Anger. Addiction warning

[1.5 minute read]

“What is your anger enabling, protecting against, or symptomatic of?”

Anger protects, bodily and emotionally. From what? It so immediately follows a preceding feeling that we don’t usually recognize its precursor: Anxiety/fear. Of bodily or emotional injury.

Two hormones involved in anger are like amphetamines and painkillers. Instant energy to alertly respond to the threat, and fear suppression (numbing) to function better under its overwhelm. Reread that as you think about being cut off while driving. It all happens in a flash. Thinking takes too long, so we could die literally.

Anger defends threats to ego in intimate relationships. If a loved one touches a raw nerve, we get angry to defend that weakness—that sense of Self that we aren’t perfect or enough. Energized, and numbed to the fear and its shame, we lash out defensively. We do regretful things under the irresistibly powerful influence of amphetamine and painkiller.

Cocaine is an amphetamine. Opioids are pain killers. It is no metaphor or analogy to say that anger acts by involuntarily addictive circuits that are evolutionarily deep necessities to survival. There is no controversy: Anger is addictive.

If you’re angry at God, how is fear involved? Leave a comment…

Read more in this Psychology Today article.
Highlights

[2.5 minute read]

“Anger is not a primary emotion. It arises from some other feeling which it contrived to camouflage or control.

“The internal dynamic is the same for a host of emotions that, as soon as they begin to surface, can be effectively masked, squelched, or preempted through secondary anger.

“Anger is a double-edged sword: terribly detrimental to relationships but crucial in enabling vulnerable people to emotionally survive in them.

“…anger covers up the pain of our ‘core hurts,’ like feeling ignored, unimportant, accused, guilty, untrustworthy, devalued, rejected, powerless, unlovable, shameful.

“Anger helps us soothe ourselves by potently invalidating whoever or whatever led us to feel invalidated.

“We self-righteously proclaim our superiority. After all, we’re not wrong, or bad, or selfish; it’s our spouse, child, neighbor, coworker.

“Transforming helpless feelings into anger instantly provides us with a heightened sense of control.

“If anger can make us feel powerful, able to address our deepest doubts about ourselves, no wonder it can end up controlling us. It’s every bit as much a drug as alcohol or cocaine.

“Contrary to feeling weak or out of control, anger fosters a sense of invulnerability—even invincibility (particularly in the realm of relationships).

“…anger ensures safety in close relationships by regulating distance.

“…we are wary of openly expressing such needs and desires to a partner who might invalidate them and reopen wounds:
Distancing through protective anger feels essential.

“Anger pushes a partner away, and *also* gets them to withdraw.

“Feeling disconnection from a partner revivifies old attachment wounds and fears, so at times the dance changes and the distancer becomes the pursuer.

“Anger can be unconsciously employed in a variety of ways to regulate vulnerability in committed relationships.

“Anger can also, ironically, be a tactic for engaging the other—but at a safe distance.

“To corrupt Descartes, the assumption here might be: ‘We fight, therefore we exist [as a couple].’

“…anger as a tip-of-the-iceberg emotion can conceal so very much below it:

“What is your anger enabling, protecting against, or symptomatic of?

[At the end of the linked article are links to excellent. additional related articles.]

Love Is Not a Noun (4). Fear of rejection is belief-based. Only.

[3 minute read]

Do you believe in love, or imitation?

Albeit an oversimplification, don’t you think the understood Self and the expressed Self is a balance between fears? The balance between fear of rejection and fear of fiercely loving our Selves?

What can hurt more than having rejected a uniquely original creation out of nothingness, by a sheerly willful act of the heart (loving)?

Sometimes it is our imitation of loving that is rejected. That’s probably good. No one likes dishonesty. But when it’s authentically our own creation, it’s as if our whole being is rejected. What’s perhaps most deeply tragic about that is our own belief:

How can we believe that something we create out of the depths of our own individual being is even *subject* to acceptance or rejection?

