Anger Management

Here is your chance to get the total picture of true forgiveness! Forgiving when you’ve been hurt, abused or even just disappointed and let down can be one of the biggest challenges we face as human beings.

Listen to Dr. DeFoore as he guides you through the process of letting go of anger, healing emotional wounds, and returning to love through total forgiveness. You can listen to a free preview of this enlightening and effective audio program now, which is available for immediate download.

Remember, you forgive for you, because you are a good person and forgiving is returning to who you are.

These are the steps to forgiveness, as I understand them after 37 years of helping people let go of anger and resentment:

1. Be sure you have followed the above steps of letting go of your anger. You can’t hold anger and forgive at the same time.
2. Remember that love is who and how you really are inside, and that forgiving is more about who you are than anger is.
3. Grieve the losses you have experienced in the relationship where you need to forgive. If you haven’t grieved fully, you won’t be able to forgive. Learn more about skills for healthy grieving here.
4. Recognize that forgiveness is something you do with your heart and your gut, not your head. You may want to try some physical anger release methods to help with this.
5. Realize that you are forgiving for yourself, not because the other person necessarily deserves it. Forgiveness is for you, for your health and your good heart.
6. Be aware that you forgive because that is who you are. It is not “letting the other person off the hook.” They are still responsible for their actions, no matter what.
7. Write about the wrongs that you are trying to forgive. It is absolutely necessary that you get it out!
8. Keep repeating all of these steps until you feel your body relaxing and breathing a huge sigh of relief. That’s when you will know you have finally forgiven. Then wish the other person well, and give them permission to be who they are on the planet with you. You may or may not choose to be close–that’s another story. Forgiveness doesn’t mean everything goes back to how it was, necessarily.

Be easy with yourself during this process. Stay with it, and you will get there.

Anger is something you feel, it’s not who you are.

You have to remember that you really are a good person who wants to love and be loved, and that’s the first step to letting go of anger. Here are some of the steps to getting there:

• Realize you have good reasons for your anger.
• Trace your anger back to the fear and the pain that is behind it.
• Tell that story. Writing about your anger can help you let go of it–and it’s free!
• Practice these anger management techniques over and over, and you will definitely let go of your anger and be ready to begin to forgive.

Everybody wants to love and be loved, but pain, fear and anger can really get in the way. Forgiveness is the way back to love when anger has taken over.

Here is how the process seems to work:

• Love–it all seems to start with love. Police officers will tell you the most dangerous call they can make is domestic violence. That’s because in the family, there’s more love, therefore more vulnerability, more chance of being hurt, more fear and therefore more anger. Love is where it begins, and if you are able to forgive, that is also where it ends.
• Then there’s always pain–if there’s a lot of love, somebody’s going to get hurt. That’s just part of life, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
• Because of the pain, there’s fear and anxiety. This is totally natural, but you need to be aware of it so that it doesn’t take over and make you “blind.”
• Next comes anger, because it is a powerful, protective emotion that comes straight out of fear, pain and love. Anger is not wrong–it’s actually totally natural. But most of us don’t know how to express anger in healthy ways, so it comes out in harmful ways.
• Now we need to forgive–because it all started with love, right? This is the hard part–it’s easy to love, get hurt and be angry, right? So, now let’s really get into what it means to forgive.

That process we just talked about is a familiar one we’ve all been through. It is common. Forgiveness–true forgiveness–is not so common.