Gretta is very devoted to her spiritual path. It is extremely important to her to move through her life as a loving and compassionate person. She has a big heart and is always doing nice things for other people. It was, therefore, deeply upsetting to her when she would find herself suddenly irritated, angry, or blaming toward someone. Yet as hard as she tried to be consistently loving and compassionate, the anger and blame continued to surface.

As we worked together, Gretta discovered that, as important as it was to her to be loving and compassionate with others, she was rarely loving and compassionate with herself.

We’re visited by negative states so often, most of us have come to take them for granted as an expected part of living.  Such as:

“Yesterday wasn’t too bad, but today I woke up on the wrong side of the bed and I’m in a bad mood. I feel a little down, probably because my boyfriend didn’t respond to the text I sent him at 3:00 in the morning. But,isn’t that natural?”

Having frequent bad moods is common, but that doesn’t mean it’s natural.

Blaming your boyfriend – or anything else – for the way you feel is also common. It’s the answer you give yourself to the question of why you’re in a bad mood this morning.

But here’s a more important question: What’s the real reason why I’m in a bad mood so often?

The Answer to Why Our Bad Moods Are So Frequent

Just as with anything else we spend a lot of time with, we spend a lot of time in negative states because we value them.

Vent, Reflect, Think Positive, & Resolve for Your Emotional Health

Getting cut off in traffic. Receiving that raging email. None of us like to have things like that happen. But when they do, how do you handle it? Do you smile and hope it all just goes away? While it might blow over sometimes, other times that’s just not enough.

When you are in a highly charged emotional state, you have to express your feelings. Otherwise they will soak into your energy system, causing more problems later and making it tougher to get them out. It’s kind of like spilling red wine on the couch. You better get it up right away or it is most likely never coming out!

Our wounded self is our dark or shadow side, not because it is bad but because it is cut off from the light of God. It lives in the darkness of fear and the heaviness of false beliefs instead of in the light of love and truth. Moving toward "enlightenment" is moving into the light of truth from our spiritual guidance. When we heal our fears and false beliefs, our energy lightens. We may even hear from others, "You seem so much lighter!"

Doorways to Darkness

Just as the light of God enters our hearts when we choose to open to love, the darkness enters when we choose to close our hearts and act from anger, fear, shame, judgment or hurt. This is what happened in The Return of the Jedi, the last of the original Star Wars series. In this movie, the emperor, who was the epitome of darkness, was trying to get Luke to join the dark side. He knew if he could just get Luke angry enough or frightened enough, he would want to kill his father, Darth Vader, and then the emperor would own Luke as he had owned Luke's father. The emperor knew that anger and fear were the doorways to darkness.

Our anger, fear, shame, judgment and hurt are the cracks in our energy field through which the darkness enters. The darkness can also enter when we cloud our energy with drugs, alcohol, nicotine or sugar. Do you recall the trial in San Francisco that employed the infamous "Twinkie defense"? About twenty years ago, the mayor and a city supervisor were shot down inside City Hall and their killer got a short sentence because of his "diminished capacity" due to having eaten a diet of only junk food.

In one of my dialogues with my spiritual guidance, she challenged me about darkness. She said, "Margaret, you have worked for many years to be physically healthy. Not only that, you have striven to be immune to illness. Likewise, for many years you have sought to become a more loving person. Now your task is to become immune to darkness." I was blown away. Becoming immune to darkness means never acting out of my wounded self's feelings of fear, anger, shame, judgment or hurt but always moving into an intent to learn about these feelings as soon as they come up. I can tell you, it's quite a challenge! I don't know if I will ever accomplish this, but it certainly is a worthy goal!

Have you been wronged?

The Practice:
Beware of anger.

Why?

Anger is tricky.

On the one hand, anger – feeling annoyed, irritated, resentful, fed up, mad, outraged, or enraged – alerts us to real threats, real injuries, and real wrongs that need correcting, and it energizes and fuels us to do something about them. In my family growing up, my parents had a monopoly on anger. So, I suppressed my own, along with a lot of other feelings, and it’s been a long journey to reclaim my interior, including anger, and be able to feel it fully and (hopefully) express it skillfully.

Whether in personal relationships or in the halls of power, people in positions of authority or privilege often tell others that they don’t deserve to be angry, they shouldn’t get so worked up, it’s their own fault, etc. when in fact they have every reason and right in the world to be angry. It is certainly important to know in your heart what is actually happening, how bad it is, what the causes are, and what to do – and decide for yourself how much you want to get or stay angry.

