Mastering Emotions: The Balance of Anger and Hope

Mastering emotions requires recognizing anger as a positive force and hope as a necessary counterpart for healing.

### Mastering Your Emotions: The Marriage of Hope and Anger
* 😡 Anger is redefined as a **positive emotion**, with a focus on **healthy expression** rather than repression.
* 🌟 Hope is reframed as a negative emotion, often seen as **delusional or escapist** in this conceptual framework.
* 🧠 The importance of integrating both **anger and hope** for emotional mastery and healing is emphasized.
* 🤝 The connection between trauma, aggression, and assertion is explored, highlighting the need for **healthy boundary-setting**.
* The physical and mental health consequences of repressed anger, such as **resentment and chronic illness**, are discussed.
* 🌈 The role of anger in paving the way for **genuine hope and optimism** is highlighted, suggesting that healing past traumas is essential for a **buoyant spirit**.
* 💪 Practical tips for working with anger, including **somatic therapy** and **expressive arts**, are recommended.
* 🎓 The speaker promotes his course, the Shadow Work Library, as a **resource for deeper exploration** of these concepts.

understanding the marriage of hope and anger is essential if you want to master your emotions and stabilize your inner world. Today, we're going to be considering this question of unlocking your potential for both healthy aggression and healthy hope, which are two concepts that you might have kept separate inside of your mind. It's going to be a bit of a fun language game and a conceptual reworking of what you might imagine both of these emotions to mean because I want you to have the ability to access your anger and work with aggression without getting rageful or resentful. And I want you to be able to have a hopeful vision for your future without becoming delusional or otherwise salvational and escapist in your mentality. So let's play a little bit of a language game, and I'm going to weave it all back together to give you a really practical toolkit for mastering your own inner world. I want you to consider, first things first, that anger is actually a positive emotion, and hope is more of a negative emotion. It's just

a game. It's not the truth. Imagine if we societally revered anger as the finest, most subtle, most authentic, and highest-minded emotion that a human could experience. We saw angry artwork. Imagine D Vinci's biblical scenes, but instead of being subtle and fine and full of mystical joy and euphoria and deep aesthetic religious meaning, imagine if it was just anger and rage and maybe Jesus flipping over the table, and you can see the anger on his face. And for hundreds of years, we've clapped at that particular capture of rage, that fury upon being done. Imagine if that was the pinnacle of human expression or any other artistic work of genius. We put metal music at the absolute top of our taste buds, and we looked at all of the performance artists from the world as being a little bit lame or a little bit weak if they're focused on subtle, soft emotions of love and connection and joy and looking after the children and the flowers. And what we really wanted for the sake of a thought experiment was very angry, very mad, very

shouty individuals, and we thought that was wonderful. Imagine that now; it's a bizarre world to imagine. But then also imagine that hope is the exact opposite. We see the hopeful person who's dreaming about the beautiful day in the future or having a sense of faith that things will work out in difficult times as being fundamentally disconnected. They're not in touch with reality; they haven't got solid footing on the earth, and we see them as being almost this pitiful and destabilized creature. In the same way that if we saw two people getting into an argument on the road and starting to honk their horns and shouting at each other, we took that same everyday reality motion and applied it to the hopeful person. They're no longer someone who we look to for guidance and inspiration; they're actually quite a misguided person themselves. In this alternative reality of anger being a fine and subtle feeling and hope being something coarse and heavy and negative and a waste of time, you see a potential opening for really changing.

your narrative around aggression and optimism because the reality for trauma healing, especially if you're someone who's gone through a difficult childhood, you've gone through a painful breakup, a difficult career transition, or you're otherwise having a bit of a mental crisis or existential crisis in your life right now. You need both of these emotions to not be too polarized in either direction. I've played around in this video of painting out anger being one way and hope being the other way because typically we assign the opposite in this culture that we live in. We don't see anger as something which has a positive effect, and rightly so, in the world that we live in. We see the major consequences for various communities, various relationships, and various ecological situations around the world where anger and rage and violence and collective hostility all come together to reveal some of the worst of humanity. I understand that I'm not trying to pedestalize anger as something which we should really or pedestalize to demonize, and here's where the trickiness comes in.

I'm not trying to do either. I'm just trying to expand your mind for what an emotion can mean and how you can use that emotion to heal yourself and get more of what you want in a way where you don't take from others and you genuinely benefit. But you're not going to be able to do it if you've got an old traumatized story or a cultural conditioning about anger being something which is bad. And it typically goes into our nervous system about the age of one, two, maybe three, maybe four years old. If you had particularly patient parents, there's a moment or multiple moments where you're having a tantrum, you're screaming your heart out as a little boy or a little girl, and mother or father says, Now, now, good boys or good girls don't cry, and good boys and good girls don't bite, they don't kick, they don't punch, whatever the aggressive impulse might be. It gets repressed, it gets buried. However, if you were a little boy or a little girl and you failed one of

