Anger and the shadow self (journal prompts)

Anger is a difficult thing to deal with. It’s something that can seep into every aspect of your life. It can poison your perspective of harmless interactions, it can put you down a negative path during your day, and it can keep you from truly experiencing your life. 

Anger is also a powerful tool that keeps us safe and protected. It can help us gauge our level of tolerance to traumas and help set boundaries for making sure bad things aren’t happening in our lives. Sometimes it’s hard to understand which is which, and we perceive harmless things as threats and react with anger. On the other hand, sometimes we experience traumas and we don’t utilize anger to protect us from that, we just allow those same bad things to keep happening to us. 

In many spiritual practices, anger is an important thing to analyze. If utilized appropriately it can act as protection for our traumas and hurts. But we have to do the work to harness the positive and protective powers of anger. Take note of your anger, look at its patterns. Dig deep into your shadow self and truthfully ask yourself “Am I using my anger appropriately?”. Here is some shadow work prompts to get you started on examining your anger.

1. Where am I when I’m experiencing my anger?
2. Who am I with when I’m experiencing my anger?
3. What am I doing when I’m experiencing my anger?
4. What about where I am, who I’m with, and what I’m doing is making me angry?
   
5. Am I reacting angrily to someone else’s anger boundary? Am I hearing or listening to where they’re drawing their boundaries?
6. Is what I’m angry about harmful to my wellbeing? If not, what is making me put up my boundary of anger? If it is harmful, what about these aspects is harming me?
7. Am I setting appropriate boundaries or am I trying to control others?
8. Are my boundaries being respected or do I need to remove myself from the situation?

Deep shadow work like this can be beneficial for your mental and spiritual growth. It’s important to examine something as powerful as anger to understand yourself more deeply. It is a natural and healthy emotion but can sometimes get out of hand. You should never try to extinguish your emotional tools and experiences but try to harness those parts of yourself to better hold healthy boundaries for yourself and others. Anger, like everything else, can be used as a tool for betterment and help us bring a deeper understanding of love and acceptance into our lives.