Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

by George Leonard

But the energy we’ve hidden away can still be available to us. And putting those forbidden parts of our personality to work doesn’t involve indulging ourselves and literally acting out the submerged part. Anger, for instance, contains a great deal of energy. If we’ve repressed that emotion so effectively that we can’t even feel it, we obviously can’t use the energy that goes along with it in any conscious, constructive way. But if we take our anger out of the bag simply to indulge it, if we let anger become a knee-jerk response, we dissipate its considerable power. There are times when it’s appropriate to express anger, but there’s also the possibility of taking the fervid energy of indignation, even of rage, and putting it to work for positive purposes.