ANGER -> are you reactive or mindful when responding to people? *New members are very welcome to contribute

[Just Sara]

Firstly I want to thank Karen, (Ggrand) who ignited my idea for this thread. (Not pun intended lol)

Are you 'reactive' when confronting someone? Do you run away, or step back and 'think' before you speak?

These are important questions about anger and especially rage. I'm sure everyone who visits these forums will have at some point in their lives experienced out of control reactions or even 'inaction' that they regret or question afterwards. Eg..."Why didn't I say anything?" or "I shouldn't have said anything."

Personally, I'm no stranger to the effects of reactive anger. It took me many yrs to address and finally defeat as an ineffective and damaging personality trait. I still struggle sometimes, but more times than not, I deal with it productively.

Anger's a normal animal/human reaction for survival. It goes hand in hand with Fight or Flight responses to keep us safe and alive. What modern society's done though, is create confusion, denial and fear in understanding what a 'threat' actually is.

There are so many 'rules of engagement' outlined in our laws and cultural niceties, we're stifled trying to identify when a 'real' threat is immanent and, how to approach matters effectively...nature vs nurture.

I think this is a discussion we really 'need' to have. It plays into our recovery and how we want to live our lives in peace with confidence.

Are you known as an angry person, a fence sitter or passive/aggressive for instance? These are all tied into our responses to internal or external anger. For the sake of this thread topic, I'd like to keep anecdotes etc to personal experience and not about 'others'; to look at ourselves for answers.

I'm eager to hear your thoughts...

Sez

[geoff]

hi Paul, I agree infrequent counselling or just once in a while won't achieve anything, it is OK once you have been able to overcome your depression and feel strong enough to carry on with what you have been doing, so a monthly visit can clear out the cobwebs, but if you're deep into depression and suffering badly, then one visit every now and then isn't going to help, simply because there is no continuity.
The counsellor won't be able to keep up and by the time they do, the session has ended, making the patient rather annoyed. Geoff.

[Flick_SnotGrass]

Great thread Just Sara,

Great contributions too from everyone.

....it's all gotten my Brian going.

I sympathize with those of us who have endured the 'you are to be seen and not heard' upbringing and survived the emotionally harsh 'heavy parenting' as my mother now euphemistically puts it.

In my case, being born with horrendous excema, the whole family and social dynamic really added a twist to the tourniquet of my mental misery. Amateur Parenting my shrink called it.

ANGER will out.

Oh, we might be able to block it...but the amygdala still fires off and we pump adrenaline into our bloodstreams.

Oh, we might develop 'dance steps' that allows us to cope....I developed an exquisitely nasty passive hostile mask for example, that I have had to learn to outgrow.

Anger and unacknowledged fear, which are both part of the same mechanism, can wreak havoc...we know that.

In my journey around the sun so far I have discovered that "Diagnosis is not cure" and I have a very bloody minded part of me that wants to blossom and not just cope.

I want more than coping tricks.

I am bloody minded enough and angry enough to demand a full cure.

I want to blossom.

I want to be a Tall Poppy.

There I've said it ~~~~ let 'em cut me down, I'd look nice in a vase on the dining room table.

So, let me apply The Healing Formula to myself H = A + M + T.

Healing = Awareness + Motivation + Tools

Through this lovely ANGER thread I can now see that I am Aware that my personal choices around Anger, in the past, now needs to be upgraded. Thanks Brian. Thanks to all here.

Yes I am Motivated to do something about this situation right now. I Start.

OK, what Tools do I have at my disposal right now to accelerate my Healing Process?

I am checking my hands and I find I have no holes in them,

Gosh, I am not perfect.

I chuckle at the old joke...I feel better.

I forgive myself for having been a chump for so long.

Oh, well.

Excema has taught me:

Once I take the splinter out and disinfect the wound then a scab will form which will protect the wound and allow the healing to take place within me and when the time is ripe, the scab will fall off and I can remember to forget the drama.

Tea anyone?

Flick

[Carla09]

What about containing anger to prevent hurt to others...for example, I have had to deal with a fair share of very nasty behaviour from a particular inlaw to avoid hurting other inlaws and husband...the problem is that my silence seems to have emboldened the person...I have had to frequently ignore very nasty comments..and pretty absurd behaviour...Like most inlaw situations I just don’t want to rock the boat and as my children could be cousins to this particular persons children I wish to keep quiet for there sake too...However, year after year Since the birth of my youngest I have waited for things to improve..however the birth of my youngest seems to have aggrevated the situation more as there is perceived favoritism to my kids being younger...etc...I have been told to ignore the comments, the behaviour, etc...but I am not sure if I can continue to carry out the rest of my married life enduring the sneers...in my happier times I have been able to cope...but when my daughter has suffered some health issues...i have kept quiet but inside I feel quite depressed...particularly as the behaviour is mostly geared towards me and my kids despite the favoratism being supposedly imparted by another person....

