If you’re dealing with anger issues you are not alone.
We don't really talk about it because... there's so much shame related to it.
I’ve been personally working with my own anger issues that surfaced up after I suddenly saw the people-pleasing, codependent habits I had.
I was working on myself with confidence and wrote in my journal about what confidence means to me. How does she looks like, behave like, feel like.
From there I got into independence and stopped there. I felt I had lost a part of myself, my identity- the one that I was a few years ago. I wanted her back.
At first it was really hard to accept the patterns and behaviors. I suddenly saw it everywhere. It was like a web that had affected me my whole life.
I researched and studied everything about it. I felt sad as I knew it was huge and challenging to start healing and change it.
I went to my old coping mechanisms of mine, numbing the feelings, bottling up the confusion, and therefore feeling depressed.
After a week of feeling miserable I was ready to accept it and see how these patterns had played a huge role in all areas of my life.
At work, money and all my relationships had repeated the same patterns.
All that was copied from what happened to me and in my family as a child.
My role was to put on the happy face, avoid conflicts and tuck the uneasy emotions away.
Rather please others, ignore my own emotions than feel abandoned, rejected.
I realized how self-harming it was and how angry it made me when I ignored my needs and priorities so I started healing the patterns step by step.
Then underneath the sadness, the anger started rising. I thought I had done with it already but there was more. This was the anger I had hidden for a long time carefully. And it was not all even mine.
I was raised with strictness and had nothing much to say about what I wanted. I learned to hide my emotions and opinions as it was not safe and I felt wrong to have them. As my emotions didn’t matter, I started believing I didn’t matter.
Eventually, underneath the anger, it was all about sadness like it often it.
I deeply craved to be seen, heard, and able to express herself freely without fear of punishment or emotional abandonment. Without the need to be perfect. Already as I child, I stopped letting it in as I felt it was not available and therefore I rejected myself, the young one in me who deeply needed my attention, my tenderness. It was the self-rejection that actually made me reject the good that was available to me.
This is how the subconscious keeps us safe and protected, thinking it’s the way to avoid the pain. Then it comes out as anger.
The results of this healing work
I feel more empowered and have clearer boundaries and abilities to express my needs and desires than ever before.
There are fewer negative voices, self-criticism, and judgment in my head is gone- people-pleasers are terribly judgmental towards themselves.
I express myself and my emotions easier. I’m more forgiving and so much more accepting and loving towards myself and others.
It’s not always a straight easy line to reach our desires but this is what I wanted.
Anger is an emotion as well as other emotions but when it’s explosive, uncontrollable, and constant the patterns and their roots that are often subconscious need healing.
You are not born angry, one of your characteristics may be frustration like mine, but your critical, judgmental or explosive behaviors can be healed.
We all have been shamed for expressing our anger and that’s not how we “should be.”
There are inherited cultural and patriarchal patterns (which is not about genders) and of course, the unique family patterns and dynamics add to it.
The triggers are stored in the body. We can’t avoid letting these things in when we are young, but we can stop passing it forward.
We don’t even notice how these affect us but wonder why we feel we can’t express ourselves and feel free to be ourselves but rather feel neglected, suffocated, and shut off, betraying ourselves and our truth again and again.
Hiding, trying to unfeel it, shaming ourselves for feeling anger doesn’t make it go away. It just starts to eat us from the inside and leads to other issues.
It’s safe for you to feel angry, be angry, and learn to let it go healthily and safely with high self-respect.
It’s safe for you to heal the root causes and stop carrying the anger that only hurts you, no one else really.
We often like to fight for the needs of young selves, trying to desperately get our needs fulfilled, get justice, trying to force or hope people around us or in our past would change or miracles would happen.
Hope that parents would suddenly apologize, or partners or people who have hurt us would suddenly change their behaviors and see us as we all uniquely want to be seen to feel loved, safe and successful.
Sometimes people change when we change and heal ourselves.
Sometimes they don’t. It’s not up to you to decide.
We’ll never get the childhood we would have needed and that requires acceptance and letting go of the anger we might feel for our caretakers.
The truth is others can’t fill the hole inside us, but we can do it for ourselves so we can then receive it from others.
Until the old wounds are healed we keep fighting and battling and blaming others for our issues, feelings.
Emotions are supposed to keep us safe and protected.
Anger is often related to rejection and abandonment wounds we have experienced earlier.
Then the subconscious patterns keep us repeating exactly the same in our life later on what we have witnessed or experienced in our childhood.
If you are dealing with a lot of anger or even rage there’s nothing wrong with you but there are wounds to heal.
Healing yourself is your responsibility and also, a possibility.
How to start releasing anger:
Witnessing and accepting it's there.
Sit with it. Journal about it. Voice-record your feelings. Allow insights to come. Who are you angry with?
Breathe through it. Keep repeating it until it’s gone.
Ask what the child inside you need. Give that to the child, they crave to be seen.
What kind of action needs to be taken? What kind of boundaries do you need to set?
Do the work. That is often the hardest part but so worth it.
If you are ready to get more personal support I can help. Book a call here
The sessions help you to release the root causes and then you become free to change your habits, behaviors, and how you feel. When you change the relationships with yourself and then others change naturally.
If you like this blog let me know your thoughts in the comments below! I’d love to hear from you.
Much love,
Jenni