Every day we are confronted by situations or people who can bring out the anger in us. Someone cuts us off in traffic on the way to work. Someone takes all the credit for a project your team completed at work. Someone ghosts you in a relationship. Someone fails to respond to messages or texts. Any of these things can make us angry, but really, what is beneath that anger? Is it hurt? Shame? Jealousy? Confusion?

Anger often is a mask for our real feelings. Anger is our first reaction. But what if we delve deeper into what we really are feeling? What happens if we sit with the real feelings beneath the anger? What if we admit to ourselves that we are less angry and more hurt or ashamed? Well, it is hard to do that, of course. No one wants to admit being hurt.

So we hold on to that anger. But holding on to anger is more than just unhealthy. Holding on to anger turns us into bitter, hurtful people who tend to lash out and push people away so we ourselves do not get hurt. And in holding on to anger, we become victims of our own lives.

Anger is a choice. We can choose to respond to people or situations that hurt us in an angry, vengeful way or we can accept the fact that we have been hurt or shamed, explain our true feelings and move on. Why hold on to that anger? What purpose does it serve? One may think that holding on to anger protects you from future hurts, but it does not. We can no more control what is going to happen to us than we can the sunrise or the sunset. All we can do is control the way we react to something or someone. We can choose to react with anger or venom and continue to be a victim of our lives or we can choose to react from a place of understanding.

Very few people actually try to hurt us on purpose. What is going on in the life of the person who hurt us to make them behave that way or say what he said? If we come from a place of understanding and compassion, we become victors of our lives and the situations with which we are confronted. If we come from a place of understanding and compassion, we are less likely to respond with anger and more likely to respond with love. Would that not be better? Doing so makes us the victors of our lives. Which would you rather be? A victim of your life or the victor of your life?

You can choose to be the victor of your life or you can choose to be a victim of your life. What happens when we choose to be the victor, the hero of our own lives is that we start to feel as though life is happening for us instead of life happening to us. When we choose to be the victor of our own lives, we begin to feel as though we have more agency, more say in how we choose to react to people and situations. When we choose to be the victors of our own lives, we own our feelings and can find it easier to move past anger, hurt and sadness. We can choose to react to troubling situations with grace and compassion when we choose to be the victors of our own lives. The choice is up to you.