What you’re not supposed to say when you’re angry is “F*ck You!” But we all say it anyway.

Think about it: If you find yourself locked into a confrontation without an exit, how long does it take until you find yourself yelling “F*ck You!”? We’ve all done it, or at least thought it.

I meditate, you meditate; We all call upon techniques to sooth the spirit. But when anger rears its head, we often have little or no control but to watch it take aim.

“Take a breath,” You can say to yourself, “Remain calm.” But they’re just words.

Why?

Many of us experience abandonment and abuse during our early childhood. Maybe it’s our parents’ misgivings or the way we felt mistreated by our peers. But the memory stays with us, tightly tucked into our cells. And we rarely feel exonerated from the pain, until we understand how to deal with it.

Anger is about the loss of a person or thing. It’s our way of diverting our energies away from pain. As we experience loss, most of us feel entitled to be angry. And who’s to say we we’re not wrong? But when we get carried away, our words can become irrational and hurtful to those around us.

With each new love, we choreograph our emotions with high precision and hopes. We’re motivated to embrace new ways of loving, but it doesn’t take long before the same catastrophic crap repeats itself. Still, we find ourselves circling back to anger. We can’t control it. Our ego is feeling the fragility of being vulnerable.

Have you ever tried to recapture that initial first high as you fell in love? Or acknowledged a previous success? It became your headline. You’re proud of it! And as you sit around with friends, the conversation flows into talks about dating. You’re excited to participate, until a word triggers a memory. Before you know it, you’re thinking about an ex, you know – the one that blah blah blah. Now your headline reads “How I screwed up.” And you feel angry.

Here’s a quick process to help you deal with anger:

Lots of pain may not have survived as long as it did, if we had asked ourselves, “What am I losing from the get-go?” By that I mean, the moment you sensed a crisis and felt anger, you must stop and ask, “What am I losing?”. And then keep asking it until you get in touch with your sadness. This internal process will take you directly to your loss. As sad as you may feel, this is your first step to taking care of you. Yes, it hurts. But it will help you get away from a heated situation until you’ve calmed down.

It’s easier to get angry than to go to an unshakable place of loneliness. But the truth is your arbiter: It will free you from falling down that too-familiar hole in the road. Like most of us who have chased after something lost, except for grief or a heinous act, we’re better off without it. We’ve become more liberated at last.

Malcolm X knew this too well, as he once said,

“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.”