As I hurled the rocking chair through the glass window, I heard someone say that I was out of control, but I knew that throwing that chair out the window was exactly what I wanted. I only became aware of my problem when my husband brought our minister to look at the hole. There I was, eyes bulging, broken glass everywhere, still not understanding why they were pointing at me.
What about you? Have you ever been so angry that you felt like losing control? Have you ever been hurt by someone's anger, or have you ever hurt someone because of your anger? If the answer is yes, this article is written especially for you. Your anger is not the problem, but what you do with it may be. Anger is only bad if you hurt yourself or someone else because of it.
Anger is a natural emotion people experience when they feel threatened or hurt. It is always a secondary emotion. This is a very important point to remember. Feeling threatened or hurt is the primary emotion you experience. Anger in the result of feeling scared or hurt. So the next time you find yourself getting angry, stop and ask yourself: What am I threatened or hurt about? Is it worth the investment? It takes a lot of energy to use anger, so you want to use it wisely. What happens to many of us is that we hide our hurt behind the disguise of anger. Then we use anger as a false power to hurt someone else as much as we're hurting inside.
When tracing anger, you will actually feel the hurt in your gut. Connecting with your pain, validating your hurt, helps keep you grounded. By nurturing the hurt first, you will be able to release anger in a strong, healthy, manageable way. You will feel in charge of your anger, instead of feeling that your anger is in charge of you. Healthy anger is the protective shield that gives you permission to say no to abusive situations: I am no longer a victim!
Reflecting on the time I threw the rocking chair out of the window, I can now see that my acting out behavior was getting all the attention, rather than my fear. I now realize my rage was being identified as the problem, instead of being symptomatic of the scary, hurtful things that were happening to me. My anger kept other people from seeing that I was the victim. How helpless I ended up feeling that day.
How you behave as an adult when angry comes from the messages you received about anger as a child. If you can remember hurtful messages about anger as a child, expect to have some issues with anger as an adult. People develop behaviors to compensate for their fears. A common barrier to expressing Healthy anger is the fear of rejection or abandonment. Rejection/avoidance behavior dictates more of our behavior than any other factor. Remember, the mental energy lost worrying about rejection can be even greater than the actual rejection. Worry is believing in negative things, a messenger of silent anger. Until you understand how your behaviors protect you, it is very difficult to make a change.
You may be asking yourself how someone like me, who throws rocking chairs through windows, could have something worthwhile to say about anger. Let me share a little about my background with you so you can better understand how my message can offer hope for you.
I came from an emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive family. I was conceived out of anger, born under angry circumstances, and I have been around anger and rage virtually my entire life. My father was a violent, Sexual psychopath who subjected me to ritualistic tortures from infancy to about age 8. My mother was a cold, emotionally dead woman who was unavailable to protect me.
As a child, I learned early that anger could mean death. To survive, I took ownership of the abuse, rather than be helpless. It was safer for me to take on my father's evil than to see the truth about him, which would have left me devastated and alone. I took all of his rage and turned it in on myself by feeling hate for myself instead of him. By owning the abuse, I could believe that I deserved to be tortured. Owning the abuse was the way I made sense out of something so crazy. I had to become a part of that craziness to stay alive. To survive I disassociated, I hallucinated, denying, and blocking any memory of ever being abused. As a little one, I needed my daddy to love and protect me, and so that is exactly what I set up in my mind to be happening. By suppressing my pain, I experienced severe panic attacks throughout my childhood and adult life. I replaced the terror I felt by developing a death phobia.
The subconscious rage that I felt toward my father led me down dangerous paths for more than the first 30 years of my life. I acted out my anger in unHealthy relationships by setting myself up to be the star victim in horror dramas. Can you understand why I was the type of person who would let you hit me, lie to me and set me up for pain? Keeping secrets is what I knew how to do the best. I became as sick as the secrets I kept.
It took multiple marriages, physical illness, and enough pain and torture to cause me to have a borderline psychotic break before I realized I had a problem. After all, look what kind of abuse I had learned to tolerate. As the result of an abusive marriage, I ended up losing my children and finding myself homeless. It took this kind of trauma to break down my defenses just so I could feel. Finally, the fear of where I was at was greater than the fear of where I wanted to go. There was only one choice left. I had to feel my pain.
