Anger - Friend or Foe?

Enduring is like tying a knot at the end of your rope and hanging on.  But who wants to go through life just hanging on to the end of their rope?  Now I highly recommend enduring over sinking into hopelessness and suicidal thoughts but just enduring does not make much of a life.  I am learning that emotions are great motivators.  I do things to be happy.  This is the reward system of motivation and for me it works fairly well.  But another more powerful motivator is anger.  Growing up being angry was BAD.  Therefore, I was punished when I was angry.  Now this confused me because one of the reasons I would get angry was someone was hurting me.  So I spent my childhood suppressing anger because it was BAD and still getting hurt.  As a teenager, I saw the destructive forces of uncontrolled anger and felt I had to agree that anger was BAD and I needed to suppress it myself.  I became so good at it I could dissociate completely from feeling angry.   Very impressive level of self control with one huge cheat, I was a multiple and I actually used this to shift the anger to another unreachable part of myself.  I did not rid myself of anger ~ I put it in cold storage. (Maybe it was hot storage?)  The interesting thing for me is when I entered counseling I finally realized that KavinCoach was trying to get me angry on purpose.  With my perception that anger was BAD, why on earth would KavinCoach purposely piss me off?  For the next several years I learned about anger, which by the way is a secondary emotion, but the easiest to provoke.  I learned that anger is like fire.  In a forest fire with the fire whipping through the trees destroying all in its path, fire is BAD.  However, put a fire in the belly of a steam engine and feed the fire trees an entire train could be moved cross the country.  Or in my day, I watched as the combustion engines launched a rocket to the moon.  On a personal basis, there is nothing like being pissed off to get the house cleaned in a hurry.  Anger channeled towards positive change can be liberating.  As long as I endured being treated as a second class citizen, nothing would change.  As long as I accepted unkind behavior, nothing would change.  I could not change the other person but I could change my reaction.  Anger was the power to get me out of my rut of passive acceptance and simply enduring life.  However, neither anger or rapid change are comfortable on a long term basis.  Once I got out of the rut I could look around and decide where I wanted my life to go.  Change happened.  Anger can be my friend or foe, depending on how I use it.