Everyone seems to understand the destructive power of anger. That’s because everyone equates anger with aggressive behavior, and aggressive behavior hurts people. Once we are injured by someone who is angry, it is an easy next step to thinking it is the anger that injures us. Anger, however, is only an emotion. It takes a person to change the emotion into an aggressive behavior. nnEmotions take place in our bodies and minds, in an interactive manner. When trying to understand anger, you must first place it in the context of emotion, especially negative emotion. At the most basic level of emotion, there are really only two: pleasure and pain. nnPain is the primary negative emotion. Without pain or injury we really don’t experience any problems. Secondary to pain or injury, there are three negative emotions that follow, in greater or lesser amounts. The amount of each of these will vary from person to person and for differing injuries. Sadness is a secondary emotion to injury that I define as an honoring of that injury. Fear is energy that the body generates to avoid being hurt again. Finally, anger is energy that the body generates to attend to or fix the injury.nnWhen you begin to look at anger as energy instead of dangerous aggressive behavior, you begin to become compassionate for the emotion. You begin to look at your anger and the anger of others as a reflection of the human experience of injury. Instead of making the judgment that anger is bad, you begin to investigate it as what it really is: energy that is meant to heal the injury.nnAfter having worked with this energy of anger in healing for 30 years and seen how powerfully it can work, both in the dysfunction in peoples’ lives as well as in their healing processes, I’ve developed a simple system for unbending anger from dysfunction into functional behavior. I call this system “Stop, Drop, and Roll.” nnStop, Drop, and Roll is what you’re told you’re supposed to do when you catch fire. Of course, if you don’t notice that you’re on fire, you won’t stop, drop, and roll, so it is actually a four-step system. nnThe metaphor I like to use to demonstrate Stop, Drop, and Roll applied to the idea of bent anger is what I call “the mosquito.” If you imagine a mosquito landing on your hand, you can see this as a metaphor for the injury: a bloodsucker, with a potentially life-threatening illness, is preparing to attack you. This information gets transferred by the nerves in your hand and eyes to your brain. You respond by generating energy, the fight or flight energy of fear and anger.nnA functional response to that injury would be to utilize the energy of your fear and anger to wipe off the insect. Bent anger would be represented by taking that same energy and the same hand and, instead of wiping off the bug, slapping yourself in the face! Such an act would represent, metaphorically, depression, addictions, anxiety, explosive anger, and extramarital affairs, to name but a few.nnIn using Stop, Drop, and Roll the first step is for you to identify the problematic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make up the bent anger in your life. Once you have identified them, you need to begin to train yourself to notice them before you get overwhelmed by them. This may take a lot of practice.nOnce you can notice them in a timely way, it is time to begin the Stop step. This involves taking time out from your place of injury. This step may take quite a bit of practice as well. nnWhen you have been able to complete the Stop step, you will have the opportunity to Drop. Dropping means preparing to take action. You do this by becoming cognitive and by beginning, through investigation, to understand why you are about to slap yourself across the face instead of wiping off the insect. This will require understanding what has injured and upset you in the present as well as how these injuries may relate to your childhood.nnFinally, the Roll step involves taking that angry energy that used to be bent into dysfunction and using it for some form of healthy activity. You may find a different healthy use for your functional anger in every situation, but there are only two broad categories for the functional use of anger: self-nurturing and empowerment. Self-nurturing is where you use the energy of anger to care directly for yourself, and empowerment is where you act on the world so that the world can empower you. Every other use of anger is dysfunction.nnLet’s look at how Sheila learned to use Stop, Drop, and Roll. Sheila identified her particular brand of catching on fire as her depressive thinking. Sheila was a single, 27-year-old elementary school teacher. In her mind her self-talk was self-abusive at times. The most negative thought that she identified was thinking “nothing’s ever going to work out for me.” Self-abusive thinking becomes clearly angry when you imagine how angry it would sound if you said the same thought to someone else.nnSheila first trained herself to be on the look out for this thought. She had to notice it when she heard it in her mind. It took a little practice before she noticed it regularly.nnOnce Sheila had learned to recognize this dysfunctional, angry thought, she began to practice the Stop step of intervening in this depressive cognitive behavior. She would try to stop thinking the thought. In order to do this, she had to understand that she was in an emotionally injured state and to be ready to start thinking about why.nnFor the Drop step Sheila needed to investigate what was hurting her in the here and now and how that injury resonated with injuries from childhood. She had recently gone out on a date with a young man and had enjoyed her time with him. She’d been hoping to hear from him, but it had been several days since he’d called. Her experience of waiting to be called resonated with her experience of her father’s gradual disappearance from the lives of her and her mother after her parents’ divorce when she was seven years old as well as other dating disappointments throughout her life.nnAs Sheila came to understand the sources of her injury, she was ready to do the Roll step. She began to think about how to use her angry energy to attend to herself and to the pain she was experiencing. She decided to call a friend and find some fun things to do as well as to attack some hills on her bike. nnThe Stop, Drop, and Roll system is relatively easy to explain, and yet hard to do. It takes practice, and mastering each step can be challenging. However, if you keep working at it, you will be successful. It can help to journal your progress and your process as you work at the steps. If you don’t give up, you can’t fail. nLearn to use your anger to carve out the life you want for yourself! nn** This article is one of 101 great articles that were published in 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life. To get complete details on “101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life”, visit
http://www.selfgrowth.com/greatways2.html.