by Richard Mills | Dec 31, 2014 | All my articles, Emotions
• Anger is not bad or good; it’s part of being human: it just is. • I need my anger, so I know someone did something that I may need to address. • I need to know when I am powerless to act (so that I don’t obsess about the actions of the other person or people.) • Anger is not the same as violent or uncontrolled expression of rage. Sometimes people get worried about anger being present in themselves or another person, because of a fear that violence will follow: to express anger does not mean someone is going the be hit. • If there were no anger in the world, would anyone bother trying to change anything? • If I say that I am disappointed with someone, but not angry with them, am I denying that I am somewhat annoyed? Sometimes it feels like we are not supposed to be angry at all: it’s tempting sometimes to think that if only we were never angry, we’d be happy. However, we need our anger: just imagine if you were never angry – you would not be good at defending yourself. You need to know when someone has wronged you, and when you need to stand up for yourself. I don’t feel good about the division of emotions into negative and positive emotions: anger is not negative or positive: we just have it. What can be negative, however, is what we do with it. For that reason, you need to know your anger, where it comes from, and how big or small it is. I have sometimes met people who...
by Richard Mills | Dec 31, 2014 | All my articles, Emotions
‘Leap and the net will appear’ (John Burroughs 1837 – 1921) Believe it or not, when I was a kid and was afraid, I often didn’t know it!… I went to a co-counselling workshop in 1996 run by a woman called Margot. The workshop was called ‘Fear’. I think I only went along because I had a spare afternoon, so I wasn’t really expecting much to happen for me. My main pre-occupations were my lack of confidence, my embarrassment about getting intimate with people, my tendency to be spiky or impatient with people who pissed me off, my… (Well, I won’t go through the whole list here.) The thing is, I didn’t really think I had much fear. Well, the workshop took the lid off things. To be continued… 31 December...
