It’s been a while since I’ve done any bike riding. But I remember one particular time when I came to what looked like a never-ending hill. At the time it seemed like San Francisco plus. I pedaled less than a third of the way up that hill and it exhausted me. After stopping to rest, I had to walk the bike the rest of the way. Even that was taxing.

A conversation I had this week with a client reminded me of that time. She was a manager at a fast food restaurant; the turnover was horrendous and she had, in her own words,  been making it worse. The employees she worked with complained “because she was harsh” and “yelled at them a lot.”

Controlling Her Anger

She said she tried many things in the past to control her anger. At times she was successful and she saw that she was able to work better with the people she supervised.

But people would still screw up. And she wanted to run a tight ship. And she would start to feel it.

She told me that when she felt herself getting angry she would just white knuckle it. She held it in until she felt like she would explode. She would try to talk herself out of being angry. She silently recited affirmations. She would deny her own feelings telling herself she wasn’t going to be angry.

And anger wasn’t acceptable to her.

Yet because when all was said and done, it wasn’t possible to keep denying and controlling. Because she was still angry, she felt like she was a failure. She was ready to give up.

Riding the Anger Bike Uphill

Anger is not a controllable emotion for the most part. Well, let me walk that back a bit. It is possible to control anger to some degree. For a while at least, you can do the same things my manager friend above was doing. And it’s possible to hold out for a while.

The troubling part is that it is a lot like my bike ride at the beginning of this article. It’s like riding a bicycle up a long steep hill. The anger becomes all-consuming. Controlling is ends up being the major chore in life.

It’s exhausting.

It drains willpower and eventually, when the right stressful situation comes up, the reaction to the anger is hostility.

It Doesn’t Have to be That Way

Over time, our friend began to realize that it wasn’t the feeling of anger that was the problem. Anger is a normal feeling. The more we treat it in extremes – act out on it or avoid it – the more control we are giving it.

Life just won’t always go the way we want it to go. When it doesn’t – I can speak for myself here – I know that I am going to feel angry about it.

But what do you think would happen if we just accepted the feeling as a normal part of an interactive life?

We don’t have to act out on it. As a matter of fact, when you think about it, is it ever a good idea to try to fix things when we are feeling angry?

We also don’t have to avoid it. We can accept it, live it out, breathe into it, be a little more mindful of what we are feeling and let it run its course.

Doing this might not get rid of all the hills, but my bet is it will smooth out the road a bit.