Nails on the wall

Do you know what is Nails on the Wall? Well, it is a form of anger management I practiced few years back. It was based on a story I read somewhere, about a father and son. The son used to get angry and abusive all the time. So the father said to him, “Whenever you get angry, hammer a nail on to the wall in your room.” So the son started hammering nails on the wall whenever he got angry. Within a few weeks, the wall was full of nails. The son could visually see how much anger was being generated by him. Soon, the frequency of the nails reduced and he didn’t feel the need to hammer any more nails. When he said this to Dad, he suggested to remove the nails. The son removed the nails and called his father to the room. Now father said, “ Son, look at the wall now. It is full of holes. The wall will never be the same again. It is the same with the heart. When we get angry, we might say or react some way which might wound others. Whatever we do to repair that, the heart will never be the same again.”

Those days, I used to be this ‘really angry’ young man, so I decided to try this out. I didn’t want to spoil the wall, so I wrote down the number when I got angry. At the end of the day, I could get a count of how many times I got angry. Just found that file in my system. Here it is for a few days –

Nails on my wall:

21 April 2008

1              2              3              4              5              6              7              8

22 Apr 2008

1              2              3              4              5              6              7              8              9              10           11           12           13           14           15           16                17           18

23 Apr 2008

1              2              3              4              5              6              7              8              9              10          

25 Apr 2008

1              2

12 Jun 2008

1

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