The Plowboy Interview: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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KÜBLER-ROSS: The best way is to take a piece of rubber hose and beat all your hate and anger against an old mattress or pillow. You have to verbalize your feelings while you do this ... you can't just beat in silence until your muscles are tired. And don't be afraid to act excited or violent while striking the pillow, because you're not hurting anybody. Instead, you're probably preventing yourself from hurting somebody in the future.

Now all of these techniques work better if—at least, at first—you have someone to help you get your feelings out. It has to be a person who has compassion, someone who won't preach to you and make you feel more guilty.

PLOWBOY: How can we figure out what might be causing our repressed anger?

KÜBLER-ROSS: Keep a diary and note anytime that you get overly upset by somebody. After a while, you'll begin to see the pattern of what bothers you and be able to deal with it. You see, whenever you react strongly to people, when someone is able to "push your buttons", it's a gift from the Creator ... in the form of a signal to you to get in touch with your own unfinished business.

Let me tell you what happened to me once. I had to do a workshop one year in Hawaii ... and it was scheduled over Easter, a time when I really wanted to be with my family. The man who organized it was a tightwad. He charged us extra for every little service 50¢ for each sheet of paper we used for our spontaneous drawings and 10 ¢ more for each crayon ... 25 ¢ for the little cups we used for coffee. He could have simply asked for $200 more for expenses, and I wouldn't have minded, but his string of tiny fees just kept making me angrier and angrier.

By the last day of the workshop, I was so incensed by this man that if he had asked for one more quarter, I would literally have killed him, right then and there. I mean it. And here I am such a "good" person, someone who goes around the world teaching unconditional love!

When I arrived back home, I was so drained by my anger that I was almost physically sick. I didn't know why I was so upset, except that I felt maybe I was "allergic" to cheap men. At any rate, my co-workers from my Shanti Nilaya organization met me and asked how the workshop went. I didn't want to talk about it, so I said, very curtly, "Fine." They asked again, and I said, "Fine, fine. G.D. fine."

Now one of our rules at Shanti Nilaya is that we all have to get rid of our unfinished business—our repressed negativity—but another rule is never to ask anything more than three times, because by doing so we may deprive someone of their choice to avoid the subject. I knew if I could last through one more question, they couldn't bother me with it anymore. However, instead of asking me about the workshop, one of my associates said, in a sickeningly sweet voice, "Well, tell me of your visit from the Easter Bunny, then."

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