I made a commitment to change and began to journey into the unknown territory of my soul, recognizing the pain and fear that was all too familiar. It was here I found my helpless, hopeless, and traumatized little girl within. Patiently and painfully, I began to understand and nurture the vulnerable, scared, innocent little one within my reach. It was here that I found hope. For so many years I had relied on others to help me.When I met the wounded child in me, I soon realized that she survived without help from anyone. How could I have not trusted her? By placing my hope in her, I began to live and love again. By learning to lower my expectations of others and raise the expectation of myself, I put an end to my feelings of hopelessness.
By linking the anger I felt in my adult life to the hurt from so many years ago, I could see why I needed to be so angry. If finally made sense. No wonder I would hold anger in for long periods, which typically resulted in depressions. I would eventually end up screaming, hitting, and throwing things to get the anger out of me. You better believe that I would fight for my life. I had learned very early that anger could mean death. My rage was really about my fear. By grieving my original pain, I learned to use Healthy anger as a gift to protect the little girl within. The emotion that almost destroyed me is now the emotion that protects me, and reminds me of my strength. Anger brings me dignity, my right to say no to abusive situations.
What behaviors offer insight to the unexpressed anger you may be carrying? To focus anger outside of yourself you may blame others, find fault with people or experience outbursts. If you're turning anger in, you may criticize yourself, feel guilt or bitterness, or suffer from depression.
Indirect ways of expressing anger include nagging, gossiping,and sarcasm. You may act out your anger by drinking, doing drugs, having affairs or stealing. If you procrastinate often or show up late, you are carrying anger that you have not dealt with. Impatience is another form of releasing fear-based anger. You may also be an anger avoider, that nice person who does everything for everybody.
Give yourself permission to have angry feelings, but make a commitment to Healthier expressions.
Anger can be a threatening emotion because of its intensity. What are some ways to better manage anger so you can release and get positive results? Evaluate your anger by breathing into it and tracing it to what you are threatened or hurt about. Breathing helps to decrease the intensity by calming the fear. Now you're ready to validate yourself by asking, What am I threatened or hurt about? If your hurt is legitimate, and not just an overreaction, it is at this point you can choose whether to invest in angry energy. Should you choose to express your anger, go directly to the person you are upset with. Using I feel statements, rather than You make me feel statements will help you release healthy anger without attacking.
Remember to use your anger as Healthy power, not as a license to kill. Avoid the blaming role by staying focused on your issue. Owning your anger will help you be heard. Don't bombard the person with everything he or she has ever done that's upset you. Separating your fear from your anger will help you from getting off target. Anger is another emotion that needs to be communicated. Communication is a process of giving and receiving. Allow room for this process to occur by giving yourself permission to express your feelings and to listen to the feelings to others.
As survivors of dysfunctional families, getting in touch with our issues can be the hardest part of the healing process because our conscious minds may be blocked from the truth. For this reason, it is important to have strong, Healthy people around us as we begin our anger work.
Today I am a successful professional speaker and anger consultant. I have learned to channel my energies into Healthy risk-taking, instead of setting myself up in abusive situations just to prove my survivability. For the most part, I choose the paths I wish to take. Once in a while, situations occur that can cause me to fear myself or others, and it is then that my determined child reminds me that I always have choices.
How can you tell if you have a Healthy attitude about your anger? Use this quick anger test. Do you get angry often? Do you stay mad for long periods of time? Do you spend a lot of time dwelling on the past? Do you suffer from anxiety attacks or bouts of depression? Are you easily frustrated and often impatient? Do you have a need to be perfect? Do you worry about what other people think about you or that they are out to get you? If you answer yes to any of these questions, it is a clue that you may need some support to better understand your anger and where it comes from.
When will you make changes? When have you had enough, and perhaps not a minute sooner. When the fear of where you are is greater than the fear of where you want to go, then you will make changes. Remember, the answers to your happiness are only to be found inside of you. The answers are always within your reach.
