Find the True Cause of Your Anger

(bright music) Headspace Studio. (soft music) Hi, my name is Neca Smith and welcome to Radio Headspace. As you know, I'm a co-chair at Headspace and one of my specialties is anger. And one thing I think that's really interesting about anger is that it's never alone. It's always accompanied by another emotion or something deeper. And in my experience, a lot of people don't actually realize that. So today, I'm going to explain the concept of anger as a secondary emotion and how figuring out what's lurking beneath it is actually the foundation for making positive change in your life. Anger is one of those emotions that is easily recognized, right? We feel it, we know it when we see it. It's one of those things that gets most of the airplay, right, in our lives in terms of, you know, the range of emotions that we can feel. But what I've learned is there usually is something lurking beneath the anger. There is something happening beneath, and we need to get to that if we really want to, quite honestly, not just manage anger, but eradicate it from our lives. So many years ago, I had a client who I worked with who was sent to me, mandated to work with me by his employer because he would have quite a few angry outbursts. And we started out working with some surface techniques, right? Some deep breathing, some thought stoppage. But eventually we got to a point where I wanted to know a little bit deeper, like, what do you think this is really about, you know? What's really going on besides being frustrated that your coworker didn't turn in the accounting report on time, right? Like, it's gotta be more than this. And as he began to do his work, as he began to look at the situations that caused him anger, he begins to think about how he watched his father become angry and upset, and upset with him often because his father would make him feel as though he wasn't worthy, he wasn't doing a good enough job. And really, the deeper issue was feeling unworthy. And he used anger as a tool to make him feel worthy, which of course he realized was to his detriment eventually, which led him to having to come see me. Once we got to this place, and he realized, like, wait a minute, I'm not an angry person at all, I'm just dealing with a low self-esteem. I don't feel good enough. I don't feel worthy of even this position that I'm in. And once he, like, realized that and saw that, the situations that he would get into, like they changed so much so like people used to, like, essentially, like, run away from him. He said that people would run away from me and now they're running towards me because they've seen just how much I've changed. I think you can begin and just asking yourself that...