[Just Sara]

Well hello Flick;

I just ran thru the thread and found your previous post I'd missed. Bugger! Sorry about that. Sometimes posts take longer than expected after moderation to appear. Better late than never; apologies.

I'm trying to wrap my Brian around your writing style Flick. It seems you use humour to deflect and inform? No worries there my friend. It's no wonder with a childhood affliction such as eczema; very nasty business. And of course the 'seen-and-not-heard' rationale that plagued parenting styles until the baby boomers began to break the mould.

I had a boyfriend yrs ago with the same; he used to rock left and right frantically in his sleep moaning until I'd wake him up. It was due to being tied up as an infant so he wouldn't scratch his skin. He learned to turn his head back and forth to try and rub the effected areas with his chin. Very sad..

His anger was nearly non existent. He was a lovely man who took long walks on the beach with his dog and was very private with his emotions.

I know I wrote in my intro that anecdotes should be personally experiential, but I thought this one would serve to help comfort you with not feeling the only one. It's also to let you know I truly understand.

The theme that continues to crop up on this thread is childhood development or lack there of. Anger is such a broad concept for us humans. The gender issue also has validity as well as age and levels of recovery.

Passive/hostile? Interesting.. Is that one step up from aggressive? Sounds so. Have you found a little peace as you've matured? What I mean, is do you express your anger more openly these days?

I read a book a few yrs ago on co-dependence. Apparently this goes hand in hand with a passive/aggressive style of communicating learned from bad parenting and trauma.

My mum's a prime example. I still deal with her attempts to hurt me verbally instead of beating the crap out of me. It took me a couple of yrs to identify this character trait and be effective in managing my responses. I had to; anxiety got so bad I couldn't even look at her without panicking.

The positive that's come from it though, is that she opens up more to me now.

Anyhoo, have run out of characters so must move on. Lovely chatting Flick.

My best...Sez

[Just Sara]

Hi lovely Pepper!

It's nice to see you on here giving of your wisdom. 🙂

Your explanation of assertiveness is really interesting. Giving you top marks girl! I needed to read what you said. I was struggling.

I get the concept of communicating opinions effectively, just don't have the ability to get past the face to face fear factor. I'm so much more productive in writing. I suppose I have to concede, accepting PTSD as a character deficit will be on-going in my lifetime. It's not easy.

How do you deal with your anger? I know I've read a little here and there over time, but am wondering if it works for you or if you'd like to change it.

Isn't 'it' a flexible word. I noticed Flick used 'it' to describe his anger demon. To me, 'it' eludes to being separate from the self. I grappled with this during early recovery; reconnecting all my nasties into one whole human...the 'me' that is.

Yes, we're flawed for sure, and that's ok. We can be so damn hard on ourselves though. x

Hi Geoff and Paul;

Thanks for reiterating your thoughts on therapy and its relevance in dealing with repressed anger/emotions. I've read many times about the effects on our bodies from not expressing our forgotten pain and hurt that builds up.

I've experienced 'Primal Scream' which outed my infant/childhood pent up anger from many traumatic events. Babies experience life with their bodies. They don't have rational thought or concept abilities. All they can do is scream or cry to release hurt and pain.

Primal Scream therapy connects with our infancy and once we're 'there', screaming as a baby releases those pent up emotions. I did it for 20 minute which seemed only a few as I was lost in the moment. Very unpleasant to experience, but once it was over, I felt 10kg lighter and the constant banter in my head was non existent.

It changed my life.

My best as always..

Sez

[Flick_SnotGrass]

Hi Just Sara Sez,

Thanks for your lovely note ... yes I was tied up too and yes I had to scratch by rubbing my face on the pillow....ah the joys of an incarnation or should that be a re-incarnation? Hmm

Yes I learnt to use humour to deflect and distract, do it less now. The big turning point came for me when I was given a questionnaire with one question:

VICTIM or VICTOR? choose one.

That's when I realized I had been playing Victim long enough.

Now I think of it I have no idea if there is an ANGER SCALE which we could calibrate and would be handy to use to measure our progress:

10 ~ Raging Tantrum

8 ~ Jolly cross

6 ~ Hostile

4 ~ Passively Hostile

2 ~ Slightly Passively Hostile

1 ~ Recovering Passive Hostile

0 ~ All Better

We really can heal ourselves.

Flick SnotGrass

[Just Sara]

Hey there Flick;

You're welcome and thanks for updating. There's a scale re anger but it's not really about labelling as such; it's a bell curve. However, I do love yours as it's probably apt, plus gave me a nice giggle.

