What’s my part, if any, in this unfolding? 

My friend is a vegetarian, but he calls himself a recovering vegan.

His favorite joke about his former diet is, vegans don’t care about animals, they just want to be angry.

It’s an extreme stereotype, but it does make me wonder about the emotion of anger and what it does to us.

Because being mad can be deeply empowering. We feel energized and righteous when we’re angry, but that means there might be an identity piece that’s hard for us to surrender in the absence of it.

Who are we without our rage? Will we lose our edge if we become less angry?

We may never know.

And this doesn’t suggest that anger is a negative thing. When it comes to our emotions, there are no good or bad or right or wrong feelings, only unhealthy ways of expressing them. Hell, anger is often the ember of most of my creative initiatives.

However, the dangerous behavior is when we misidentify the source of our emotions. When we operate under the illusion that there are these things that make us angry, and they exist outside ourselves.

They don’t. It’s an inside job.

Manhattan, for example, is a humongous city that’s cold, hard, rude and greedy, and that makes for one hell of an external stressor.

But as citizens of this hellhole of a metropolis, we can’t blame the city for our rage. Taking the city’s frenetic energy back home and continuing to fume about, that’s the culprit. That’s the internal stressor fueling our anger.

It’s like when my coworkers used to bitch about being tired and busy and annoyed that the subway is late and disgusted by hurricane of mass commerce that surrounds us.

Join the club, folks. Eight million other people agree with you. Blaming geography isn’t helping.

Masters suggests in his book about shadow work that we ask ourselves the following question:

What’s our part, if we have any, in such an unfolding?

Here’s the psychologists’s thinking behind this inquiry:

The less we know our shadow, the more likely it is that we’ll blame destiny for what happens to us. Not knowing our shadow, and what’s housed in it, reduces us to little more than puppets operated by unseen forces. But the less we’re run by what’s in our shadow, the more we’ll view our destiny as something we both make and are made by, something that’s far from immune from our choices.

Are you looking for a way to blame other people for your rage?

Maybe it’s part of your identity and you can’t let go of it.

But empowering as your anger might be, you have to ask what role you might be playing in creating it.

LET ME ASK YA THIS... 
Does blaming deny you the individual journey you are here to make?