A Healthy Relationship with Anger
Anger as a Catalyst for Change - Healing the Self-Abandonment Wound
Our childhood experiences influence how our nervous system responds to situations. If we grew up in environments that were or felt dangerous as children, our nervous system learned to be on guard and watchful for threats and danger. Our adult bodies can often still respond as though we are in survival mode. This can become our habitual way of turning to the world. That is what trauma is.
Noticing every facial expression, every change in mood, feeling afraid of getting something “wrong”, or others being “mad at us” may be familiar feelings when we have these experiences.
In the self-abandonment wound, we learned to look after the needs of others as a way of trying to stay safe and not be rejected or abandoned. We look after the needs of others before our own in the hope we will receive the love we crave. This, of course, is at the expense of loving ourselves. We often don’t even have a sense of what our wishes and needs are.
In the self-abandonment wound, we avoid conflict at all costs, so anger is then squashed down in the body and suppressed. The anger, however, comes out in unexpected ways and can be directed in outbursts towards others and self-shaming, self-criticism, turned inwardly. This takes a deep toll on us, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Building a healthy relationship with anger is important in our healing journey.
What is Anger?
Anger is defined as a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure or hostility. Anger as an emotion is vital for our healthy development. Like all other emotions, anger is a part of the human experience. It gives us information about our experience and an interpretation of what is going on around us.
Anger is the emotion we feel as:
A response to unfairness
A response to disempowerment
A symptom of hypervigilance and trauma
A response to disrespect
A response to our boundaries being ignored or crossed
A response to invalidation and disrespect
A part of the grief process
A sign of built-up resentment or unresolved emotions
What I love about anger as an emotion is how much energy it holds and how it helps mobilize us to change. It is a catalyst for change. It stirs us into action. It stirs us to protest something in our lives, or indeed in the broader society, too. We need anger for change to happen.
Anger is healthy when we channel it into positive change. Unhealthy anger is when we misdirect our frustration and either take it out on the people around us or internalize it.
Anger, Mobilizing Change and the Healing Journey
We were often taught that anger wasn't okay or “bad”. Perhaps we got the message that our protest and anger expression was not “good”. Maybe we heard “Good boys and girls” didn't show anger. We may have also seen anger expressed in unhealthy ways growing up, such as with unpredictable, explosive outbursts or silent, rejecting punishment. We came to fear anger then, in others and also in ourselves.
When we start to heal on our journey inward, the emotion of anger is one that we start to feel more and more. You might start to feel irritated by things, even internally raging at something that happened, and you might actually say things you wouldn’t ordinarily mean to say, and you might start to say things that surprise you, like “No”. Anger starts to help you do that. This can feel a bit shocking at first, and it may be a worry to you. It is unfamiliar. You might be thinking, “What is wrong with me!?”. It might frighten you a little. The interesting thing is that this is a sign you are healing. Anger is often there when we start to come out of this wounding, feel our feelings, and acknowledge our needs. This is a good sign.
We can change our relationship with anger so it can guide us well in our lives. It can mobilize us to meet our authentic lives, and it can support us to find our separate ground. We can learn how to build a new relationship with it, and this can be done in the service of our development and growth.
What helps us to meet Anger in this Healing Journey?
Understand and acknowledge where the anger is coming from. Give it space to be seen, felt and validated.
Begin to notice how anger feels in the body. Notice it without judgment. Anger can be very tiring in the body. Do you notice feeling tired or fatigued? Notice if you feel your chest tight, headaches.
Start journaling to be more attuned to your thoughts and feelings
Become curious about anger as an emotion - how was it expressed in your house growing up? This can help inform how you were raised to express and treat anger as a child and how your relationship to anger is now.
Identify and acknowledge angry thoughts. You are building a new relationship with this normal human emotion.
Finding a physical outlet for your anger (exercise, sports, walks, movement in the body) can support your body when you notice the feeling of anger.
Harnessing anger into assertiveness is a skill that takes time to practice but it can feel very empowering to set boundaries and to start to say “no” to what no longer serves you.
Allowing ourselves to meet and feel this emotion and acknowledge it is really important. Anger is healthy when we express it in healthy ways. When we start to meet ourselves, we also meet the parts of ourselves we have kept squashed down, trying to be “nice” and “good”. Trying to be “perfect”.
Accepting our wounded parts and supporting ourselves in that brings us back to ourselves again, back to our own separate human, imperfect selves. This is the beginning of a journey of loving ourselves again; it is a journey of being who we needed when we were younger, To be as we are.
