Thursday, April 16, 2015

Anger Center stage

In the space of 15 minutes I read three radically different posts on Anger.  Anger is a destructive force....Scott Williams calls it orgasmic http://scott-williams.ca/2015/04/14/my-anger-myself/ ...its seductive power sucks people in.....then you meet a person that invades your boundaries....anger is the only answer some people will listen to.  If you talk in reasonable tones they will totally ignore you and your concern....only anger gets through their thick wall of self absorption.  I was raised in a home ruled by anger and passive aggressive quiet anger.  I didn't do much better raising my kids.  I buried my anger under layers and layers of dissociation.  The monster in the living room.  A few points I learned about anger.

1.  Dissociation buries anger without processing.....when you discover it again it is as fresh as when it was buried.

2.  Anger is a secondary emotion.....Fear, hurt or frustration came first.  Look for the source to resolve my anger. 

3.  When I feel anger, many times it is the warning that someone is violating my boundaries.  (I'm kind of clueless to the earlier signs.)

4.  Anger is affective in short term situation.

5.  Some people will listen to nothing else.  Reasonable tones bounce off some people.  Anger is the tone that says, "YOU WILL LISTEN TO ME."

6.  Anger can function like a thrumming dynamo to fuel accomplishing some tasks.  (Cleaning house in a rage gets me through more work than I can accomplish without it.)

7.  Anger is as destructive to me as to the person I direct it to...sometimes more so.

Anger was the avenue my first counselor used to pry out my secrets.  He would say things to provoke an angry response from me.  He was astounded at how completely I could dissociate so that anger vanished within seconds.  I still struggle with feelings of anger.  It is hard to sit with those emotions. 

Anger is brooding

Doesn't play well with others



2 comments:

mulderfan said...

IMO Like alcoholism, anger is a symptom, not a disease. Like doctors we can learn to follow symptom to find the cause.

Ruth said...

I agree. Thank you for pointing this out.