A Guide Through Anger
The D.A.N.C.E. through your mind body experience is an imperfect one and may often show up as anger at yourself and others in the process. You may rage at the unfairness, confusion, and pain of your circumstances. You may rage at how long your healing journey has been, how nothing has seemed to help, and how stuck you may still feel. You may rage at how misunderstood and alone you feel. You may rage at your imperfection. All of this makes sense. Your anger is the anger of hope and of desperately wanting a better life. It is the anger of your child self and it is perfectly okay. The anger is showing up to be released and, with practice, you can create space to honor such feelings and release them, in addition to any associated symptoms.
Many people, including myself, have had difficulty allowing the presence of anger to show up. I grew up in a household that freely spoke the language of fear, but was not well-versed in the language of anger. As a result, I became familiar with the fear, but the anger remained shameful and foreign inside me. When anger emerged, it was messy. I could not push it away nor could I fully be with it. I raged at others for their inability to understand or be with my experience, while I silently felt shame for having such a “troublemaking” part of me. I punished myself for the anger energy in addition to everyone else. I directed it inward and pointed it at all my vulnerabilities and perceived weaknesses. This is the way my brain learned to survive environments where anger was dangerous. The anger is uncomfortable and messy, but it does not make you bad and it is showing up for a reason. You may not like how you appear in these moments and others may not understand the intensity rising up inside you, but your relationship with yourself is the one you must honor. Remind yourself of your worthiness even in your most rage-filled moments. Your anger is a result of the trauma you carry from this lifetime and your ancestry, as is mine. Alongside the emotion of anger is a traumatized belief getting triggered about yourself, others, and the world. The emergence of anger is the opportunity to practice releasing this energy and expanding into a new state of peace and love.
As a child, I often carried a belief of feeling unsupported, alone, and misunderstood. The traumatized belief merged with the response of others around me and created a self-fulfilling prophecy. As I navigated continuous environments where I felt alone, unsupported, and misunderstood, the belief remained hardened in me and produced anger and resentment as a result. Certainly, environments can be objectively worse than others and lead to new or exacerbated traumatic experience, but this is not about blame or fault. At a certain point, it was most helpful to recognize what I was carrying within me that elicited such powerful emotion and continues to at times. I hated just about every authority figure in my life up to a certain point. Was everything authority figure and caregiver perfect? No. Were they all deserving of my anger. Also no. The dynamics of childhood are very difficult to process in real time for various reasons, including development and dependency on your environment for survival, but once you get to a certain age the responsibility becomes yours to practice honoring and owning your anger for what it is, as well as continuing to release it. And there will be no shortage of opportunities to do so!
Another example of a powerful belief that shows up in association with anger is the belief that you are not living up to your expectations or the expectations of others you have internalized. Recognize how unforgiving a learned part of you has become toward yourself, and see how this part is now punishing you for your experience. You may simultaneously direct this anger inward and outward as others never seem to live up to your expectations either. Again, the punishment has roots in a traumatized belief and associated emotion you are carrying. Remember that the journey is messy and you can find ways to let the messiness show up without shame or guilt and with as much courage and humility as you can muster. Whenever you feel that punishing belief and anger emotion show up in regard to your own progress in one area of your life, including your own healing, do your best to remember this is only your brain’s conditioning. Remember that the emergence of the belief and emotion is itself the opportunity in the moment showing up for healing and demands your attention. You are courageous enough to be with this and you are not bad or unworthy for being where you are; in fact, it is exactly where you are meant to be.
Your anger may not always look like anger at first glance, and there are likely other emotions mixed in. Alongside anger will always be a feeling of hurt and perceived threat. There is a biological basis for this since the brain is always scanning for danger and threat, and both anger and fear are produced in the amygdala - the primitive part of the brain geared toward survival. Your brain perceives emotion energy as a threat, like lava from a volcano ready to burst, but there is no lava and there is no volcano. You are safe in the ocean of your experience. You cannot be destroyed. In reality, a core belief has been triggered that your brain has been conditioned to see as threatening. Whenever such a belief gets triggered, typically in a relational experience, you or the other person may seem dumbfounded at how such profound anger emerged from such a seemingly innocuous situation. You must consider that when such a belief gets triggered, your brain immediately recalls the threat of the original situation, likely from your childhood or even your ancestry, and it no longer sees the current situation for what it is. This is the definition of a trauma reaction. Your brain cannot actually tell the difference between past, present, and future, and the information it feeds on is based in the emotion and belief energy you are carrying. If someone says or does something that elicits the belief of “No one understands me,” and this belief was shaped at a very pivotal and fertile time in your childhood, an enormous wave of anger, fear, and hurt may show up that was produced and manifested from that experience.
It does not feel like an opportunity in the moment, but you are being triggered precisely so you may release this trauma you have been carrying. The opportunities are simply a byproduct of human relationship. We trigger one another so we may heal and it is up to us to practice doing so. Not with shame, blame, or guilt, but with as much courage and compassion for ourselves and others as we can muster. We continue to dance between moments of exciting growth and frustrating stumbles as we navigate our mind body experience. To learn to D.A.N.C.E. with anger, we learn to dance with what we carry, what others carry, and with life itself. You are not your symptoms, your traumatized beliefs, or your anger. You are a soul being human and you are here to expand.