Anger - Part One

That red eyed devil of the heart

What is it? Is anger the emotion or the expression of the emotion? What we feel is pain, helplessness, injustice, fear. We feel trapped. We feel the need to strike out, to turn our trauma on some external entity. We are quick to dismiss anger as a negative emotion that is destructive - negative - bad.

But what is it?

Michael Swerdloff describes anger as a “secondary emotion.” This means that we must feel another emotion before we feel anger. Anger is our inability to deal with that primary emotion. You might feel fear for example, and perhaps your programming is such that when faced with fear you fight - you become angry and lash out. My anger has always been related to struggle, to the “playful resistor” aspect of my personality. This personality adaptation is all about the struggle. The Playful Resistor is loyal, playful, analytical, fair and determined. These are the strengths. The problems occur when things do not go quite right. Then the PR is prone to struggling, to not asking for help, to sticking with uncomfortable situations and not seeking change.

It is not that the PR is bad. None of the personality adaptations are bad, they all have pitfalls, strengths and opportunities for growth. I recently took the lid of this aspect of myself with my own therapist who is a kind and brilliant man who has supported me through significant change over the last five years. My call was a week ago and it has taken that time to process all that we began to explore. We are now digging very deep into some of the behaviors and their origins that have troubled me throughout my adult life.

I share these things because it is important that we stop seeing psychotherapy, or transactional therapy, or transpersonal therapy or CBT or whatever you engage in, as fixing something that is broken. Therapy is about change, it is about developing a greater insight into the drivers of your behaviours so that you can change unhealthy behaviours and adopt ore useful ones. This is what therapy is for.

So in the last session I identified that there is a problematic area of my behaviour that has its roots in the paternal. To be clear, I a not blaming my parents at this point. There is a difference between understanding parental drivers that determine our behaviour and simply blaming your mum and dad. Through the five year process I have of course experienced intense feelings of anger towards my parents, and I have also experienced love and forgiveness. To be clear, both mod my parents are dead and these are matters I now deal with for myself, and for my own children.

John Lydon told us that “Anger is an energy” in the Public Image Limited track ‘Rise,’ and I could not agree more. It is an energy projected through a filter that is shaped by the primary emotion. For example, the anger that I have struggled with most of my life is to do with frustration and feeling intensely that ‘life is not fair.’ When I look at the traits of the Playful Resistor this makes perfect sense:

Possible Pitfalls of Playful-Resisters:

1. Resist direction from others - my friends will be all too keen to acknowledge that I am terrible at taking advice and always think that I know better. This is because I have been ‘scripted’ to struggle along my own path and not ask for help.

2. See life as a struggle - I remember my Dad saying to me “you have to suffer in life” as if he were imparting some great wisdom. He really believed this and passed it on to me. But he was born in 1928 and grew up through a war, so can I blame him. Not really, but I can recognise where the behavior originates and take action to fix it.

3. Get into either/or, all or nothing thinking - I have never been very good at taking small steps and building things over time. As a result I have very little security in my life and I have rarely stuck with anything to make it successful.

4. Make things more difficult than they have to be - I over complicate and undermine myself, shoot myself in the foot and then blame it on something else. If I had just kept things simple…

5. Procrastinate - when you are overcomplicating things, seeing everything as a struggle and think that life is all or nothing, then you are going to procrastinate. You are going to want to find a reason to not take the step you need to, because you believe it will result in failure. Because: life is a struggle.

6. Often frustrate others with their resistance - I have had horrible arguments with friends and even lost jobs because I would not see that what I considered resistance in others was actually my own resistance being mirrored back to me.

All of this is only going to result in one thing: anger.

Fucking rage.

I have been a monster in the past. I mean throwing things through windows, smashing this and breaking that, punching holes in walls and tearing down everything. I wanted to burn the world because it was to blame.

So what are the solutions?

What are the areas for growth?

Well first of all, we should look at the strengths of the playful resistor:

Strengths of Playful-Resistors:

1. Loyal - a strong friend, faithful and trustworthy.

2. Good at noticing things that are not right - wants to make things right, has good intent will make the effort.

3. Good investigators - Look at the facts to create a strong argument.

4. Tenacious - yes, a dog with a bone. Sometimes to a fault as we have seen in the pitfalls.

5. Playful - On a good day the Playful Resistor just wants to have fun.

6. Weigh both sides of an issue - fair and just.

So there are always good things in every personality adaptation. But these have to be balanced out with opportunities for growth and it is the strengths that will make this happen.

Areas for Growth for Playful-Resisters:

1. Realize that there are always more than two options in any situation - I have been doing this more and more. When I sense my own resistance to something I see it as an opportunity to do things differently. To challenge myself to learn.

2. Realize that life does not have to be a struggle - I am doing more to relax., Observe good sleep hygiene, drink less, more exercise and time for me to be.

3. Learn to ask directly for what they want - This is something I still struggle with. I simply do not feel that I deserve things, so I create convoluted circumstances to try and get what I want. There is an element of the “Charming Manipulator” adaptation here as well, but we can save that for another day.

4. Learn to say “no” directly - I am getting better at this. It feels weird to say no, but why make life a struggle right?

5. Realise that other people will be cooperative with them now - I am starting to realise that the world is not against me and that when I surround myself with the kind of people I like and jam with, then I feel more at ease.

6. Trust their feelings to guide them - On so many occasions I have ignored my intuition and regretted it. Intuition and ‘feelings’ are streams of information that we cannot decode rationally or logically, but that does not mean that they are not real.

So what is Anger?

Anger is a complex construct that has its roots in our fundamental drivers and scripts. These are elements of our character that go all the way back to our formative years. To the first five years of life. Our emotional development is deep, deep down, and to explore it we have to hold the pain that also resides there. Everyone has it, everyone carries it. But when we explore these things and change our perspective, change our behaviour, we liberate ourselves from these traps and pitfalls.

This is the end of part one. In part two I will share the piece of creative writing that kicked this whole thing off about anger.

So go well and big love from Driftwood Studio.