the way too early test at school. You're six years old, and you've got a mathematics test, and you're already assigning your self-worth to how many questions you can get correct out of 20. And you come back, and you didn't do too well, and you see in your, you know, parents' face, they're maybe a little bit disappointed. And you say, No, don't worry, Mom. Don't worry, Dad. I'm going to do better next time. And you've got that glimmer of hope that's rewarded. Your parents are likely going to reward that because, generally speaking, that is a good thing to have. There's a wide cultural conversation about conditioning and how we value some emotions and demonize other emotions. Your genuine inner work requires you to shift the narratives, at least as a thought experiment. Somebody who's gone through pain and wounding and devastation, they've been abused in a relationship or in a family environment, they need aggression, they need assertiveness, more importantly. But the beginning, we can't make the distinction between

aggression and assertion. Assertion and aggression both come from the same ecological root, which means to move towards the aggressive impulse, both verbally speaking from an etymology perspective, but also the energy of moving and pushing—a punch, a kick, a strong verbal REM marker. No, get off me, I hate that, go away. It's all a push. It's all a push. It's pushing out of you. You push people away. You're shut out for people who've experienced trauma and damage and pain. They've usually gotten underdeveloped capacity to strike out and keep themselves safe with a bit of an offensive gesture. And again, it can get dysfunctional. And some people who've gone through a very difficult childhood, they become abusers themselves. It's a very complicated question, but there's many, many, many layers of subtlety about the emotion of anger which have really missed within our society. What happens if all of that anger from childhood or the difficult breakup or the betrayal at work gets buried deep within us? Of course, one of the primary consequences

is heart issues, arthritic conditions, digestive issues, breakouts, stress responses, insomnia, and unfortunately even more considerably damaging diseases and sicknesses further down the road. The sickness starts to fester, the anger grows cold, and we go into resentment. If you've ever met someone in their 70s or their 80s who has a lot of resentment from their past, they are truly living in hell. They have taken on so much damage, and they didn't get it out of them with the punch, the kick, the somatic therapy, the biotic release, or even just saying no at the right kind of time and the right calibrated way. Just having a healthy boundary that ate them alive, and I don't want you to be in that place. But it would be a mistake to bypass the healthy expression of anger and go straight into the hopeful narrative. You can't move from pain into joy without treading the space between or giving proper space to let the pain be heard. Aggression and hope are needed. The trauma survivor needs to know that they

can push away further harm, or they can therapeutically work with the harm that was done and push it away and really release it and let it go. Sometimes letting go is like the Zen Buddhist metaphor of taking the hot coal and realizing you are only burning yourself, and you can let it fall away and go up the Himalayas and sit there and find Nirvana. Normally, it's not the case. Normally, if you got a hot coal in your hand, at the very least when you drop a hot coal, there's a bit of a push like, Ah, there, there's a push there, there's a bit of a push. And sometimes you need to throw it. Don't throw it at the person who hurt you. Maybe that's a temptation, but you can throw it out, you can throw it away, you can quench it via external aggressive gesture. It's more of a somatic therapy conversation, and maybe I won't go down that full avenue just for this video. It's something which I've explored at length on this channel and inside my

course the shadow work Library. I have an entire module dedicated to somatic therapy, and one of my favorite lessons is on working with anger and rage. I actually released it inside of the shadow work playlist promotional series, which you can find down in the description, and you're going to see that whole lesson working with anger bioenergetically for free from within the course. I recommend you check that out if you want a bit more of that somatic work down there in the description. For the sake of this one video and trying to find a reconciling point between anger and hope, you need to have the ability to see both of them. This is crucial. This is where the video comes to see both anger and hope as neither fundamentally positive nor negative but merely as emotional states which can be harnessed and embodied depending upon the context and depending upon the season in your healing journey. For someone at the very beginning of healing from a difficult and disgusting abuse in a romantic relationship, those kinds of situations, men and women, where your agency is taken.

and you've been left in very devastating situations. It is completely appropriate for them to go through more of an aggressive, focused stage of self-healing rather than going towards the hopeful stage. Because if they try and go towards conversations like this, imagine I was facilitating a session with you. You said to me, Jordan, this really dreadful thing happened in my past, and I can see the resentment on your face. And I were to respond with, Well, don't worry about that. The future can be so wonderful. Just imagine the next relationship you're in. Just imagine when you move to a different country, somewhere else in the world, and it's going to be so much safer and so much nicer there. And think of all the birds that you're going to see and how bright the sun's going to be. And what about the... There's a place for it. You feed the hope over time, but I'm fundamentally missing the mark because that person is mad. They're in fighting consciousness, and

it's a healing move to bring them out of victim consciousness or more of a disempowered perspective to get them back on their feet and show them how to say no and feel strong and feel defiant in their energy because they didn't get the opportunity before. And once they've expressed some of that, usually through things like martial arts therapy or even working directly somatically but also conversationally, just opening up the philosophy that's okay for you to strike back. There are these journaling exercises you can do where you imagine going into an active imagination space and get vengeance and revenge at something which you don't want to necessarily go into too far on your own because it can get quite dark and quite heavy. There's so much you can do, but depending on the context, depending on the stage of the healing journey, you need the anger to come through. And the anger is ultimately, this is where it becomes interesting, the healthy expression of anger is the hopeful gesture. Through exploring your rage and your resentment, you peel back the

