think about how I fought this girl and, even though I had ultimately won the fight, she was still verbally disrespectful. I had attempted to abduct the respect I was owed through fighting and I still did not receive what I had set out to accomplish.
The first step I took in controlling my anger was to notice when it was occurring. When I would get angry, the fire would start at the bottom of my soul and work its way up to the top of my head. Once it reached my head, I became cloudy in my thoughts and could only think to fight.
Understanding how your body begins to respond when encountering anger can help aid in your resistance against it. I think of Anger like a being that must be controlled or it will overcome you. Once I was able to realize how my body responded, I was able to notice that the conversation I was having and the action I needed to take.
Initially, I began to disengage in conversations where my body would give off the alerts that anger was approaching. This eventually lead to me recognizing the difference between when I needed to make a statement and be done with the conversation and when the statement wouldn’t be heard and I needed to walk away.
Controlling anger is not a one-stop shop. It is something that has to be practiced in various circumstances and to various degrees.
When I allowed anger to flourish within my soul, it brought with it resentment, disappointment, and guilt.
Resentment, Disappointment, and Guilt
As I previously stated, I believe that emotions are beings that we choose to engage with or dismiss. When we choose to develop deep relationships with emotions such as resentment, disappointment and guilt, we invite them to live with us and guide our behaviors.
When I would fail to control my anger, I would initially resent the person that presented the challenge to me. I would converse within myself on how the person treated me unfairly and how my reaction was warranted. I would convince myself that this person was the cause of my bad behavior and this resulted in my inability to forgive without a spoken apology from the perpetrator.
In some cases, the person would apologize in the exact way that I felt I needed to be asked, and in other cases they would not. Either way, once my emotions subsided, I felt disappointed and guilty in the way that I had behaved.
Disappointment and guilt can also be linked to dismay, inadequacy, despair and sadness. It is the emotion that lets us know, we have failed the task we were assigned or wanted to be assigned to do. In small, slightly meditative quantities, these emotions can serve us in redirecting our behavior; but in large deeply meditative quantities, they can hold us back from our full potential.
I would allow these emotions to sit with me for days and sometimes weeks before I came to the point of forgiving myself. Sitting in these feelings left no room for positive emotions such as forgiveness, love, and kindness but opened the floodgates to emptiness, stress, and fear.
I wasn’t able to conquer these emotions without God. I allowed God to redirect me back toward the path of righteousness and began praying more with the understanding that, this was not what The Most High God wanted His creations to live in. It is ok for us to experience these emotions, as they can be signs that a change needs to occur, but it is not ok to live in them.
Once I understood this, and began to pray that I could forgive others and myself, I was faced with more emotions that I hadn’t learned how to control. Those emotions were emptiness, stress and fear.
Emptiness, Stress, and Fear
Believe it or not, once I learned that I didn’t need to live in toxic emotions, I felt empty. Yes I was a believer in the Christian faith, but I was raised in a toxic family, I grew into a toxic person, and I had identified with my toxic emotions.
I was comfortable living in the emotional rollercoaster of toxicity but I hadn’t learned how to live in control of my emotions. I began having serious panic attacks and was rushed to the ER about 3 times; each of which I was diagnosed with a panic attack most likely caused by stress. It took me being hospitalized for me to understand that the stress of practicing toxic behavior was wreaking havoc on my body.
I decided to begin thinking (meditating) on what was causing me stress, and discovered that it was the relationship I was in. I mentioned earlier that my angry persona drew men to me, but what I didn’t realize, was that I was attracting the type of men that also lived in toxicity. The crazier and angrier I was, the more attracted they were to me and the softer and kinder I was, the more they became uninterested.
My upbringing bred abandonment issues which resulted in fear. Fear that someone would kidnap me in the middle of the night, fear that someone would cause me great physical harm, fear that someone I Love would leave me and never look back. The relationship I was in become full of infidelity, abandonment, extreme negative emotional harboring and robbed me of peace.
I would stay up all night monitoring his social media, driving past his house, calling his phone with a blocked caller ID, and hacking into his Facebook account until I found all the writings on the wall. I looked back on all of the behaviors I had practiced coupled with all the evidence I had found and knew, for my mental and physical health, that it was time for me to leave.
I had also made this man my god. When I left him, I left myself. When I stopped practicing toxic behaviors, I lost my identity, and when I realized I was single, I feared that I may not find someone else to Love me.
It took the strength of God and the courage He allowed me to hold in order for us to recreate myself into who I am today. Over the course of several years, I found out that my identity wasn’t in any man, but was found in God. I learned that the toxic behaviors that lived with me weren’t my friends, they were my enemies. I discovered that letting my emotions loose instead of controlling them was not freedom, but slavery. I discovered myself.
Proverbs 16:32
Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.
With Love,
Mother Ocia