ANGER IS ONLY A SYMPTOM...
Anger is only a symptom…
After delivering the last session of my “Building Bridges to Friendship” program to a class of grade 5/6. Trialing this program at another school last term I chose to add a couple of other levels to this last session on “Shake off, step up, learn and choose Joy Resilience.”
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While working with many children, while mentoring over the past years, anger comes up consistently. For this reason I had to speak to this in the last session of “Building Bridges to Friendship” program in regards to resilience and what steps need to be taken to learn how to develop that capacity.
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The analogy I used is that anger is an alarm clock going off inside of us for our inner ear to hear and act on with urgency. Screaming WAKE UP! Screaming to see what is causing the pain in the first place. And as with alarm clocks we reach out with our arm and turn it off but with anger we leave that alarm on and for some reason we have not learned to turn it off. For some reason we prefer to stay angry and stay asleep internally and not develop an inner arm to reach out and act on our inner selves behalf.
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Anger is an inner prison keeping us inmates to its power and control.
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As I was speaking of these anger analogies to this class I saw a large percentage of the students looking back at me with complete contempt, anger and seething glares. No matter what else I shared or what activities I got these students to do before the end of the session these students stayed angry and just went through the rest of the session because they knew they could not leave.
-
Afterwards I reflected on what had happened and realized that these students, who I knew from working with in a mentoring situation a few years before could not do what I was asking of them. They could not allow themselves to shake of their bad feelings. They could not step up out of the hole they were living in. They could not learn the truth behind why they spend so much of their lives angry. And they could not choose Joy over anger because if they did they would have to see and accept the inner pain they live with each and every day due to long term ancestral poverty, caregiver’s substance abuse, neglect, violence, fear with not one single sign post of hope that this will ever change for them or their families. So lets just blame you today for why I am angry.
ANGER IS ONLY A SYMPTOM...
Anger is only a symptom…
After delivering the last session of my “Building Bridges to Friendship” program to a class of grade 5/6. Trialing this program at another school last term I chose to add a couple of other levels to this last session on “Shake off, step up, learn and choose Joy Resilience.”
-
While working with many children, while mentoring over the past years, anger comes up consistently. For this reason I had to speak to this in the last session of “Building Bridges to Friendship” program in regards to resilience and what steps need to be taken to learn how to develop that capacity.
-
The analogy I used is that anger is an alarm clock going off inside of us for our inner ear to hear and act on with urgency. Screaming WAKE UP! Screaming to see what is causing the pain in the first place. And as with alarm clocks we reach out with our arm and turn it off but with anger we leave that alarm on and for some reason we have not learned to turn it off. For some reason we prefer to stay angry and stay asleep internally and not develop an inner arm to reach out and act on our inner selves behalf.
-
Anger is an inner prison keeping us inmates to its power and control.
-
As I was speaking of these anger analogies to this class I saw a large percentage of the students looking back at me with complete contempt, anger and seething glares. No matter what else I shared or what activities I got these students to do before the end of the session these students stayed angry and just went through the rest of the session because they knew they could not leave.
-
Afterwards I reflected on what had happened and realized that these students, who I knew from working with in a mentoring situation a few years before could not do what I was asking of them. They could not allow themselves to shake of their bad feelings. They could not step up out of the hole they were living in. They could not learn the truth behind why they spend so much of their lives angry. And they could not choose Joy over anger because if they did they would have to see and accept the inner pain they live with each and every day due to long term ancestral poverty, caregiver’s substance abuse, neglect, violence, fear with not one single sign post of hope that this will ever change for them or their families. So lets just blame you today for why I am angry.