No one really wants to talk about it, but the truth is, there is a kind of “evil spell” hanging over each of us and our world as well. In fact, part of this global spell is our denial of its existence. It is called suffering. Everyone does it—and, like hypnotized captives, everyone believes that their suffering somehow benefits them. That’s how the spell works. Why else would anyone punish themself with unhappy feelings unless they had been tricked into somehow perceiving self-hurt as self-help?

 Let’s examine one of these instances. First of all, to be angry is to suffer. It doesn’t help anyone to get angry. Anger hurts whoever is angry. It burns. Anger ruins relationships, causes heartache and regret, and devastates health. And yet, in spite of all of these facts, when we are angry it feels right. Somehow, in some unseen way, anger proves to whoever is experiencing its heated feelings that he or she is right—even though, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The same scenario holds true of worry, anxiety, resentment, doubt, guilt, or any other dark state.

Coming to grips with what you can and can’t control opens the door to true emotional freedom and personal power. I frequently receive questions about what to do in situations where someone is behaving in an unloving way, or a way that’s painful for them. For example:

• My co-worker never answers emails, making it very hard for me to do my work, as I need his input.
• My wife never wants to make love.
• People often ask me intrusive questions that I don’t want to answer.
• My husband is often late and never calls to let me know he is going to be late for dinner.
• My friend got together with a bunch of our friends for lunch and didn’t invite me.
• My parents are forever criticizing me.
• I often feel invaded and demanded of by family and friends.
• My husband sits at the table when we go out to dinner absorbed with his phone instead of talking with me.
• My children are disrespectful toward me.
• My wife has a male friend whom she talks with all the time and sometimes meets for lunch, even though I’ve told her I’m uncomfortable with their relationship.
• My wife often wants to talk about what I’m doing wrong. 

Two Healthy Choices in Conflict

It is important to remember that we have only two healthy ways of dealing with conflict – two loving responses when another is behaving in a way that is upsetting or hurtful to us.

Do you believe you are responsible for causing others’ anger, hurt, sadness or anxiety? Is this causing you to feel guilty?

“My wife is so upset that I have to travel more on my new job,” Chuck told me in our phone counseling session. “She feels so alone and lost when I’m gone. When I talk with her she is either crying or angry. I feel so badly and guilty but I don’t know what to do.”

“Do you feel responsible for her feelings?” I asked him. “Do you feel that you are the cause of her feelings?”

“Yes.”

* * * * *

“I’m just starting to date again after my divorce and I’m having a hard time with it,” Jeanette told me. “I just don’t know how to let a man know that I’m not interested in dating him any more, or in pursuing a sexual relationship with him. It feels like such a sticky situation.”

“Is it sticky because you are worried about his feelings?”

“Yes. The last man I dated hung his head and looked so distressed when I asked him to leave. I know that he was really attracted to me and I wasn’t at all attracted to him. I felt so awful that he was so hurt.”

“Did you feel responsible for his feelings?”

“Yes.”

A lot has happened here in the United States and I want to do my best to help support you in the place that you are in … knowing that everyone is in a different place … that everyone feels a little bit differently because of a different perspective, different experiences, a different frame of reference … and that’s how it’s meant to be.

Let’s talk today about the pain, the sadness, the fear, the anger, the overwhelm, the frustration, the nervousness so many people are feeling and being activated by what they’re witnessing.

You may be one of those people that are feeling disappointed in the human race … or disappointed in who we are, disappointed in the way that people are showing up, or feel heartbroken or have a heavy heart.  I want to take a moment first off to tell you that whatever it is you’re feeling … wherever the things that you are witnessing and experiencing are taking you … you have a right to those feelings.

How do you forgive and what do you do if you've been hurt and you really want revenge?

You know folks in life as human beings. We have all been hurt at some point and many times you may have loved big and gave your heart and soul to friends, family and relationships. 

You’ve pulled your resources, your energy, your time, your trust. Nothing hurts more than loving someone, trusting someone and giving them everything, and maybe they didn’t appreciate you. Maybe they didn’t honor you. Maybe they betrayed you. 

As human beings, this human experience and relationships can be difficult and challenging in moments. They’re never easy and can be complicated.