Chapter Seven: From Anger to Compassion

I first saw Mahala and Tonya twenty-four years ago when they first got together. They parented three children, one adopted son from China and two girls who were conceived from a sperm donor, one born to Mahala and the other to Tonya. Mahala was and is a famous singer/songwriter. She has a demanding schedule so most of the parenting duties have fallen to Tonya. Two of their children, Kathy and Tom, are in college. Sonya is a junior in high school. Mahala and Tonya were entering menopause together. Both had issues with anger and both were easily triggered into being angry.“So this is menopause,” Mahala said.“It might be easier going through this with a male partner,” Tonya said.“Men have their own issues at mid-life,” I said.“We wouldn’t know,” Mahala said. “So what do we do?”“This fellow Steven Stosny has developed a ritual that I intend to teach you,” I said. “If you learn to use it, this ritual will transform your anger into compassion and help you become a person of compassion instead of an angry idiot.”“You are calling us angry idiots,” Tonya said.“You are not angry idiots now,” I said. “But anger shuts off two-thirds of your brain and leaves you with a brain of a five-year-old child. And you two are in your forties. For a forty-year-old adult, that would make you an idiot.”“After our fights, when I have calmed down, I can’t believe I said those things,” Tonya said. “They were so childish. I didn’t mean most of them.”‘”I’m the same,” Mahala concurred. “I play back what happened in our fights and I acted like I remember our children acting. When they witness our fights, they just walk away disgusted. I can’t blame them. I’m disgusted too. Angry idiots. I plead guilty.”“So what is this ritual?” Tonya asked.“I call it the HEART ritual.”“How does it work?” Mahala asked.“When we are angry, our bodies and brains are filled with angry neurohormones—endorphins and norepinephrine to reduce pain and vasopressin and cortisol to raise our blood pressure and increase our heart rate. These neurohormones work together. The thalamus-amygdala parts of the brain pull the blood away from the skin, shut down sensory input and force us into narrow, either/or thinking. As long as these angry neurohormones dominate our brains, we will be angry and limited in our ability to think. No one but us can change these chemicals.”“So what do we do, take a pill?” Mahala asked.“No,” I answered. “You move from anger to a different emotion. Each emotion has its own set of neurohormones. If you invite a new emotion into your brain, the anger neurohormones will be diluted. Other parts of your brain will be turned on so that your thoughts are not so restricted.”“So there are a lot of emotions,” Mahala said. “Which ones do we go to to get our brains and mouths washed out?”“There are nine basic emotions,” I said. “They are anger, fear, sadness, joy, desire, shame, surprise, disgust and rest or sleep. Fear won’t work. It might shut down anger, but the moment your oppressor releases you, your anger pops back. Surprise adds energy and we need to calm down. So surprise won’t work. Desire also adds energy. Joy will merge easily with anger and we become sadistic, enjoying our cruelty. You don’t want to go to joy. Rest or sleep would be good but most of us can’t go from rage to sleep. Disgust works with anger like joy does, making us entitled to look down upon the object of our anger.So that leaves sadness or shame to be our best options. They are different versions of hurt. The basis of most anger is hurt. Our anger works as a defense to protect us from being hurt more. So it is easy to find our hurt below our anger, if we take time to look.”“I don’t want to look for my hurt,” Mahala said. “I have enough of that. I will just get stuck there because I will believe I am a worthless piece of crap.”“Well there’s a step to help us avoid that deep shame pit as well,” I said. “That’s the third step.”“So go through steps of the HEART ritual with us,” Tonya said.  The HEART RitualH – Halt. Stop. Don’t say another word. Don’t move. Imagine seeing a stop sign or H A L T in flashing letters. You have engaged will power and will power only lasts about 40 seconds. That’s how long you have to get to the next step. Halt only tells you not to feel; this never works for long. You must feel something. So get to step two as quickly as you can. E – Explore or Examine your hurt beneath your anger. Memorize these words:Unimportant            Powerless      Disregarded              UnlovableDevalued                   Accused         Rejected        Unfit for Human Contact Memorizing these words and choosing one or a few of them engages your whole brain. Having these words at the ready will get you into your neo-cortex sooner.Once you have chosen one or two of these words to represent your feelings, remember another time/place/person when you felt this hurt. Remember the person who hurt you. Feel the hurt you felt then until you are feeling sad or ashamed, perhaps near tears. Here you focus on simply putting new emotional chemicals in your brain and body. This step has nothing to do with anybody else but you or anything outside you. It is about changing things on the inside of you. Reflect on your past hurt until you feel sad. Once this is done, you are ready for the next step. A – Ask the question. The question is: Am I really _______. Fill in the blank from your choice of emotion words from the last step.Unimportant            Powerless      Disregarded              UnlovableDevalued                   Accused         Rejected        Unfit for Human ContactThe answer is always “No.” Keep asking yourself this question and answering this question for yourself until your answer is an emphatic “NO!”This stops any downward spiral into depression or toxic shame. Here, you are reminding yourself of your basic self-worth. You are loving yourself. You must do this before you can successfully go to the next step. If you don’t like yourself, you will justify behavior and defend yourself with anger. R – Respect the person who is the object of your anger. They have feelings just