Anger is such a great emotion that has such
a huge taboo over it. “Nice” people don’t get angry:  that’s the message I grew up with.  Instead of developing healthy ways of feeling and expressing anger, I was left hanging, feeling shame for feeling it and no reasonable way to deal with it. When I eventually came across Louise Hay’s work on how specific diseases can be linked to the suppression of specific emotions, it made sense to me and gave me the motivation to acknowledge and work with my achilles heel, which was anger, but it took many, many years and a lot of healing to clear the backlog and learn to work with it as an ally in the present moment.

I love anger.  It’s a clear signal that something you are experiencing in the present is not in alignment with who you are and what you are wanting to create in your life.  It is a force, a huge rush of energy that you can use to make change, take action, improve yourself, but the key is to keep that emotional energy IN MOTION.

Abraham talk about the Emotional Guidance Scale* and how hard it is to move instantly from a low state to a high state and especially, to maintain a higher state if you haven’t moved steadily through at least some of the stages of emotion in between – the difference in vibration is just too great.  It’s why you can feel on a such a rollercoaster of highs and lows when you start working with self development and spiritual ideas and why many people end up feeling inadequate or guilty that they haven’t maintained the peak experiences they felt when they were in a workshop or with someone who’s inspiring and uplifting to be with.

That steady progression needn’t take more than a few minutes but it can even take months or years depending on where you are in your personal journey and where you tend to steady out emotionally on a day-to-day basis (in the health field they call that your set point but you shift it with practise).  The fact is that many of us start off pretty low and may have gotten used to feeling depressed or powerless or insecure and so we need to feel angry because anger feels better than feeling powerless or depressed or scared.  The problem is that anger is not ‘allowed’.  People around you may prefer you to be in one of the lower states than moving into anger because anger is a BIG emotion and, especially if you haven’t had enough practise at owning it rather than directing at other people, it can be very uncomfortable to be around.

How often do you see parents pacifying their angry children, trying to get them to ‘quiet down’ or people telling an angry person to calm down or pull it together?  If every time you reach anger, you’re sent back down to shame or powerlessness, it can be hard to feel the relief and freedom that lies just the other side of it in blame, or doubt or boredom, let alone hitting hopefulness, optimism or joy as your regular inner feeling.  Of course it’s useful to know how to ‘be angry’ without directing anger ‘at’ another person, but I should think that’s a whole other post for another day.

I’ve noticed that, luckily, kids move through their Emotional Guidance Scale much more easily than us adults who’ve had the process hampered a little.  It can be really easy to help them to keep the energy in motion by simply allowing them to express themselves freely until they shift on their own, or by validating them by just stating what you see they’re feeling without judgement or adding to the drama of the situation.  However, sometimes they need a little more help, especially if they’ve already learned some less effective ways of coping from parents who are a work in progress, like me (raises her hand).  I like my children to have control over themselves, so rather than do any surrogate tapping for them, I prefer to show them how to do it for themselves so they can have a tool for life.

In line with that, here’s another video from Brad Yates and his adept assistant to help your child deal with anger.  EFT doesn’t deny the emotion, it just gets the energy flowing where it’s gotten ’stuck’ in a person’s ’story’ or field, freeing their way up the scale.

Happy tapping to you and your family:

Brad adds this note:

*Once again, thanks to Vickie for her post on the Emotional Guidance Scale here.