How does that belief and dread creep into your thinking? By your largely repressed shame telling you that imitating loving acts for the sake of acceptance is dishonest?

When your loving is authentic, and not imitation, it is not open to judgment. It’s infinitely outside realms of comparison because it’s utterly unique. Unique things are incomparable. This is why judging any person in their fullness is so perditiously horrific.

That which — in any person, or by any person — is authentic, is original and unique in all creation. Your acts of authentic love are sacred. The image and likeness of the divine. Their acceptance or rejection by any other person is irrelevantly impossible.

Your authentic acts of love are uniquely original, so stand as undeniable acts of creating, flowing from a divine source, which is YOU. Don’t believe their value stands on acceptance or rejection. Their value stands on their source—which is YOU. And that is why not a one of us doesn’t have authenticity at the top of our value hierarchy. Authentic acts of love stand on their own. Authentic IS divine.

When you act sheerly out of love, you are expressing the fullest of you. The deepest beauty in this is that there is no shame in loving what you create. In loving your loving. That’s not egotistical at all. You do not love authentically for the sake of the ego; you do so for the sake of your full Self. It’s an expression of your nature. Which is your soul. Entirely natural. No shame. Loving comes from and feeds souls, not egos—except accidentally, consequentially. Authentic love is shame’s utter opposite. God isn’t shamed by loving God’s creations.

Let your ego feel wonderful about your authentic loving. Your soul already does, before you even know it. And all of creation depends on your part in creating. Divine. Sacred.
Love that.
Love you.

So, love.
Create.
Bring into being.

That which is authentically created canNOT be uncreated (by rejection).

Don’t imitate love for the sake of acceptance or positive judgment.

Love fiercely for its own sake. Yours.

To hell with judgment and rejection!

Leave a comment below, wording your own resolve to love your lovingness today, at least a few times.
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Neil D. 2020-05-21

Related:
Love Is Not a Noun (2). What IS Love? (“Acts of love are so profound because they are utterly original. They arise from a purely unique creator. YOU are unique. YOU are a creator.”)

Love Is Not a Noun (3). To Love Is To Be Curious

[4 minute read]

What might we *do* to nurture lovingness?

Be curious.

Humbly curious. Not comparatively curious. We think that’s hard because it’s impossible not to filter through our own experience that which another person shares. So don’t resist that. Curiosity about another also yields self knowledge.

“Humbly” curious means not judging. As you take in what another does or says, don’t *judge* it. Judgment is terminal. It stops the receiving and the loving. Don’t compare what you are hearing or feeling against any artificial ideal or standard of goodness, right, or wrong. Just receive.

Listen with exquisite attention. It is an act of loving. And it is a unique act. In that moment, a condition never to happen again, and which has never happened before. That moment is sacred. Be in it with intense curiosity.

When the beloved gives a seeming conclusive answer, don’t accept it easily as terminal. Let your loving curiosity continue to flow in, through, and around that answer. Ask more. More curiosity. This is a sacred moment, and sacred means deep, tense, dense, heavy. The fullness of who and what we are.

If/when you are being humbly curious and loving, it won’t feel comfortable for you and the beloved, but it won’t be resented or regretted either. Trust your heart to know when your beloved needs you to stop your curious inquiry. If/when you are being curious and loving with enough humility, your heart will do that calculus without requiring your conscious mind. It is our nature. More than anything else is our nature.

Curiosity is what the best of therapists practice. When we think of the phrase “Divine Physician,” we think of Yeshua healing physical maladies. Those kinds of dis-eases are easiest for us to grasp by our conscious minds. They are a sort of first step into the invisible and mysterious. They are sacramental—visible signs of reality unseeable. Inside the body. Surgery. Medicine that acts on our insides. Mysterious.
[If you believe that we understand how most medicines work, you are largely mistaken. We don’t. We can explain some bits of that, but I would contend that in no case do we understand all the bits. If we did, designer drugs would be everywhere.]

