Week 7 · Lesson 1
The Thoughts That Set It Off
Week 7 of 23 · Anger Management
What is the thought you have right before it goes bad?
There is one. Everybody has one, and it is almost always a sentence.
He is trying me. She is lying. They are laughing. Here we go again. Nobody is going to look out for me so I have to handle it.
Whatever yours is, it shows up first, and then everything after it follows.
Key ConceptAnger Is Information, Not a Plan
Anger is not the problem and anybody who tells you it is has never had to survive anything.
Anger is a signal. It shows up to tell you something got crossed. Something got taken, somebody moved on you, a line got stepped over. That is useful information and you should not want to lose it.
Here is where it goes wrong. Anger tells you something is happening. It does not tell you what to do about it, and it is a terrible source of instructions because it is built for speed, not accuracy.
Taking the signal and letting it write the plan is how somebody loses ten years over four seconds.
Journal Question
What was your anger telling you the last time it came up? Not what you did. What was it saying got crossed?
Teaching PointFive Thoughts That Lie to You
These are not weakness. Everybody’s mind does this. They just cost more where you are from.
Deciding you know what somebody meant. He looked at me like that on purpose. You cannot see inside anybody, and you are guessing with your own history.
Either somebody is solid or they are against you. Either the day is going right or the whole thing is trash. Real life almost never sits at the ends, but that is where the mind goes fastest.
Deciding how it ends before it starts. They are going to say no anyway. This is not going to work. So you do not try, and then it does not work, and now it feels like you were right.
Somebody is short with you and you decide it is about you. Nine times out of ten they are carrying something that has nothing to do with you.
One thing goes wrong and inside a minute it is everything, it is always like this, it is never going to change. That is not what happened. That is what it turned into on the way through your head.
Activity
Five thoughts. Which two are yours? Write the last time each one ran, and what it cost you that day.
ScenarioThe Text That Was Not About Anything
Somebody does not answer you. Two hours.
Hour one, you notice. Hour two, your mind starts writing. She is with somebody. He is switching up. They are talking about me right now. By hour three you have an entire situation in your body that has not happened anywhere except in your head.
Then they answer, and their phone was dead.
Nothing occurred. And you have been in a fight for three hours, your chest is tight, and you already said something to somebody else about it that you cannot take back.
That is not weakness. That is a mind trained by a life where the worst thing usually was happening. It learned to get ahead of it. The problem is it never learned to stop.
Spiritual Takeaway
He got angry, and He still knew exactly what He was doing
People act like Jesus never got mad. Read it again.
He walked into the temple and found people running a racket on the poor in God’s own house, charging them to worship. And John says He made a whip out of cords. Sat down and made it. That is not a man who lost control in a second. That is somebody who saw it, felt everything about it, and then acted.
He drove them out and turned over their tables and money went everywhere. Nobody in that building was confused about how He felt.
Ephesians 4:26 says be angry, and do not sin. Both of those in one sentence. The anger is not the sin. What the anger gets to write is where it turns.
And notice what He was angry about. Not being disrespected. Not somebody looking at Him wrong. He was angry about people being used. That is the difference between anger with a purpose and anger that is just pressure looking for a door.
The same man, in the same week, knelt down and washed the feet of the men who were about to leave Him, including the one He knew was already selling Him. Same man. Whip in one story, towel in the other. Both on purpose.
One time, when the sentence shows up in your head, write it down instead of acting on it. Just the sentence. Then look at it later that day and ask whether you actually knew it was true.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 7 Lesson