Healing Your Emotions: Discover your five element type and change your life. Angela Hicks
id="ulink_41cff479-2a13-546c-bb1b-fdd9dab124fa"> Ambivalence and Indecision
The full venting of anger is only occasionally effective in getting us what we want and, even when it works, there may be negative side effects. So ambivalence and indecision are a natural progression from wanting to be angry, but at the same time not wanting to. Ambivalence or indecisiveness may feel awkward, but they will at least maintain personal and social contacts. The feelings of anger, of course, remain unexpressed and get stored somewhere in the body.
Wood types like Julia and Jacqueline find it hard to show their anger and frustration. Julia says:
I don’t get angry when I should do, then I get angry with the wrong person. I might also cry if I feel angry. Eighty per cent of the time I might be experiencing anger but cry as well. I might not say anything when I’m angry but then it sits inside me and I think about it a lot and it festers.
Jacqueline told us:
I talk about my anger towards people but then I don’t show it with the people I’m angry with and I back down. I appear to be assertive, but it takes a huge amount to manifest anger to their face.
Eleanor tells us about the difficulties she has making a decision:
I can think I’ve made a decision but because other options are there, I can’t leave it alone. I can’t rest with it properly. Other things keep popping up and I want to take everything into account. I see other people making clear decisions and not worrying about the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ anymore. For me other possibilities stay in the picture and it makes life difficult.
Ambivalence and indecision make it difficult to move forward in our day-to-day lives. If we return to the baby’s natural reaching out for something, and appreciate that this normal urge can get transformed into indecision, how then can we recognize a distorted expression in everyday life?
EXCESSIVE ANGER AND OUR HEALTH
Research carried out by Dr Redford Williams at Duke University found that excessive anger was a higher predictor of dying young than smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol! He asked students at the medical school to fill in questionnaires and found those who scored highest on the test for hostility and anger were seven times more likely to have died by the time they were fifty than those with lower scores.5
Recognizing the Emotion of a Wood Type in Everyday life
The Wood types will often manifest anger which is not appropriate to a situation or fail to be angry when it is appropriate. This means having a keen sense of ‘social rules’ as these often dictate what is appropriate or inappropriate. For example, the following are a violation of unwritten rules:
In each of these cases, a boundary has been broken and requires some sort of response.
Wood types, however, may not be able to respond with normal assertiveness. They might, for example, fail to react when a boundary has been violated or, alternatively, will be responding with anger and assertion even when they have not been unjustifiably violated.
In the first case, we will notice a person describing an event and in the back of our minds we will be thinking, ‘I’d be angry about that!’ In the second, we may be puzzled as to why the person is so angry and noticing that the angry response seems to stop them from moving forward in the situation.
These kinds of observations and interactions help to assess the state of a person’s Wood Element. Given the negative feelings of a Wood type, what becomes important?
BIG ISSUES AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS FOR THE WOOD TYPE
For any type, when typical negative experiences recur, certain issues become more important than others. The Big Issues for the Wood type are:
To say that these are Big Issues is to say that in any situation, particularly one of stress, the Wood type will almost automatically be concerned with who has the power or control, what are the boundaries, what is correct behaviour and how to develop and grow. Depending on the strategies the Wood type has chosen, some of these will be more important than others.
Another way of expressing the internal experience of someone whose Wood is constitutionally impaired is that they begin, to varying degrees, to carry certain unanswered questions such as:
For the non-Wood type, there are answers to these questions. For the Wood type, these questions keep recurring, and to varying degrees do not get answered. The difficulty in finding answers to these questions can lead a Wood type to develop various life-patterns or strategies.
HOW WOULD YOU KNOW YOUR FRIEND IS A WOOD TYPE?
He or she might: