Surrender and Progress

Picture by Aaron Askanase

I was recently contacted by someone who was newly diagnosed with MS. Her main question to me was if her anger at the diagnosis would pass. I reassured her that it would, but let her know that we all have to find our own peace with the condition.

It got me thinking in two directions. The first is that I firmly believe that anger is best dealt with by dealing with fear. Fear causes the fight or flight reaction and the extra energy easily turns into anger. A new diagnosis is very scary. It puts the future into very uncertain terms, some of which can be very debilitating. My advice as a healer is always to look at what scares someone about the potential futures and spend time with the fear.

My second reaction was realizing that I'm not sure that I went through a long period of anger about the diagnosis. I was 26 when I got diagnosed and really had no understanding of MS at all. I didn't even know I should be scared of it, so I just rolled with it. I had no idea how it might effect my life, so wasn't sure how to react to it. There are times that I get angry about it, but they pass relatively quickly.

I was talking to my wife about this, and she was remembering her anger at blowing out her knees while training for a marathon years ago. She was so angry that she was not going to be able to run the marathon, and angry that she couldn't really walk for about three months.  My wife is a very goal oriented person with a high drive to succeed. I'm not. When the MS limits me, I just find something else to do. When she gets stymied, the energy just builds up until she finds another way to succeed or she gets really angry.

For me, having MS meant that because of the heat, I couldn't go to the rain forest in Peru on my honeymoon (something I'd always wanted to do). I thought it would have been amazing to go, but we just found other places to go, no big deal. For a very goal oriented person, I would think that would have been very frustrating.

It's hard for me to determine when I started to be this way, but my life is a careful balance of surrender and progress. I work very hard on myself to heal and to be a good healer, but when things change for me then I surrender to the change and adjust. I have an innate faith in God, but I don't know if that is a result of the MS or if it was just accentuated by it. I learned very early on that there were things in this world that were more powerful than I was, and that I just needed to surrender to those things. The difficulty is knowing which things should be struggled against, and which things should be accepted.

I think it's like a stream coming towards me. If I fight it, it builds up and overwhelms me (and even a small stream can do this if allowed to). If I completely surrender, then I get washed away. But if I accept the force coming towards me and change with it's influence, then I can stand in the stream and maintain myself.

I think the anger about MS is that resistance to the change. MS is so much bigger than we are, but we have so much influence over how it effects us and how we react to it. Dealing with the anger is a question of learning to live with those changes, and learning to be at peace with the uncertainty MS brings.

I'd like to hear from you about how you've dealt with your anger, and what you've found most effective.

Fear is the mother of anger

In Chinese medicine, health is achieved through the balancing of the five elements. Each element has an associated internal organ and emotion. In the generation cycle, water is the mother of wood, meaning that water energy creates wood energy. The emotions that are associated with them are fear (water) and anger (wood). Fear creates anger.

In the western world, we refer to this as fight or flight. When we are scared, our instinctual reaction is either to run or to turn and fight. In Chinese medicine, the wood energy is understood to be forceful directed energy, much like a punch. We get scared, we want to hit something. My experience with MS is that the wood energy often gets directed back at oneself, so essentially when we get scared, we hit and hurt ourselves. It's a very ineffectual way of running away. It's also another aspect of the urge for self-destruction.

The key to unraveling this cycle is to deal with our fear directly. There are many ways to do that which I will write about in my next post, but the best way is to send love to the fear. In the five element cycle, fire is the child of wood. Fire is associated with the heart and with love, so when we transform our anger into love we are bringing ourselves back into balance. More on this in the next post.

This post has a lot of Chinese medical jargon in it. I chose to use it, though I usually stay away from jargon if possible, because it's the best way to express what I wanted to convey, so if you have questions about the jargon, please let me know.

Anger takes away power

I've been noticing lately how effective anger is in taking away my power.

I'm the kind of person who is very sensitive to noises around me, so when my neighbors play their stereo too loud or let their yappy dogs yap at one am, it just makes me really angry. So much so that I either just sit and stew, which is no good for me, or I knock on their door to "talk" to them about it. When I'm angry, I'm very aggressive and I just want to shout at them. Invariably, that just results in their shouting back at me, and the music stays loud. When I go talk to my neighbor in a calm voice, she'll usually listen attentively and turn it down. Invariably, when I'm angry, I yell and nothing gets done.

The anger saps my power and then I make choices to please the anger, not to help myself, and those choices are always the wrong ones. By allowing the anger to have power over me, I lose my power.

There are those who are fueled by anger. I hear stories about football players who play their best games when they are really pissed off. They have figured out, or maybe their just wired that way, to use the power generated from anger to help themselves.

I don't know if I can generalize for all people with MS, but anger has never taken me to a good place, it's only taken me to more darkness. My choice is either to learn how to decrease my anger, which involves dealing with my fears (more about this later), or learn to channel the anger for my good.

I guess that's the question for y'all: does anger motivate you to help or harm yourself? Does it focus you? Or send you off in the wrong directions?