What is anger? When we are children there is a natural rage that arises when our truth is not seen or honored. Children seem to be born with an innate sense of justice. In families where there is abuse or addiction, there is often denial or refusal to speak of events or experiences that are apparent to a child’s knowing. I call this righteous anger and it is one of the few expressions of anger that are the true emotion. In most cases anger covers up another deeper emotion, one in which we would feel too exposed or vulnerable should it be seen. Anger is often a protector, a defense against pain. In the next few blogs I will speak about the many faces of anger, beginning with a defense against loss and ending with healthy confrontation.
So many of my students and clients say to me that they can’t express anger. I usually ask them in response: if you were angry with me, how would I know? Everyone has an answer to that. My favorite is “You would never know, I would simply not let you know.” Others are: I would shut you out… I would just leave the room… I would blow up at you… I am passive aggressive…
Each one of these is an expression of anger, what I call the “ways” that we learned to express anger in childhood. The energy of anger is so strong that we can all sense it. Our idea of the expression of anger is that it needs to look like a confrontation, like strong words, like a fight. That is the way a child may express anger under certain conditions where one can express it that way. In situations where it is unsafe to yell or fight, a child may withdraw, or look at the family with what I call “laser eyes.” But anger does not go away. Like every emotion it needs to make impact, and to bring about the other’s awareness of their impact on you so there can be change — a “new gestalt” can emerge. We rarely if ever learn to express anger in a way that achieves that.
Anger is a defense against loss: Our ability to accept loss is related to the way in which we were supported through the losses we have had in our lives. An infant first expresses anger when they are not fed when hungry or when a favourite toy is taken away. This is the first experience of loss. Later, come the natural disillusions when parent’s letting us down, or the shocks of betrayals of trust, or the loss of a beloved pet, or the death of someone dear to us. In the absence of caring support, we begin to develop a picture of loss as something unbearable.
The cycle of grief contains anger as an essential step towards eventual acceptance. In grieving the releasing of anger to the one who died is one of the most inexplicable experiences, but it paves the way to real mourning.
A woman I know is the best to have around when there is a loss. She told me that when she was five years old her grandfather, who had been bedridden and living in her childhood home, called her into his room and said to her: Tomorrow there will be a lot of people in the house and probably no one will pay much attention to you. But I want you to know that I will always love you, no matter what. The next day he died, the house filled up with people as he predicted, but for her he was present.
My friend has faced the full range of losses – death of close friends, loss of relationship, loss of dreams – and is always able to do what needs to be done for herself and for others. She attributes this to the guided experience into dying that was the gift of her grandfather.
Compare that to a student of mine who, at age 9, sat for 8 hours on the school steps, waiting to be picked up by his parents. Finally a neighbour remembered to pick him up. It seems his father had died suddenly that day, his mother had gone into shock, and no one had remembered the child until hours later.
That is an extreme instance, and yet for a child whose beloved pet dies and is told not to cry, the experience can be just as profound. Losing is as significant a part of life as winning and we need to be guided through it. Culturally we have come to equate losing with feeling like a failure. This leaves us in a continual battle against failure which consumes our decision making and our lives.
We also are afraid that we have let ourselves down. This is always a part of the anger we feel when others have let us down. We are angry at ourselves, and unforgiving that we should have “known better” or been less naive. The inability to accept the loss of “letting myself down,” compounds the anger we feel to those who have disappointed us, and our anger is bigger. Add to that our mailbag of undelivered disappointments and resentments and you have a formula for anger that can explode as rage and a feeling of “overwhelm.”
One of the things I promise my students is that I will teach them to become “a good loser.” Here it is.
Experiment in Becoming a Good Loser
Consider instances in your everyday life where loss is present. This may include letting someone down, failure, disappointment with another or with life in general. In the average day there are many opportunities to feel loss.
Notice in your body where you feel the sense of loss when you think of any of the above. Some people describe the feeling as a blow to the stomach, as the bottom falling out, as a heartache, as confusion, as shame, as a sinking feeling. Find your own. And once you find it just describe it to yourselves as the physical sensation (as above).
Next time you feel that feeling, try not to do anything to make it go away. Don’t act to fix it, to explain it, to turn it into a gain. Don’t spend time thinking about the thing that happened that brought the feeling on. Just spend some moments feeling the feeling.
In other words allow the feeling of it to be present with you for as long as you can tolerate it. This is the feeling of loss. If you are able to do this when the feeling comes up, you will eventually connect with the original sense of loss you had before the associations with betrayal or abandonment. You will meet your body’s aware sensing of the feeling of what has happened and expand your feeling repertoire to include the losses of life.
Copyright October 2016