I'm terribly sorry about you being tied up as a little one. I can't imagine how traumatic it was for you. In essence though, you were a victim; so was I. But as you say, there's a time to stop playing that card eh?

I've always said humans have evolved from an autistic Brian glitch. My colleagues and I used to laugh about it. Developing Brian as we have 'must' come with the odd problematic behaviour or two or three or twenty...

Which brings me to the sciency stuff. I have a book referred to me by my psych. It changed my understanding of anger and trauma responses forever. It's called;

'Waking the Tiger - Healing Trauma' by Peter A Levine

A really interesting read. Levine refers to us as 'organisms' as a reminder we're not just social creatures, but an organism responding to stimuli first and foremost. Our cultural/societal programming has forced us to forget our true instincts that protect and guide us as animals.

It's probably the biggest contributing influence that saved me from complete victimhood. (And worse) Once I realised my responses were normal and totally understandable, I could forgive myself for being 'human'.

It seems as we've evolved from Reptilian Brian thru Primal and Rational Brian's, we began asking 'WHY'. Sigh...

This led to philosophy; the rest is history. The book tells the truth about normal fight/flight/freeze process' that've been stupidified by our need to be 'appropriate'. God!

Anyway, I used to range from 0-8 on your scale, and remember once being at 10. That was a physical encounter at age 17 when I literally saw 'red'. These days I try to channel my anger into 'words' that allow me to assert myself better.

It's a work in progress...

Take care...

Sez

[Peppermintbach]

Hi Sez,

Thank you, you’re very complimentary 🙂

Yes, sometimes I think the human condition stems largely from being fundamentally flawed. I don’t think being flawed is necessarily bad though. To varying extents, most of us as are trying the best we can to navigate our emotional life. That’s all we can really ever do, I think...

I’m only speaking on a personal level but I suppose it depends on the extent of my anger. Sure, I get irritated and frustrated but rarely experience full-blown rage.

If it’s full-blown, I feel there’s no point even trying to engage with me. If I’m in that state, I tend not to even want to be around people anyway. So people tend to be spared from it purely because I’ve most likely already walked away from a situation.

It’s not because I’m being thoughtful but it’s because I genuinely don’t want to be around anyone when I’m that angry. I literally want everyone to “leave me alone” when I’m in that state of mind.

Thankfully, most of the time, my “anger” is more likely to be mild to moderate frustration or irritation. I can usually manage those feelings. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel them, it just means that I step back before acting on my feelings (usually).

These days, I try to ask myself if it’s worth my efforts before engaging, and 9.5 out of 10 times, I’ll quickly realise it just isn’t worth it. I try to pick my battles. Some things, or at least to me on a subjective level anyway, just aren’t worth it so I take a breath and tell myself to “let it go.”

I am, over time, learning to save my “energy” for issues that truly matter to me. To me, that’s part of my self preservation. I can accept that it may not be for everyone but it works for me.

A quote that has helped me is “you don’t have to participate in every argument you’re invited to” (unknown). I like that because it doesn’t deny my feelings and suggests that I don’t always have to act on those feelings.

I’m not saying that I do things perfectly as I definitely have moments when I’m behaving terribly and being rude but it’s something that I try to do...taking a step back before acting on my anger and picking my battles.

Also, I try to remember how it might feel to be on the receiving end and to consider the other person’s feelings before acting- that tends to stop me in my tracks most of the time too. Sure, I have feelings and perspectives, etc but so do the people around me and I try to take that into consideration (most of the time anyway).

Love,

Pepper xoxo

[startingnew]

hi Sez, sorry its taken me a bit to get back here. yes always open to new options. who wants to be self destruvtive their whole lives becasue they cant express their anger in a more positive way.

Pepper i liked your point of view as well.

great thread, keep the contributions coming. am reading along but nothing to contribute.

[Just Sara]

Ah...there's that beautiful lightning and thunder! 🙂

Nice to see you here again lovely Pepper. It's really interesting to note how you can write so in-depth about anger, yet not so much with other emotions. I wanted to write 'responses' then. Is there a difference?

Actually, you refer to 'frustration' and 'irritation' being low levels of anger. Are they causes or responses? Hmm...lots of questions. Sorry!

Do you think anger is part of your depression? Or maybe an expression of it? Oops...there I go again. I always said a well formed question can be an answer in itself. Hope I'm right.

I absolutely love it when you're in the zone hun. I light up with enthusiasm.

I'm going to leave things here as I have a really busy day ahead of me. I'm MIA for a few days till next week; off cruising the ocean blue. Yee-harrrr! Or is it Arrr me harties!? Or is that harpies? Ha ha

Anyway, I've given you and others something to think about while I'm gone.

Take care lovelies; will return sun tanned and rested up. Or plonked up. Probably both...

Love ya's...Sez xo