A Revolutionary, New Approach To Heal Angry Feelings


Anger, not expressed, can have potentially devastating effects, especially when you suppress it and turn it inward on yourself. Harboring feelings of anger often leads to emotional or physical consequences. We see this every few months in the news about an incident in which a person shoots several strangers. The latest event of this kind that occurred early in 2007 took place in Utah.

On a more mundane level, people who leave work with pent up anger take their feelings out on those who have a harder time fighting back such as spouses, children and waitresses. Suppressed anger can eat away at the body producing headaches, eating disorders, intestinal disturbances, and other more serious illnesses. It can also diminish your self-esteem, undermine your self-confidence, and reduce your feelings of self-worth.

If you’ve been struggling from such aftereffects of anger, would you like to achieve a healing from them? A few years ago, I discovered a powerful method that could enable you to heal from the debilitating effects of anger held in. I call my approach the Anger Technique.

I must caution you though, it is not easy to use. Before you begin, you must make sure that it is safe for you to do a significant amount of physical exercise. In addition, you must be certain it is okay for you to get in touch with angry feelings that you hold. Furthermore, it requires significant emotional work for up to twenty-five minutes per day for a week or two.

Is my approach worth the effort? You bet. If you are able to use it successfully, the healings you obtain are truly life changing. As I implied the results come unusually quickly. Furthermore, the healings appear to be both complete and permanent.

Description of the Anger Technique Is there a person toward whom you have harbored strong angry feelings? Imagine you are confronting this person. In a standing position, visualize yourself screaming at the person phrases like “you son of a gun.” Obviously, you would want to use much stronger language. You need not do this out loud.

As you express these feelings, it is essential to involve your body physically. One way to do this would be to move your arms like a boxer punching a heavy bag. With another way, you could place a pillow at the edge of your bed, kneel down on the floor, and pound on the pillow. Use whatever variation would work best for you.

You will make the best progress if you put all your strength into the physical effort. To avoid exhaustion, do this for about five seconds at a time and then relax for a few minutes until your body has calmed down. Repeat this a number of times in a twenty- to twenty-five minute session. After several of these sessions (typically between three and eight) you should go through what I call a healing transformation (HT). The HT might last anywhere from a split second to several seconds. It is likely to occur as you are “screaming” and “punching,” and when it begins, you should continue what you are doing.

When the HT happens, you might experience sensations that are not easy to characterize. The most salient feeling is a tingling in the upper part of your body. It is similar to what you experience when your foot has been asleep and is in the process of reawakening. Light headedness and deep breathing might accompany this tingling. After the HT, you are likely to experience a deep feeling of relaxation in the pit of your stomach that will last for a few days.

The results may be somewhat different if you acquired your angry feelings gradually, rather than through a traumatic incident. In such cases an HT might not occur. I am confident, though, that the approach will still be beneficial in terms of reducing your angry feelings.

Another Benefit of the Technique I have also learned that if you use the technique on a situational basis, that is, whenever you feel very angry or frustrated because of an upsetting experience, the technique will dissolve the angry feelings or frustration and allow you to maintain a healthy emotional state. There is nothing wrong with feeling appropriately angry when you feel mistreated. It isn’t the anger that is destructive; it is the harboring of it that creates problems. On such occasions, when I use the technique for just a few minutes, it helps me release most of my anger. I can then view the person with whom I am angry from a more peaceful or neutral perspective. If the situation is such that I need to communicate further with the individual, the procedure allows me to later relate my concerns in a calmer and more effective manner. Here are two examples. One day, on my way home, I had an unpleasant encounter with an extremely nasty bus driver. Although my behavior during the interaction was quite reasonable, later on I wanted to express some of the anger and frustration I was still feeling toward the man. Using the Anger Technique in the comfort of my home for just a few minutes helped me become much more at peace.

On another occasion, I felt rejected by a woman to whom I was very attracted. For a long time, this was a mutual attraction. When she abruptly changed her mind, I felt frustrated. Using the technique for several minutes helped me express and eliminate my emotions. I was then able to think about her from a completely neutral point of view. If you use the Anger Technique, I am interested in knowing your results. Please contact me to let me know. You can reach me at P.O. Box 173, Newton, MA 02456.

Fred Craver, Ph.D., is a partially sighted person who is now developing his fourth career, as a professional speaker and author. He discovered his approach for dispelling anger in the mid-nineteen nineties out of his desperation to rid himself from long held angry feelings. The inner peace that soon resulted was most gratifying.

Fred began his professional life as a college teacher of physics at St. John Fisher College, near Rochester, New York, where he taught courses at all levels. When his declining vision made teaching difficult, he became a human services director and social worker. He ran a summer vacation program for blind adults sponsored by the Massachusetts Association for the Blind. When developing technologies made it possible for partially sighted people to work with computers, he became a programmer at the Army Research Laboratory in Watertown. Fred received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University and his master’s and doctoral degrees in the same subject from the University of Rochester.

Life can be a beautiful thing, but if we don’t understand life, we might end up fighting it. More often than not, it’s you and I against the world. Making a living, holding on to our relationships, to our wealth, our political and spiritual beliefs, these can become monumental struggles. Worry and fear is the classic result, followed closely by anger. When someone cuts us off in traffic, it’s not that one incident that sets us off; it’s the accumulation of pressures that have been simmering in our minds for quite sometime.

Some of us are fortunate; things go well enough that we develop expectations that our good luck will continue indefinitely, and we are able to create buffer zones. Then disrespect from other angry people doesn’t cause severe reactions, and the cycle of anger, where each tries to regain respect by diminishing the other, is disrupted, and things don’t spiral out of control. If the cycle of anger isn’t cut by someone by backing down, violence results, maybe even war.

