The Sixth Tuesday

I LOVE the book Tuesday's with Morrie. I read it in college and frequently think of the lessons I learned from Mitch Albom's visits with Morrie. In fact, I'm thinking I need to read it again!

At mutual Wednesday night, we were talking about what we do when we get mad...how we react...how we get over it.

I was thinking about this question the other day in the car as I BLARED my radio - that's what I do when I'm mad! If I'm in the car, or close to my car, or have time for a ride, I hop in, turn the stereo volume to 50 (it normally resides somewhere between 15 and 20) and drive (the faster the better, but going slow works too). When I'm mad, I like to feel the beat of the song vibrate through the seat and into my chest, I like to be able to sing at the TOP of my lungs and not hear myself.

When I'm home, I clean. Not nice cleaning - I slam doors and scrub aggressively when I'm mad. I think my favorite cleaning chore is the dishes because there are so many opportunities to slam cupboard doors, jerk open drawers and clang pots together.

Wil thinks I'm funny when I'm mad, not because I like to slam things or turn the radio up so loud I can't hear myself think, but because it doesn't take long before my anger turns off, kind of like a switch, and I'm nice and happy and me again. Really, I think two songs, maximum, was all it took of listening to the radio loud earlier this week and then I was fine. Typically emptying one load of dishes and scrubbing the counters is all it takes for me to be me again.

As I was thinking about how I release anger or grouchiness, I remembered Tuesday's with Morrie and Morrie's insight about emotions. Morrie explains the way to detach from an emotion, to fully move on is to let it penetrate you completely first, but only for a little while.

The book explains it much better than I can, so allow me to quote:

"Take any emotion - love for a woman or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief, you're afraid of the vulnerability loving entails.

But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."

I love this - I'm not always good at it, but I love it. I do this when I'm mad (most of the time) - I allow myself to feel the emotion entirely, I bang and slam and sing and after 5 or 15 or 20 minutes, I feel better, I'm able to detach myself from the anger and move on. For me, this is so much easier than when I try to avoid the feeling and it festers in the background for days.

So, my question for you is what do you do when you're mad - how do you make yourself feel better?

Editor's Note: I express my anger only at socially appropriate times. No need to be scared! :-)