When we get mad, the absolute number one piece of advice we'll get is to "let it go." The problem is, for someone who's actually angry to the point of it messing up their life, you may as well have just asked them to take on a Balrog with nothing but a standard-issue phaser set on stun, which is not only insane but impossible because those don't even exist in the same universe, you goofballs.
The other problem is that we send mixed messages: you're supposed to let anger go, but at the same time, you're supposed to stand up for yourself. Well, standing up for yourself takes a lot of energy, so where does that energy come from, if not the anger welling up inside you, like a big angry Balrog?
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As a side note, isn't it weird that Balrogs are an apt metaphor for everything that exists?
The idea is that you're supposed to let go of the things that you can't control and fight to control the things you can -- only that's insane, because most stuff doesn't clearly fall into one of those categories. What if you hate your job? What if you hate where you live? What if your cat won't stop meowing? You have to do a lot of investigating and careful thinking to figure out if those are problems that you can actually fix or if they're issues you just have to accept -- and that's damn near impossible when you're angry. So the real prerequisite to all this anger advice is that you need to learn to control your anger -- but what's the difference between that and suppressing it?
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