But if life creates a majority of people who are dissatisfied because of a disparity of wealth, or a lack of freedom, or many of the inequities we see around the world, then violence becomes a way of life, and suffering can become widespread. The trouble is; we never know exactly how life will play out for us. It’s a crapshoot.

If we are intelligent at all, we know that our good life is susceptible to erosion, so we attempt to shore it up and secure ourselves. The definition of secure is “firmly attached,” and being firmly attached to anything means that we cling to it desperately. In other words, we fear losing it; therefore, security cannot exist without its companion . . . fear.

If we don’t understand our thirst for security and the resulting fear, then, although we are extremely intelligent in other areas, we are ignorant of the basic mechanisms of our heart, and when we are ignorant of life at this basic level, we make bad decisions. One bad decision is becoming angry when that which we cling to is threatened. Clinging is the first bit of ignorance, and anger merely compounds it.

This plays out all the time. Look at anybody who becomes angry, and underneath the anger you will find what it is they depend upon, what is threatened. We must investigate in this manner if we are ever to become free and see the beauty of life. Only when we understand our underlying motives and urges can we unchain ourselves. If we don’t understand our motives, how can we not blindly continue down the same roads that have caused so much of our worry and fear in the past?

This lack of understanding, and especially the lack of interest in understanding, is ignorance, an insidious ignorance, because we don’t realize that we’re ignorant; we think that we are extremely intelligent. Our intelligence, unfortunately only goes as far as our brains, and not our hearts. We are blind to the workings of our hearts. The heart to us means emotion, but this is not the heart at all, the heart is intelligent beyond emotion, beyond animal instincts of survival, of greed, hatred, and illusions. When we are able to develop this kind of intelligence, not only will we end our anger, but we will end our fear and conflict as well.

In personal development, one of the main goals is to achieve happiness. What often stands in the way are “negative” emotions that linger on. Most people have some of these emotions, either repressed or lasting with no outlet. Some are low level, some are strong.

Recognising that you have this sadness or anger bottled up inside you, or dealing with lower level emotions are articles that can be found on the Urban Monk website. I am focusing on letting out anger on this article because I feel it is one of the worst. It is crippling; it colours everything you do in your life and is often linked with depression.

Anger is crippling

I used to suffer from massively pent-up emotions; while I was often described as a teddy bear guy, I had massively pent-up anger and to a lesser extent, sadness. When I blew up, I blew up. I became verbally abusive and irrational – often this would only be shown to, and therefore unintentionally hurt, the people who love me the most and are the closest to me. This led to a deep depression that lasted for more then a year – and badly deteriorating physical health.

So trust me; be honest with yourself, and find out if you have anger issues. If you do, take steps to fix it – for yourself and those who love you.

Besides being a major step towards happiness, there are other benefits to dropping all that emotional weight from your shoulders. Self-esteem, confidence, and courage are other parts that develop as you deal with anger.

Understanding Anger and Sadness

The first step to dealing with it is to understand anger. Anger is not “negative”. It is simply an energy; an emotion. It serves as a protection system. When you get angry, it is a sign that something or someone is infringing on you or your rights.

It is not to be confused with blind rage; blind rage is when you start being abusive; when you start being violent towards inanimate objects, or worse, other people. That is not healthy.

I heard a great analogy once; emotions are like vegetables. When they are fresh, they are fine, when you hold it in for a long time, that’s when they become toxic. They explode to the surface and manifest themselves in unhealthy ways. It could also lead to cancer, stress, and several other nasty conditions.

How to deal with Anger

There are a few universal exercises for releasing anger across all the different sorts of methodologies and therapies I’ve researched. I’ve captured the essence here.

Often times you need to do this a few times. Pain comes in waves, and often times one such exercise won’t be enough to release all that pent-up energy.

There are many causes of anger or sadness; bad parenting, childhood bullies, and so on. Try to trace it back to the roots, understand it, and try to give it a voice. As you’ll see below, this is vital, as the vocal component is the most important.

Note: If it is something that you cannot handle, please do not feel ashamed to seek out professional help. And avoid self-destruction; numbing of the pain with alcohol, drugs, or other risky behaviour. I went through a whole year of this and paid for this behaviour physically and emotionally for nearly a year after. And I’m one of the luckier ones.

Once you have that, find a safe location. Somewhere you can scream and act out your anger and sadness – either alone, or with an understanding person. With each one of the following options, remember you need to scream out – all the words you’ve always wanted to say – while you are doing it. Even if it’s just a string of vulgarities, do it!

Let it all out. You might feel weird and self-conscious doing this, it’s normal. Don’t give up. Just do it over and over again until you feel that all your repressed anger is gone. You'll know when this happens, instinctively. It might take weeks, it might take days, it’s different for everyone.

The three steps

1) Do this in a safe location. Kneel on your bed like you're praying. Find a large pillow. Make a hammer fist with your hands. Not a boxing style fist, you might your wrist. And pound the pillows, with all your might until you can’t go any more.
2) Sometimes twisting is better. Find a towel, and twist it like you are trying to wring out every last drop of water.
3) Sometimes just screaming is good enough. Go somewhere abandoned, with some loud music put on maximum and scream with your whole body. Become the yell. Yell until your whole body trembles.

What’s next?

Usually what follows the release of anger is sadness. Read the next in this series of articles for this at the Urban Monk website. You’re on your way to Mastery!

This article is for educational purposes only. It is based on the author’s research and own experience; however you and you alone are responsible for what you do with it. By reading this article you agree that he will assume no liability or responsibility to any person or entity for any loss or damage related directly or indirectly to this article.