Where do our angry responses originate? Our eruptions are an outflow of what we’re already carrying inside ourselves. We’ve each formed habits of trying to manage our reality when we’re pushed out of shape, and these patterns which we typically used formed around our early experiences. The feelings we had when there was a power imbalance when we were little are still with us, and are part of our identity. So when something comes up that doesn’t sit well with us, we will follow our usual tendency of either withdrawing or moving towards the situation. Continue reading Firming up the marshes, breaking down the rocks, on the road to life-giving anger
All posts by Sergio Milandri
Our Journey of Anger
How did it start?
Our experiences under the age of three gave us emotions from which we made assumptions about our world. Around us were others that modelled what permissible behaviour was, but often what they said we must do was idealized and different from what they did themselves. We tested life out for ourselves reinforcing learnt patterns into the foundation of our being. So our practiced behaviour became our way of engaging with reality. Continue reading Our Journey of Anger
Engage with Your Anger
Most of us struggle with anger in one way or another. Anger is a force for enormous change and is meant to be a positive tool to help us live fully. We’re born into a world with conflict. Our well-learned patterns of how we respond when we’re angry are deeply rooted in us. It’s these internalized patterns that are the problem. So often, since we dislike these we try to change our behaviour, but find this very difficult to do. For our automatic, visceral reactions come from a place that is not easy to access.
Continue reading Engage with Your Anger
I Am Your Anger
I am the engine inside of you. I am here to help you get through life, but you have never looked after me. You try to put me down and to get rid of me, but you can’t for I am integral to who you are. You neglect and ignore my warnings, but I break through your consciousness. I hide in your circumstances and I get you. I have to change things. I have to fix things. If you don’t manage me appropriately, you can’t blame me. You never engage with me, never befriend me. You sometimes use me so you can hurt others and frighten them. Continue reading I Am Your Anger
Known by Our Fruit
How to be delicious!
Things that have caused us distress through our lives have made us more sensitive and compassionate to other circumstances. They’ve made us able to go beyond ourselves to others, which becomes the fruit of our lives and gives our days meaning. Our lives shift from, ‘What do I get out of this?’ to being able to spend ourselves and to be life-giving for others. Continue reading Known by Our Fruit
Befriending Depression
Learning to play all the keys of our heart’s piano
We all have times of feeling low. It helps to understand what these are saying. Since we haven’t listened to and resolved our little depressions, we don’t know how to process our big ones. As we learn to love ourselves more fully, we need to do for ourselves what wasn’t done for us. We are empowered as we come to accept who we really are.
We all know from our own (and others’) depression, that there is no magical ‘quick fix’. Continue reading Befriending Depression
Feel the Fear and Give it Containment
Often we identify with the feelings we have and make them so part of our identity that we can’t separate from them. We say, for example, ‘I am angry,’ or ‘I am fearful,’ instead of, ‘Sometimes I experience anger or fear.’ We shape our thoughts, and receive them from others, but we are not our thoughts and feelings. We need to take responsibility for every feeling. They should not be our masters, but be our servants.
[wpanchor id=”fear messenger”]We often associate with having fear negatively. We see it as something that we need to control and get rid of. But all our feelings, including fear, are important messengers. Continue reading Feel the Fear and Give it Containment
Anxiety From Assumptions
We have each developed patterns of behaviour in order to ensure our feeling of belonging. Rejection is what we fear the most, but we compromise ourselves a lot in order to avoid this. If we wait for others to validate and define us, we disempower ourselves and lose our sense of who we are. No one can do for us what we need to do for ourselves, for if we struggle to love ourselves, how can anyone else?
The emotional landscape we experienced as children profoundly affected us. Continue reading Anxiety From Assumptions
Loneliness or Aloneness
In order to become aware of the inner patterns and guiding images we all carry, we need to stop and look. This will need times of being alone with ourselves in order to grow in wholeness. This is essential so that we can also be there for others. This aloneness is a transformative, ‘pregnant’ waiting. It is not the same as loneliness, which carries with it feelings of lack, desperation and incompleteness. We dare not postpone living, waiting for our dream to materialize and for our present life to pass. This invitation to deepen intimacy with God and ourselves is done reverently, but not without fear. Indeed, intimacy implies this as ‘in timor’ means ‘into fear.’ Continue reading Loneliness or Aloneness
What are we living for?
It’s easy to see ourselves as not yet complete while we wait for that special thing or person to appear in our lives. We delay living fully until all the puzzle pieces fit. We so need to open our hearts to see what’s really going on. Have we closed down inside in order to survive? Has our hope of life getting any better died? Are we simply surviving, just daily using our energy only to manage humdrum tasks and solve problems? It’s not that these aren’t necessary, but are they taking first place?
Continue reading What are we living for?