The Divine Physician heals the least visible parts of a person. The most mysterious. Be most curious about that. That’s how you can be a healer too. In the image and likeness. The mind of Christ.

Combat and shed any notions of God as omniscient and omnipotent. Those notions speak to your ego, not to your soul. You may think they are notions of glory and praise to God. I don’t. They terminate curiosity. Our curiosity about how God loves us, and our curiosity about how we can love God. They terminate those curious possibilities.

If we are made in God’s image and likeness, then we should look inside for what fuels loving. Curiosity and mystery. Not conclusions. Being. Not having-been.

If you want to ascribe some infinite attributes to God, I suggest infinite curiosity.

How could an all-knowing God be infinitely curious about us?

Well, to me, that answer lies in why we are created in God’s image and likeness.

I believe God to be furiously and passionately and INFINITELY curious about every single one of God’s creatures. I believe God revels in the mystery of every thing that God creates.

Curiosity and mystery always come with some disruptive, disturbing tension that is also a liberating excitement about being. To be disturbed is to be awakened from sleep.

I don’t think God ever sleeps.

Rise up and walk.

Awaken to your intrinsic curiosity.

Be. And you can love.

Walk, and you will love.
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Neil D. 2020-05-20

Related: Love Is Not a Noun (2). What IS Love?

Love Is Not a Noun (2). What IS Love?

[3 minute read]

Love is not a noun. Nor a goal. Love is creating. Uniquely.

Simple does not mean easy.

If the Law seems complicated to you, is it because you cannot achieve it?

It is not our nature.

Perhaps the Law stands merely to remind us of that. Our ego and mind are reMINDers of our abject inability to achieve love by commandment.

If you want a simple “rule” to live by, it has been given. It has been shown. It has been revealed. But, not only does simple not mean easy; simple means virtually impossible. Virtually.

The “law” written on the human heart is not written for the mind. You cannot think your way to love. You cannot measure your achievement of love by the mind. We all know this, but we don’t know this.
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If you would like a simple rule for living most fully according to your nature, it has been given. But we don’t like it. And we *won’t* like it. Not at first, because we are not living the fullness of our nature at first:

In every action, in every thought, ask, “Is this love?”

It is that simple. Very simple. Too simple.

Too simple for our mind to accept as any answer.

Too simple for our ego, which thinks we (and life) are complicated.

Our egos like a challenge, but do not like failure. The simpler a challenge, the more probable its failure.

Simple is the opposite of easy.
For the ego.
Not for the heart.
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In this world, we think our nature flows toward love. We think we are drawn toward love. Our feelings, hormones, minds, and neurochemistry all tell us that.

We have it wrong. Partly. Those impulses tell us what we value. Not *how* to manifest that core value. Our fullest nature flows FROM love.

We feel most complete when we act out of (from) love. And we sense dishonesty in acts that *imitate* acts of love.

We experience no greater shame than when we become aware that we are imitating love, not acting from it. That is the biggest gap between what we are and what we can be. That is fundamental dishonesty. Fundamental withoutness. Fundamental separation from our nature. Fundamental unreality. Fundamental hypocrisy, the only real sin.

So many of the behaviors we have learned are behaviors we have learned by imitation. When someone else’s actions touch us deeply, we experience love. We want to give that experience to others, so we attempt imitation. No bueno. That is like acting to comply with literally written laws. Attempts to act as others did.

Love and acts of love are so profound because they are utterly original. They arise from a purely unique creator. YOU are unique. YOU are a creator. You do not need to imitate other creators or creations. That is not authentic. They are not who you are. That’s the futility of comparison and judgment, which yield shame.

YOU are a unique engine of love.

When you act out of love, no one else can ever imitate it.

It is exclusively and uniquely your gift.

That’s love.
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Neil D. 2020-05-19

Related:

Love Is Not a Noun (1), like Judgment

Eating ice cream IS a Divine Experience. Soul and Ego. “Love” and “Like”
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