TL;DR - This (very long) post outlines a process for letting go of anger (and a lot of other things). Broadly, it involves writing everything down in specific format, analyzing it to own my shit, reading it to someone, fixing things and living right in the future. In a lot of ways my emotions are a black box. Experiences go in, different feelings come out. This process opens it up, shows me how my anger works and lets me fix things.

Overview: I hope that this can help some of the men here as it has helped me. This post was prompted by an AskMRP discussion on letting go of anger. Frequently a person wants to let go of anger but cannot manage to do it via contemplation and relaxation. This is a common experience: we can't just choose to stop being angry or fearful. I can understand intellectually that anger doesn't help me, even agree philosophically that its the path of weakness, but I need to experience something in order to change my internal reality and let go of anger and fear. Its not quick, pleasant or easy, but that's what the below process does. Some anger evaporates when its seen clearly. Sometimes I forgive the people and my anger towards them to goes. Some people must be helped in order for me to let go of my anger. If I am not willing to see clearly or let go of my anger, I don't really want to be rid of it. If I'm not willing to help or apologize to someone you hate, that's normal. I don't worry about that for now. I'll be ready once I get to that point in the process. People who believe in god would do well to ask for his help but that is in no way a requirement.

There is a group of people who have to let go of their anger if they want to stay alive: recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. If they hold on to their anger it will drive them crazy, they'll relapse and they'll die. As a consequence the anonymous recovery programs have figured out how to let go of anger even in the most extreme circumstances. The general concepts of this process are borrowed from the 12 step recovery process but I think its applicable to all people. Anger works the same with everyone.

As a part of this process I'm going to fearlessly face what is in me, own my shit, learn everything I can from it, let go of the things that don't help me and try to be the strongest person I can be in the future. I think this is consistent with what we do here. Anger is a beta trait and a loss of frame. There is no circumstance where it is more helpful than peaceful focus. If you have to choose between fear and anger, choose anger. But the path of strength is neither and anger will corrode my life from the inside out in the long term. We need to be convinced of this in order to let it go.

Perspective: Anger is victim based blame directed outward at something that threatened something important to me. Sometimes this is understandable, like if someone did something stupid that threatened my daughter's safety. But that's like 0.1% of what I've been angry about in my life. Most of the time my anger is me choosing to play the victim regarding shit I should be accepting and owning. A resentment is to re-feel anger or hurt. To play it over and over again in your head. If I have a resentment there is a reason. I get something out of it. Maybe because it makes me feel safer, smugly superior or it deflects accountability in some way. When our past is accepted we no longer need to replay resentments in our head. Fear is the weaker flip side of the same victim coin and closely related.

The Process

Step 1) Write down all the Anger. Expand it. Disassemble it to see how it works and what its made of.

There is something about writing things down that makes them real. I need to make a list of everything I am angry about. I like using a password protected spreadsheet on a laptop. The spreadsheet should have 5 columns. If you have a problem with fear you can make a second similar sheet for fears. You will find that anger and fear are very closely related.

Column 1) What am I angry at. People (my wife perhaps), places, institutions, ideas. If someone did something to you in the past and you're still thinking about them negatively, that's a resentment and they probably belong on this list.

Column 2) What did they do that I'm angry about? Nothing counts here but honesty. If you're angry about something they did, write it down. Don't worry about whether you should be angry, or if its silly or childish. Write it down. But this has to be physical actions that they took. No labels like "she was being a cunt" or "all those privileged fuckers were stuck up". What did they actually do? If you are angry because someone didn't do something OK, but you need a column 4) entry that you expected them to do it. If you have something where you're angry but you cannot identify any physical action or omission, you need to ask yourself where that came from. Complete these first 2 columns totally before going on to the rest. List all things you're angry about. You need a different row for each thing you're angry about. I will have different rows for my wife denying sex and shit testing me. I might have different rows for my wife shit testing me in front of other people and shit testing me at home, if I feel differently about them.

Column 3) What was threatened? You cannot be angry without something you care about being threatened by something external. Next to each item from column 1, write down what their actions threatened. Think about the incident and ask your self really, what did you feel and what did they threaten? A list to start with is ego, financial security, sex, friendships, other relationships, career, relationships with your kids.

Column 4) My part in it. Ignore the others person's behavior entirely. We are trying to fix ourselves. For each event from column 2, what did I do, or fail to do, as a part of each of those incidents to bring them about. How did I allow the person to threaten that thing in column 3? Did I instigate something to cause the other person to react and hurt me? How could I have reacted better to the event? What unreasonable expectations did I have for this person? How could I have gotten over it quicker? How could I have let it effect my life less? What was the other person thinking? What did I do that fell short of the standards of behavior of a perfect captain? Imagine I posted in MRP saying "I'm angry at (Column 1 person) because they did (column 2 action) and then told the whole story" what would /u/whinemoreplease and /u/TheFamilyAlpha call me out on? All that stuff.

Important Note: People who had things happen to them before the age of 14, which they are still fucked up about in adulthood generally have no part in the original event. This is also true for victims of random crimes and misfortunes. Those things should definitely be on this list as we want to heal that pain and let go of the anger and hurt. But, for instance, people who were abused as children have no responsibility for that. That being said, they are responsible for how they chose to deal with it in adult life.