If you feel pressured and suffer from boxed up fears and hurts, what is keeping you from unwrapping the package of your inner self and discovering the gift of anger? This gift, may be the best treasure you will ever give to yourself.
What about you? Have you ever been so angry that you felt like losing control? Have you ever been hurt by someone's anger, or have you ever hurt someone because of your anger? If the answer is yes, this article is written especially for you. Your anger is not the problem, but what you do with it may be. Anger is only bad if you hurt yourself or someone else because of it.
Anger is a natural emotion people experience when they feel threatened or hurt. It is always a secondary emotion. This is a very important point to remember. Feeling threatened or hurt is the primary emotion you experience. Anger in the result of feeling scared or hurt. So the next time you find yourself getting angry, stop and ask yourself: What am I threatened or hurt about? Is it worth the investment? It takes a lot of energy to use anger, so you want to use it wisely. What happens to many of us is that we hide our hurt behind the disguise of anger. Then we use anger as a false power to hurt someone else as much as we're hurting inside.
When tracing anger, you will actually feel the hurt in your gut. Connecting with your pain, validating your hurt, helps keep you grounded. By nurturing the hurt first, you will be able to release anger in a strong, healthy, manageable way. You will feel in charge of your anger, instead of feeling that your anger is in charge of you. Healthy anger is the protective shield that gives you permission to say no to abusive situations: I am no longer a victim!
Reflecting on the time I threw the rocking chair out of the window, I can now see that my acting out behavior was getting all the attention, rather than my fear. I now realize my rage was being identified as the problem, instead of being symptomatic of the scary, hurtful things that were happening to me. My anger kept other people from seeing that I was the victim. How helpless I ended up feeling that day.
Childhood Messages
How you behave as an adult when angry comes from the messages you received about anger as a child. If you can remember hurtful messages about anger as a child, expect to have some issues with anger as an adult. People develop behaviors to compensate for their fears. A common barrier to expressing Healthy anger is the fear of rejection or abandonment. Rejection/avoidance behavior dictates more of our behavior than any other factor. Remember, the mental energy lost worrying about rejection can be even greater than the actual rejection. Worry is believing in negative things, a messenger of silent anger. Until you understand how your behaviors protect you, it is very difficult to make a change.
You may be asking yourself how someone like me, who throws rocking chairs through windows, could have something worthwhile to say about anger. Let me share a little about my background with you so you can better understand how my message can offer hope for you.
I came from an emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive family. I was conceived out of anger, born under angry circumstances, and I have been around anger and rage virtually my entire life. My father was a violent, Sexual psychopath who subjected me to ritualistic tortures from infancy to about age 8. My mother was a cold, emotionally dead woman who was unavailable to protect me.
As a child, I learned early that anger could mean death. To survive, I took ownership of the abuse, rather than be helpless. It was safer for me to take on my father's evil than to see the truth about him, which would have left me devastated and alone. I took all of his rage and turned it in on myself by feeling hate for myself instead of him. By owning the abuse, I could believe that I deserved to be tortured. Owning the abuse was the way I made sense out of something so crazy. I had to become a part of that craziness to stay alive. To survive I disassociated, I hallucinated, denying, and blocking any memory of ever being abused. As a little one, I needed my daddy to love and protect me, and so that is exactly what I set up in my mind to be happening. By suppressing my pain, I experienced severe panic attacks throughout my childhood and adult life. I replaced the terror I felt by developing a death phobia.
The subconscious rage that I felt toward my father led me down dangerous paths for more than the first 30 years of my life. I acted out my anger in unHealthy relationships by setting myself up to be the star victim in horror dramas. Can you understand why I was the type of person who would let you hit me, lie to me and set me up for pain? Keeping secrets is what I knew how to do the best. I became as sick as the secrets I kept.
It took multiple marriages, physical illness, and enough pain and torture to cause me to have a borderline psychotic break before I realized I had a problem. After all, look what kind of abuse I had learned to tolerate. As the result of an abusive marriage, I ended up losing my children and finding myself homeless. It took this kind of trauma to break down my defenses just so I could feel. Finally, the fear of where I was at was greater than the fear of where I wanted to go. There was only one choice left. I had to feel my pain.
