Healing Anger

Shalom friends,

My mother, bless her soul, always told me to control my anger. My father said that he would give me a hiding if I dared to raise my hand in anger again (he was referring to my younger brother Bernard, who actually now I can’t remember smacking, although he probably deserved it) I remember once kicking, Mrs. Kobrin, my Hebrew teacher in the shins, I remember smacking a little dog across the snout when I became angry during a fight at Hebrew school with one of my friends.  Today  I laugh when I remember how I smashed a window pane which I considered the cause of bumping my head as a child.

I’m sure that there were many other times but these are the ones I remember. I had a reminder of a forgotten outburst when, I was in Australia, visiting Bernard, my younger brother, in 2006;  I flew from Sydney to Melbourne specially to see Aunty Lily, who I loved very much,  in her old age. When I told her I was coming she was surprised at me of all people, making a special trip to see her. She didn’t think that I cared anything for her.

A very awkward situation; I felt love for her and she thought I didn’t care for her.  This situation arose because like many members of my family, apparently, she remembered an incident that I had forgotten, where I had been angry at her and since then had kept her distance from me.

I was notorious as a person who was easily angered. Nobody ever told me this directly they just keep their distance from me.  Aunty Lily finally told me that once I had kicked her in the shins when I was about 6 years old. She had kept that memory in her heart all those years and that spoilt our relationship, which could have been much warmer (I suppose there were other incidents she didn’t  tell me about)  .  

At quite an early age, without knowing why,  I eventually stopped raising my hand or kicking my feet against people  and started breaking  objects. I still was easily angered but I expressed it in a different way. This carried on until I was about 60 years old. Almost my entire life had been scarred by anger, which had caused ineffective, self defeating behavior.

My anger hurt people and objects that I loved and were important to me; my wife, kids, friends, employers, good relationships that I would have enjoyed, shattered and damaged. My favorite object to break were my spectacles, without which I couldn’t see, then there were chairs vases, doors. Every few months I was at the optician for a new pair of spectacles.  

Being angry was very painful to me but it never occurred to me that I could actually cure my anger. I sometimes thought of ways of controlling it but never imagined that I could be without anger.

Even now I’m not without anger but now I know that with many years of practice one can heal anger completely and not have any anger.

It’s not a magical trick and doesn’t happen overnight. The same way that anger is with us from the moment we’re born so healing anger is a way of life that continues until we die and eventually we can even die without anger.

Today I know that healing anger is a slow, laborious task and the real problem is that one doesn’t even feel the need to start the healing until something happens to give us a jolt into action, then we start. Eventually I started from such a jolt.

The first jolt came when I realized for the first time in my life, when I was about 40 years old that the greatest anger is the anger one feels at dying. I was shocked that I was angry at dying. This happened when a sudden pain hit me in the chest and stopped me dead in my tracks while crossing a busy road in Tiberias, on my way to the bus station, happy to be on my way home after finishing my month of reserve service on the Golan Heights. My only thought was “damn, now I going to die” It was the first time I’d ever felt such a tremendous pain and I felt, with absolute certainty that I was going to die and my reaction was anger, the strongest anger I had ever felt.

Round about that time I had another shock when in a human relationship therapy session, to which Israel Postal services, where I was working at the time, sent some of it’s employees, I became aware that I saw myself in exactly the opposite way others saw me. I saw myself as a kind, helpful sort of person (I conveniently forgot about my outbursts of anger) while others saw me as a harsh difficult to get on with kind of person. I was shocked to hear that this was how people saw me.

Although I still didn’t see anger as my problem I did become aware of feeling lonely. This feeling and not anger brought me to a great psychologist in Jerusalem, Helen Globus, may she rest in peace. She didn’t cure my anger because like most psychologists she thought in terms of controlling anger not healing it completely. She did help me, however to understand how much I loved people and how important it was to make amends, as far as was possible to repair relationships with my family.

She taught me that it was okay to express anger  but to do it in an acceptable way; not to hurt people or to kill them but to turn my anger against objects, which I had already done many years earlier. She taught me that I loved people and I was scared of anger, especially against  my brothers, because I loved them and was scared that in my anger I would injure them. This was an interesting revelation but still didn’t start me on the track to heal anger.

Only in 2000, when I was about 60 years old, without much guiding around because of the Arab uprising, the Intifada, I enrolled at the Hebrew University to study Jewish Philosophy. To my amazement, while looking for a book on Plato I found one by Schopenhauer and it seemed strange to me that he had studied Buddhism and lo and behold there on the same shelf next to Schopenhauer and Emanuel Kant was a book by the Dalai Lama. This seemed very strange to me because I’d never thought of a closeness between eastern philosophies and western.

The book I had found was called “Healing Anger”, a strange title, I thought; is anger a sickness that needs to be healed? Then  I read the book, a collection of lectures that he had given at a seminar and I began to learn how loving the world is connected to healing anger. I’m still studying that book and others by the Dalai Lama and lectures by him.

I still get angry but rarely. I’ve come to love even my anger and I don’t fear it anymore because now I look at it as one looks at an object, which one can only do if emotions aren’t aroused by the object. Doing that I can analyze it, which brings me to insight  and wisdom and positive action.

One heals anger by turning it into a kind of virus that when studied makes itself amenable to destruction and even manipulation, if one chooses. It may even be used to cure other ailments that affect us, like impatience.

Until I read this book, at the age of about 61 I was still taking out my anger on objects. This was still unacceptable behavior because when I became angry with someone I felt an emotion take hold of me that made me want to kill the person I thought had made me angry.

I didn’t realize that the emotion had been caused by anger. Now I realize that emotion isn’t  anger, it is emotion and it’s different from anger. For the first time in my life I made the distinction. I understood that anger was using emotion to hide itself by blinding me by emotion.

It’s really like a virus and like a virus it has a method, called emotion, of hiding to protect itself. Emotion is the cloak which anger uses to hide. We fall into the trap of calling the emotion anger, while really emotion is a diversion and while we’re busy trying to control the emotion brought on by anger, anger runs riot with us.

We need to see anger to be able to heal it and the only way to do this is to quell our emotion. Then we can examine it under a microscope, as it were. Then we can find ways to eradicate it and in the process of quelling emotion and letting it seethe inside us while we deal with the real culprit, anger and doing this, rather difficult trick we start to discover insights into ourselves and new wisdom about the world we live in. Anger has the power emotion is its tool and controlling emotion releases the power which anger can give us if we allow it.

Wishing you a great no newsday

Yours truly

Leon Gork