Reframing Anger
When we were children, we all experienced traumatising moments.
I like Dr Gabor Mate’s definition of trauma : it’s not the event but what went on internally as a response to the event.
Coping mechanisms developed as response to traumatising childhood events become default responses. They become our MO in the world. And that can translate to a wide spectrum of things.
Intellectualisation is my go-to defence mechanism. I was raised by books and music, words are a huge thing in my life.
So a part of me says If I understand, I can heal. If I can put it into words, there it is.
What I’ve come to learn is that things do not work like that.
Just because you’ve processed something cognitively, doesn’t mean you’ve processed it emotionally. Thinking about it is a way of numbing down those emotions we don’t want to feel.
We avoid “negative” feelings because they feel extremely uncomfortable. Emotional pain lights up the same part of our brains that physical pain does. And who wants to go through that, huh? If you get a headache, you take some ibuprofen and you’re set. You don’t want that pain, you make it go away.
You get a bad feeling — you distract yourself, right? We apologise for talking about difficult things, even though difficult things are a part of life as much as the instagrammable moments.
I am sorry I don’t wanna burden you with my stuff let’s talk about something nice my friend and I used to say t o each other. Until we made a pact not to apologise for our feelings.
That raised the question for me, if that is how we treat our emotions externally, we feel ashamed for having them — how do we manage them internally? Do we allow ourselves to feel disappointed, rejected, sad, unappreciated without feeling guilty about it?; Knowing that in the ebb and flow of life everything is temporary.
The ability to allow those feelings to surface and not judge them is key to mending those childhood wounds from when maybe we were told things like you’re so ugly when you cry, you’re too old to cry, the other kids will laugh at you, etc.
When in fact what we needed was someone to acknowledge our frustration, validate our experience, so we could move on. I noticed this so much in children. The more you try to make them stop crying or feel better, the worse they feel and the more they act out. But when you validate what they are feeling and support them as they go through it, they will be back playing and happy in a few minutes.
If you’re like me and these feelings didn’t get validated when you were growing up, or worse, they were shut down, shamed, etc. — then you need to be able to do that for yourself as an adult. And this is a lesson my experience has taught me.
I saw anger only expressed as rage at my house growing up, I don’t think I had any example of healthy anger. So, as a small child, I promised myself I would grow up to be super zen. I guess my whole personality formed around this, and for that I am grateful. I learned to look for the positive as a means to cope, and that became my MO.
The shadow side of this is for many years I fought uncomfortable feelings and resisted them, tried to control my environment to avoid them. I invalidated whatever reason I had to feel that way. Like you don’t have the right to be mad, shut up.
Did I manage to avoid the feels? No. But resist them I did. I judged it, I felt guilty for feeling angry — thus adding an extra layer of pain onto my original anger. It’s a vicious circle.
After punching pillows for a while, or sweating it off at the gym, I began to make friends with anger. It’s okay to feel angry. Sometimes it’s the push you need.
Anger helps me identify pain points in myself that I need to address. I get territorial sometimes, I don’t like people touching my stuff. When it happens and I get angry I know that is okay. It’s a natural feeling and it shows me I have to set stronger boundaries.
I can validate myself now and get grounded, and when I can’t — I have amazing friends who lovingly do that for me.
Sometimes being angry is the best mood (Cee Lo Green — Sometimes)
