The Art Of Tammy Bailey AT FORTY FIVE Magazine Issue R 2021 12

AT FORTY FIVE MAGAZINE /15
We learn how to hate just the same way we
learn how to love. While love is our natural
state, our environment and external
programming determine how we deal with
our negative emotions as well as our capacity
to love.
Nelson Mandela said, "No one is born hating
another person because of the color of his skin,
or his background, or his religion. People must
learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they
can be taught to love, for love comes more
naturally to the human heart than its
opposite."
Anger, resentment, rage, and hatred are blocks
to love. Negative emotions come with a lot of
judgment or a fear of judgment. Many people
do not know how to process these heavy
negative emotions. Even those who have fits of
rage and outwardly express hate are doing so
because that is part of their learned
programming, but also because they don’t
know how to process their own negative
emotions in a healthy way.
Before I explain how we can process this
long-held accumulation of negative
emotions, I would like to explain the idea of
healthy and unhealthy expressions of
anger. When I was a child, I was taught that
anger was bad—to be angry was to be
violent. While I never experienced any
physical violence in my own home, I grew
to believe that anger equaled violence. My
interpretation of that falsehood was that
anger was unacceptable and shouldn’t be
outwardly expressed. I learned to hold it in
and bury it deep inside. I learned to bite my
tongue and swallow that bitter pill of
resentment.
These heavy emotions are becoming harder to
hide, contain within, and keep at bay. It is as
though a bubbling volcano is ready to erupt. In
fact, many people process anger that way.
Unexpressed anger becomes a cesspool of
resentment, which eventually becomes a bout
of rage. Eventually, the volcano needs to erupt.
When something happens in our environment
that bumps up against our accumulated
boiling cesspool of unexpressed feelings, it
causes us to blow up. Instead of feeling our
own unexpressed feelings, we project them
out into the world and cast our anger out as
words and/or violence.
"Unexpressed anger becomes a
cesspool of resentment, which
eventually becomes a bout of
rage."