curtain of Hope. It's almost as if the anger was inviting you towards a deeper level of Hope if you were just willing to sit with it for a while. You can't bypass towards a narrative of Salvation, and you can't genuinely believe that things are going to be better in the future if you've got a hell of a lot of reasons inside of here to not believe that because of what happened in the past and what's happening right now. If you've got that pain there, you're not going to be able to be told a story or believe a story of Hope and appreciation. You work with what's there to begin with, and eventually, The Hope naturally comes through. And it's my personal philosophical or maybe moral, religious, spiritual belief that when we have unburdened the trauma that we've endured from the past, the human heart and the human soul have a naturally buoyant quality. There's a natural uplifting which returns to people when they're healed or getting

healthier. I've seen this in my own personal trauma healing journey. How I was when I was a teenager in my early 20s, as opposed to now. The kind of light that I have in my eyes, my ability to genuinely be quite hopeful in my day-to-day life, is directly proportionate to me also doing a lot of very deep anger work and a lot of, well, honestly even still today. I love listening to metal music. I love aggressive and explosive workouts. I enjoy working with frustration in a conscious way because if you can unravel that narrative or you generally drop the cultural idea that anger is always bad and you can see anger as something which can assert a new value system. Again, aggression and assertion coming from that same ideological route to move towards. You can do something like creating art, healing relationships, or otherwise doing something for your community which is fueled by a righteous frustration. And it almost becomes the healthy anger of your soul, which is getting into more spiritual territory. But if you can can say that's not right.

that's evil. That's wrong. And I'm going to do something about that. And you watch for when you get too grandiose. You watch for when you become uncalibrated and you start using your days to bring something good into the world. You're bringing, you're asserting from the heart, and the heart isn't all love and light. The heart can feel the depths of resentment. And I would say that some of the greatest healers that we have in the world, some of the most inspiring figures within humanitarian sectors, they feel the rage and frustration. When they go past the row of body bags in the Civil War, they look at that pain, they face it head-on, and they feel the fury, and they do something healing as a result. Sometimes we're all human. People go too far, they lose their cool, and there's a lot of violence in the world where clearly it's uncalibrated. But trying to bring the two together, there's a real potential to use anger to heal yourself and heal the world, and hope will naturally follow. So

If I've got one piece of advice for this video on how to master your emotions and really heal yourself at a genuinely deep and reliable level, it's shifting your focus away from hope and positivity and the potential of the future, and really looking at the darkness and the heaviness, and seeing if it falls away with love and attention. And also the ability to be honest about your emotions and express it outwards, and to see if that naturally creates the opening which is much, much, much more authentic. It's up to you. I recommend that you check out again my course, the Shadow Work Library. It's linked down in the description. In terms of the full playlist, I have got a deep exploration of how to work thematically with anger and rage, which is one of the major emotional shadows that we repress to the darkness. This course took me four years to research and many months and many videos to put together. You can find it down in the description, and I'll see you in the shadow work playlist.

Hope & Anger: How To Master Your Mood & Control Your Emotional State - Inner Work Library [133/500]

Jordan Thornton - Inner Work

Understanding the relationship between hope and anger is crucial for mastering emotions and stabilizing one's inner world.

The speaker challenges the traditional views of these emotions, suggesting that anger can be seen as a positive force and hope as a negative one.

This conceptual reworking aims to provide a practical toolkit for accessing healthy aggression and fostering a realistic, grounded vision for the future.

The Balance of Aggression and Optimism in Trauma Healing

Both anger and hope are essential emotions for healing from trauma, and they should not be polarized.

Cultural conditioning often demonizes anger, leading to its repression, while hope is rewarded and valued.

Inner work requires shifting narratives around these emotions, as both aggression and assertiveness are needed for those who have experienced pain and wounding.

The Relationship Between Aggression and Assertion

Aggression and assertion share a common ecological root, both involving a push towards others, often stemming from trauma and pain.

Buried anger from difficult experiences can lead to various health issues and resentment in later life.

It's important to express anger healthily and create boundaries, as this can help release the pain and prevent it from festering.

The course offers a module on somatic therapy, with a free lesson on working with anger and rage.

It's important to see anger and hope as emotional states that can be harnessed depending on the healing journey's context.

For those healing from abusive relationships, an aggressive stage of self-healing may be more appropriate before transitioning to hope, as expressing anger can ultimately lead to a healthier and more hopeful mindset.

Anger can lead to a deeper level of hope if one is willing to sit with it and acknowledge the pain from the past.

Genuine belief in a better future is difficult when burdened by trauma, but working through that pain can eventually bring about hope.

The author's personal healing journey shows that addressing anger and frustration can lead to a healthier, more hopeful outlook on life.

Embracing anger and frustration can lead to healing oneself and the world, as seen in inspiring humanitarian figures.

Mastering emotions involves facing darkness and heaviness with love and attention, rather than solely focusing on hope and positivity.

The speaker offers a course on shadow work, specifically addressing anger and rage, as a tool for deep emotional healing.