Progress with anger

Today I reflected on how far I've come in my understanding of anger over the past 15 years. I used to think of myself as a very angry person. It seemed there was a well of anger inside me. I wondered if I just needed to "get it all out" somehow. Anger arose for me in every non-superficial relationship. Expressing the anger was destructive (I didn't know how to express it constructively), and keeping it inside was also destructive. This made relationships really uncomfortable. Gradually, though, I saw that there was no well of anger-- just a set of stories that kept getting re-activated. Wow! And gradually I saw that the stories were empty. So it didn't matter if stories arose when I was around people. I saw that I wasn't being inauthentic to just let go of the stories; there was no need to voice them. I saw the usefulness of exploring the stories by conversing with my child self. Finally, now, doing an intensive guided inquiry into the nature of emotional reactivity, I am seeing that the stories don't even need to arise-- they only arise out of habit, and the habit is not useful and can be broken. I just realized that I no longer think of myself as an angry person. Pretty cool!