Anger is the child of fear

If you're squeamish you may not want to read this.

My recent past few blogs have been about health. I really am not a health nut. I just don't want anyone to endure pain or illness one minute longer than necessary. My teacher said, "Pain is the adjuster" meaning the direction you are pursuing in life or the attitude with which you perceive the world and how life or relationships work might need adjustment. I was reading a Lyme disease blog and one woman explained how she had learned from being so ill to not sweat the small stuff. She learned to reorient her thinking to what was important to her and her family so she cut the "garbage" games out of her life mainly because she had no energy to play them. She was forced to cut back to the "basics" in order to get through the day. There was no energy to quibble about the small stuff that in 100 years would make no difference. She had really grown emotionallyfrom her experience to learn she could deal with the world from an honest perspective. Some people don't get it and never re examine their lives.

As people go through financial hardship many will turn to fight each other out of their emotional pain from fear. Anger is for the most part the child of fear. Fear of the unknown is a terrible place to come from. Fear of the uncontrolable can also cause anger. Fear and anger distort interactions. They can turn people into childlike behavior wanting their needs met to the exclusion of others. Life is a balance of wants and needs. Whether you are in a relationship with anyone or not the first thing a person needs to do is what I call self comfort. There is a period of time when a young child is first learning to sleep on their own. They go through a time when they wake up and will cry out for a parent. Now this can be for two minutes or all night depending on the personality of the child and the response of the parent. Let us say they wake up because they have kicked off the coversbecome cold and wake up. There are movies that show when a child wakes up and learns to put on his/her own covers to fix the situation the disruption of the sleep pattern stops. They kick off the covers, get cold, wake up and cover themselves up. They self correct. They learn to depend on themselves. My observation about fear is we have to see the problem for what it is and comfort ourselves. Pull up the covers does not mean hide rather act to correct the problem and in the action of seeking the cause and acting on the solution the fear is dissipated somewhat by a healthy redirection of focus on the problem.

Many people who self medicate have never looked at what their fear is, faced it and self comforted. Many times just putting a name or recognition to it is the first step to overcoming the immobility to address it. The brain is a wonderful and awful (as in awesome) thing. There are experiences so traumatic that it short circuits and imprints on the medulla oblongata and sets up a cascade cycle that when the event is addressed it is as if the memories are real and now and urgent. That is why they are looking at drugs that will cause amnesia for traumatic events so horrific that this cycle replays itself in the brain memory over and over. While what I am about to tell you does not compare to some of your experiences for me it was awful. I had a dog I loved dearly whom I found dead. He had hung himself by his chokechain hung up on the fence trying to get out of the yard. I replayed the scene over and over in my mind for weeks alternately blaming myself for having had a choke on him. Blaming him for wanting to get out. Why had I not heard him to stop the thing from happening? The resolution came for me when I finally let it go. It happened. I couldn't do anything about it. I mourned the loss and never put a choke chain on a dog again. It did not reduce the pain of the loss by letting go but there was nothing I could do to change what happened and to replay with all the what if's did not change a thing. My aunt and uncle went through the same type of scenario in the days before seat belts when my cousin was killed when she fell out of the back door of the car when it was forced open as she and the dog were playing in the back seat. Her skull was shattered as she hit thepavement. They lived in a very rural area with no near by hospital. They immediately took her to the doctor who told them to take her home and put ice on her head. She died a few hours later. Their marriage survived because they were able to let it go and move on. They self comforted and comforted each other knowing there was no other way to deal with the memory other than let it go. Life is not always easy as you all know. With love and forgiveness to ourselves and for others without blame or judgement in any case sometimes we can move on. I send you all love and forgiveness and the great desire that you all learn to self comfort and love yourselves. We are only human as awful and wonderful as that can be. Cover up gang!