Journey to Recovery
I made a commitment to change and began to journey into the unknown territory of my soul, recognizing the pain and fear that was all too familiar. It was here I found my helpless, hopeless, and traumatized little girl within. Patiently and painfully, I began to understand and nurture the vulnerable, scared, innocent little one within my reach. It was here that I found hope. For so many years I had relied on others to help me.When I met the wounded child in me, I soon realized that she survived without help from anyone. How could I have not trusted her? By placing my hope in her, I began to live and love again. By learning to lower my expectations of others and raise the expectation of myself, I put an end to my feelings of hopelessness.
By linking the anger I felt in my adult life to the hurt from so many years ago, I could see why I needed to be so angry. If finally made sense. No wonder I would hold anger in for long periods, which typically resulted in depressions. I would eventually end up screaming, hitting, and throwing things to get the anger out of me. You better believe that I would fight for my life. I had learned very early that anger could mean death. My rage was really about my fear. By grieving my original pain, I learned to use Healthy anger as a gift to protect the little girl within. The emotion that almost destroyed me is now the emotion that protects me, and reminds me of my strength. Anger brings me dignity, my right to say no to abusive situations.
Help Yourself
What behaviors offer insight to the unexpressed anger you may be carrying? To focus anger outside of yourself you may blame others, find fault with people or experience outbursts. If you're turning anger in, you may criticize yourself, feel guilt or bitterness, or suffer from depression.
Indirect ways of expressing anger include nagging, gossiping,and sarcasm. You may act out your anger by drinking, doing drugs, having affairs or stealing. If you procrastinate often or show up late, you are carrying anger that you have not dealt with. Impatience is another form of releasing fear-based anger. You may also be an anger avoider, that nice person who does everything for everybody.
Give yourself permission to have angry feelings, but make a commitment to Healthier expressions.
Anger can be a threatening emotion because of its intensity. What are some ways to better manage anger so you can release and get positive results? Evaluate your anger by breathing into it and tracing it to what you are threatened or hurt about. Breathing helps to decrease the intensity by calming the fear. Now you're ready to validate yourself by asking, What am I threatened or hurt about? If your hurt is legitimate, and not just an overreaction, it is at this point you can choose whether to invest in angry energy. Should you choose to express your anger, go directly to the person you are upset with. Using I feel statements, rather than You make me feel statements will help you release healthy anger without attacking.
Remember to use your anger as Healthy power, not as a license to kill. Avoid the blaming role by staying focused on your issue. Owning your anger will help you be heard. Don't bombard the person with everything he or she has ever done that's upset you. Separating your fear from your anger will help you from getting off target. Anger is another emotion that needs to be communicated. Communication is a process of giving and receiving. Allow room for this process to occur by giving yourself permission to express your feelings and to listen to the feelings to others.
As survivors of dysfunctional families, getting in touch with our issues can be the hardest part of the healing process because our conscious minds may be blocked from the truth. For this reason, it is important to have strong, Healthy people around us as we begin our anger work.
Today I am a successful professional speaker and anger consultant. I have learned to channel my energies into Healthy risk-taking, instead of setting myself up in abusive situations just to prove my survivability. For the most part, I choose the paths I wish to take. Once in a while, situations occur that can cause me to fear myself or others, and it is then that my determined child reminds me that I always have choices.
How can you tell if you have a Healthy attitude about your anger? Use this quick anger test. Do you get angry often? Do you stay mad for long periods of time? Do you spend a lot of time dwelling on the past? Do you suffer from anxiety attacks or bouts of depression? Are you easily frustrated and often impatient? Do you have a need to be perfect? Do you worry about what other people think about you or that they are out to get you? If you answer yes to any of these questions, it is a clue that you may need some support to better understand your anger and where it comes from.
When will you make changes? When have you had enough, and perhaps not a minute sooner. When the fear of where you are is greater than the fear of where you want to go, then you will make changes. Remember, the answers to your happiness are only to be found inside of you. The answers are always within your reach.
If you feel pressured and suffer from boxed up fears and hurts, what is keeping you from unwrapping the package of your inner self and discovering the gift of anger? This gift, may be the best treasure you will ever give to yourself.
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