like you do. Look inside them in your imagination and see if you can imagine what they might be feeling. If you look, you will see some of the same feelings you have just felt. Use the same words you used to represent your hurt:Unimportant            Powerless      Disregarded              UnlovableDevalued                   Accused         Rejected        Unfit for Human ContactWe can’t be expected to precisely know how another person feels. That’s not the point. The point is to take us out of our narcissistic pity party and to help us join the human community. Life is a bitch for all of us, even the person with whom we are angry. Once we see that we are suffering disappointment and hurt together, we see that our opponent deserves our compassion and understanding. Now you are ready for the next step. T – Together you can solve the problem or wait until things have calmed down so that each of you can care about how the other feels and then use your collective imaginations to discover a creative resolution.    HEART in Action: Mahala and Tonya ContinuedIn our next session, Mahala and Tonya reported back on their efforts to improve their relationship with the HEART ritual. They found it useful for talking to their children too.“So I tried this HEART ritual with our daughter,” Mahala said. “She’s a lot like me. She is stubborn and intense. She has to have her way or else. She was about to unravel into her rage and I stopped her and I said. ‘You are angry Sonya, but below your anger you are hurt. Think about how and why you are hurt.’She said, ‘I want to go to Julie’s house. She’s my best friend and she just broke up with her boyfriend and she needs me. I know it’s a school night, but I feel bad that I’m not there for her. I feel like I’m letting her down. I feel guilty. That’s how I feel.’ I responded by saying. ‘Feel that. That is an honorable feeling, to love Julie and to want to be her friend and to be sad because it’s a school night and your mother won’t let you go to her house. I understand how you feel. There are times I’m away from you that I want to be with you and I can’t. It hurts.’“She cried. I held her. It was so much easier to deal with her when she was feeling her sadness than it was when she was attacking me with her rage.“It must be the same for Tonya. I could talk about my hurt rather than raging at her or cutting her off and withdrawing into my righteous, self-serving anger with a book and a drink.”“That’s great,” I said. “Your daughter found her hurt below her anger. We all can do that sometimes. But it takes a mature adult to get from anger to compassion. Children often don’t have the resources to do that.”“I did that successfully this week,” Tonya said. “Mahala told me she would be back from a trip by 2:00 PM. I was counting on her to be home because I had to go with Sonya for her first adult doctor visit. Tom wanted to buy a car. He had money from his summer job burning a hole in his pocket. Mahala was supposed to go with him to look at a car that Tom saw in the paper. I had to leave at 3:00 P.M. Mahala wasn’t home. I could feel myself getting angry. I did the HEART ritual. I halted. I got to my feelings of being disregarded and powerless.“I thought back to a similar time when I was a girl and my daddy forgot me at school and I felt my tears. That’s the second step. Then I realized I wasn’t completely powerless, the third step. I would take Sonya to her doctor’s appointment. Tom could go by himself. He could look at the car but not buy it. If he liked it, then Mahala or I could get it checked out by our mechanic.“Then I thought about Mahala and how she must have felt, the fourth step. Mahala was stuck on a tour bus or she would be home. She must be feeling sad and powerless, that she was not able to make it back when she said. I was not angry anymore. It felt great. The HEART ritual changed the whole experience for me. My anger didn’t capture me. I was free. I don’t know how to explain how good that felt to me. I was so proud that I could do that for myself.”“I’m glad you could do that, too,” Mahala said. “That meant I didn’t walk into your verbal buzz saw when I got back at 4:00. Tom did a good job of not buying and negotiating permission for us to have the car checked out by our mechanic the next day. Things were pleasant when I got home. That was a gift to me.”“But it was more a gift to myself,” Tonya said. “My back did not get tense. I didn’t get a headache. I didn’t become stupid. I didn’t take it out on the kids. And best of all, I have no legacy of angry tantrums to feel guilty about. I am proud of myself and proud that I had the internal strength to find compassion for Mahala.” Then she turned and looked at Mahala. “Mahala, I’m glad you appreciate this. But mostly I’m proud of myself that I could contain my anger myself.” Compassion is the antidote to anger. You can see it in this story. It helps relationships, of course, but compassion’s greatest gift is that it helps our souls. It pulls us out from our small petty survival. We leave behind our law-of-the-jungle selves and move into the human community of other lost souls who are hurting and need one another. Instead of being the center of our world, filled with our hurt alone, compassion makes us part of a fabric of human life, filled with opportunities to love, collaborate and to be creative problem solvers. In the compassionate place we find a seat at the table with others where we belong and can contribute. In our poor-me, self-pitying, self-important universe of anger and defenses, we are lonely, competitive, miserable people.In the military, defensive thinking is often required. The military is organized around survival and defending against a threat. A common military mantra is “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.” This may be the correct strategy when making war with real enemies, but when dealing with those we love, it just perpetuates pain.This defensive military strategy will never bring peace. Real peace will only come through the strength of compassion. Yes, you must be strong to wage war, but you must be stronger to build real peace.