Column 5) What should I have done, owned or been on top of. This is plan for the future. I'll give you a hint here. This will generally involve you owning a part of your life that you felt was threatened (from Column 3) that you previously blamed something external (from column 1) for fucking up. Again imagine you posted in MRP saying "I'm angry at (Column 1 person) because they did (column 2 action)" what would the mods/approved guys tell you that you should have done? The men here can provide you a good set of tools for owning or managing almost any element of you male life here. Read. Ask people.

I'll provide a brief example row.

Row 1 - Sex denial

Column 1) I am angry at my wife.

Column 2) I'm angry because my wife doesn't fuck me as much as I want.

Column 3) What was threatened? This threatens my ego and my sex life.

Column 4) What was my part in it? I married a woman that was not attracted to me. I did not make myself attractive. I displayed low value. I got fat. I tried to obligate and berate her into giving me starfish sex. I whined and got butthurt when I got rejected. Lots more here.

Column 5) I should have married someone else. I should have made myself attractive, studied game, displayed high value, dreaded my wife and owned my attractiveness like a man.

Step 2) Gain Insight.

If you made a thorough list you now have a blueprint for how you relate to the world. Review your list. Ask yourself the following questions.

  • What patterns do I see? Do you have the same anger pattern with every women you've been with? How about every boss? If so there's something there you need to own and the individuals are probably not the one causing the problem.

  • Do you have unreasonable (expectations)[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/30m0yh/the_root_cause_of_the_anger_phase/] that are not supported by the way actual humans behave in romantic relationships.

  • Look for covert contracts. Many places I'm angry at someone else for not doing something I expected is going to be a covert contract.

  • What am I letting someone else decide in my head? Use the ideas from WISNIFG. On my list, most places where I am angry at someone for criticizing me its because I chose to let them decide how I should feel about myself or what is acceptable for me. I have to see and then own that.

  • Do you recognize any patterns of behavior from the home you grew up in? Those anger patterns with your wife, how do they compare to your parents? The purpose here is understanding.

  • Where do you still see blue pill thinking and behavior?

  • Are there areas of life where you see a lot of anger? These are the areas you need to look hard at fixing.

  • Do you see how the individuals involved were irrelevant and that you were really just externalizing blame for the difficulties and conflicts inherent to life and the natures of men and women?

  • Do you understand why a woman behaved the way she did and AWALT? By this time you will probably see that you have very, very little reason to be angry at individual women.

  • Do you see how you were doing the best you could and its OK to forgive yourself? Do you see how other people where the same?

Other people who are farther down the MRP path than I am can probably come up with better questions than I can here.

Step 3) Read everything to someone.

This is scary. Grow a pair and do it. Go take you list and read it to a close mouthed, sensible person. Maybe your minister, uncle or male friend. I don't know why, but something about doing this will cause you to accept everything on the list. Unless they are red pill themselves they will probably tell you a bunch of things are not your fault. Don't listen to them. You are not doing this to seek their counsel, only their presence. This will not be a fun experience. Sometimes we talk about killing your ego. This is a good way to go about it.

Step 4) Making things right: Repair and Right Living

By this point most of our anger should be gone. All of the small things we were angry about should have disappeared after we wrote them down, analyzed them, saw them from the other persons point of view, realized their futility and read them to someone. Usually, at this point, there are only the more significant people left that we are still angry about. For those people we make amends. In doing this we want to resolve the mistakes of the past and set our ship on the right course for the future.

There are a few ways to do this.

  • Apologizing. Look at the column 4. What's there that deserves an apology? I think we need to be careful here. In our beta past we have abused apologizing as a part of covert contracts, manipulation and validation seeking. I think that apologizing to someone you care about for your beta fuckery from a position of Alpha strength can be a positive action. However, apologizing to seek validation is not. I would be interested to get the communities opinion on when apologies are appropriate. But at this point, if I am angry at someone and I have harmed them, it is very likely that I will let go of my anger by apologizing to them for what I have done.

  • Helping. Trying to do something to help someone I am angry at will frequently allow me to let go of my anger. If I'm angry at my Father, I can go visit him the nursing home every week for a while. Yes, he'll still be an asshole. That's fine. I'm doing it to help me, but in order to do that I have to legitimately help him. Sometimes I am angry at a category (race, religion) of people. I can give some money to a charity that helps them.

  • Living right. This is probably the biggest category. If my wife criticized me for being unreliable, my part in that was I was unreliable, I will make amends by being reliable in the future. Alot of what we do here follows this pattern.

  • Prayer. In very rare circumstances there may be some people we are still angry at even after thoroughly completing the rest of the process. Its rare but it happens. There is a technique that has been know to work where all other methods fail: pray for the person. You don't have to pray to a god or be christian. Talk to the universe then. Ask the universe to give that person all of the health, wealth, love and happiness that I have ever asked for myself. I have never heard of a case where doing this solemnly, seriously, every day for a couple weeks didn't work.

Step 5) Continue to journal.

At this point I have cleared away the wreckage of a lot of my anger. But my experience is that the previous sequence will be a revolution but this will then become an evolutionary process of growth. When new things make me angry I make a list with 5 columns. I then complete the rest of the process on that individual point of anger. Anger teaches me the weak points in my head. If I use it correctly it can be a valuable tool for improvement.

Conclusion: I hope this process can help others as it has helped me. I intend this post to be a first draft of an idea that is refined based on people using it for the purposes we focus on here.

EDIT: Added content about expectations based on input from /u/theultmatecad.