Angry? Stop blaming COVID
by Erik Curl, LCSW, MVF-CSW, CAGCS
The other day I was reading an article from September 2021 about how to be a better parent during the pandemic. The basic message was “just lower your expectations and calm down.” Boy, for a while that seemed like sage advice. Just let the river flow and don’t make any big deals about all the junk that’s building up; don’t overload yourself with any demands or hopes. Just be and get through this. I have a friend who gained the COVID 30 basically by adopting the “anything goes” philosophy and plowing through cheeseburgers and pizza with no remorse. He’s kicking himself now as he lifts, runs, and forcefully pushes himself away from all meat, cheese, and bread combos. He wishes he’d not taken it quite so easy on himself and tells me all the time that his pandemic lesson is “nothing is free.”
Our physical health is not the only thing, though, that was neglected as we focused on survival and adaptation to our “new normal” during COVID. In year three of this thing, you’re probably doing what many of us find ourselves doing – taking stock. Are you asking yourself “How’s my mental health?” or “Am I living my best life?” How are your relationships? Are there needs you just shoved down hoping they’d go away on their own?
One of my wife’s favorite people to quote is organization expert Marie Kondo. Marie says, “Keep only things that speak to the heart. If it doesn’t spark joy, discard it.” I know Marie is generally talking about belongings, but it seems to me that this is a good principle for habits and life baggage of many types, especially the bad habits and regrets you may have collected over the past few years. If you’re just lugging stuff around that sparks no joy, maybe it’s time to consider how to get rid of it.
Anger is one of the “bad habits” I’d suggest we all can constantly use work deciding if it’s leading us to joy. A Buddhist saying goes something like this “holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal to throw at someone else; you’re the one who gets burned.” I think of anger as a secondary emotion. Its roots are usually in a primary emotion like fear, frustration, or sadness. As men, we don’t do well with those feelings so it boils out as a “safer” emotion – anger. When I work with clients who want to experience less anger and let anger have less control over their lives, we dig into what’s behind it. Therapy is a safe place to “peel the onion layers” and examine what’s going on underneath. Once you can examine yourself, you can start to learn the vocabulary you need to express your true feelings.
The process looks like this. We educate and discuss what influences in our lives drove us to the conclusion that the primary feelings of fear, frustration, and sadness weren’t okay. For many men, it goes back to childhood. “Boys don’t cry” “Suck it up” “I’ll give you something to cry about”… Using a steady process, we talk through the life stages and how they’ve layered more over that core. This is where the “layers of the onion” analogy really comes into play. For many men, they went through sports or the military or even violent experiences. Aggression was acceptable; vulnerability wasn’t. By showing anger, it created distance and safety rather than fear or loss. The irony is that anger moves us further away from what we want. Just like my buddy and his cheeseburgers, the reckoning is here. It’s time to get real and to learn how to express our true feelings so we can let go of things that are weighing us down. Spark more joy.
