What about rage that IS acknowledged?

Hi all,

I'm wondering your thoughts on anger and rage that you don't feel you are suppressing but still feels like it is causing or contributing to symptoms?

I'm speaking specifically of a major world event and watching a friend on social media take a side that is angering me and frustrating me and causing me great rage. My rage on this is quite open. I post about it, I've written about it, I've even poured out emotions in the form of a poem (and I don't even like/read/write poetry.).
The major world event situation angers and traumatizes me and I think it is creating/exacerbating symptoms and I feel like it's quadrupled in relation to this particular person. The frustration comes from the fact that I know she is a nice person, always fighting for the good guys, but not in this case. And I want to smack her over the head and shake her make her understand.

So, you see, my rage isn't really that suppressed. ??
Maybe I need to explore why I care what she thinks and posts? Why I am letting the whole awful situation cause me so much pain?
Why do I feel I have to be the one to correct people and save the world? (That must be the root of it......)

Thoughts?

 

So... i am listening to Bart Ehrman. I Love/Hate the man ... I admire and glean knowledge from him, but I know we would disagree on virtually everything locked in a room together. On a primordial ontological existential level. I often fantasize about punching him (in a loving christian TMS preventing sort of way)

He is being interviewed the other day "How are you doing"
'sighs'..."well I would be OK but with all of this stuff going on in the world...."

He goes on to list all of the global catastrophe's of the moment. This is a WEALTHY, PUBLISHED , FAMOUS, TWO HOME OWNING TENURED PROFESSOR and AUTHOR. I am having problems paying my bills because of inflation so the arrogance of his 'can't be OK until the world is a Disney film' idiocy is extra enraging.

Apparently his computer, radio and news stream have no OFF Button. Also NONE of the things he is concerned about affect him directly AT ALL. It is his EGO as a know-it-all and Agnostic and refusal to take into account Human Nature...they can all be 'reasoned' away. I believe he has also complained about pain before. (snicker) he is the kind of guy who would NEVER understand Sarno.

One of the things I also know he is 'sighing' about is something that indirectly DOES affect me. Certain news stories are 'closer' than others. Certainly more real than it is for most of these people losing their hair. But I don't go there with anybody. I just fantasize about beating the piss out of them....it is my 'favorite' Sarno therapy bar none.

I only use him because it is an extreme example... He is the kind of guy I probably would have fought with in High School, so it is no far stretch to imagine beating the hell out of him...and I do. No shame. I do it for lots of people. I make sure and don't 'agree' and 'like' crap that I don't agree with or like. People who know me well can LOOK at me and know my opinion w/o speaking. I developed that after reading Sarno.

I also don't discard people because they don't agree with me..that's what THEY do, and we all know who THEY are. But I feel not a shred of guit for indulging myself in imaginary mayhem...keeps me pain free.

hope that helps.

 

It’s about how the rage makes you feel about yourself - and how you feel it in your physical being, not just what you think about it.
Perhaps anger and guilt for feeling rage at a “nice person” or having thoughts “nice people” aren’t supposed to have.
You don’t necessarily even need to excavate the reason.. just work on accepting you can be an “angry person” or the person your outward persona doesn’t portray. It can take experiencing this on repeat to sink in.. and because it’s unconscious, (in general, this underlaying rage is not something you are aware of). Last week I smoldered in a parking lot for 25 minutes because the giant megachurch robots took up an entire 500 car public parking lot which had signs in it for them NOT to park there. It took them 25 minutes after service to clear out and I was pissed that their highly moralistic stance didn’t give two craps about the elderly and disabled people trying to just go grocery shopping. I considered that my subconcious probably thinks it’s not nice to get mad at the nice Christian people, so I just sat there, glowering and feeling the rage, telling myself it was just fine to be pissed off. Then I helped the very flustered older gent who people weren’t letting in a space to park.
My symptoms felt far less intense the rest of the day, which was unusual. Generally for myself, a single episode of feeling emotions makes 0 difference in my symptoms. Several people have told me they have witnessed this in folks who generally haven’t felt (not just think, but physically felt) much anger in their life. They tend to be folks who need to drain their bucket of rage, or as someone once told me, and keep themselves from corking the little whole they have created in the bucket.

 

Good stuff. I admit to writing (and drawing) about beating the piss out of this particular person and others as well. It does feel good.

 

Thanks, Cactus. A lot to mull over here. Definitely true about anger/guilt at feeling rage at a "nice person." I believe this to be true because even though I feel rage and want to "beat the piss" out of this person (to use B-Ball's excellent phrase), I also find myself making excuses for why she believes and says and does the things she does. By nature I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and to try and see things from their vantage point. I guess that might also cause unconsciously shoving some of the anger/rage that I feel consciously down into the unconscious zone. Or as you see unconsciously feeling anger/guilt about feeling anger when "it's not her fault" that she believes what she believes and spreads that information.

That's an interesting concept -- feeling unconscious rage about feeling rage. When my husband feels rage, he just feels rage. I always try to talk him down from his rage by trying to get him to see the other side of the story. (Which of course pisses him off.) His rage is pure. My rage is conditional. "I'm mad but it's not really their fault."

Ugh on your parking lot situation. Great that you were able to feel the rage...and help the elderly gent.

I like that concept/visual of draining that (very full) bucket of a lifetime of rage. When I first started letting out my rage on paper and to this day I'm always surprised at the amount of crazy rage I release. It feels good being a crazy lunatic on paper.

 

Does letting go help, or is that repression? I am troubled with the idea that a friend would be so angry over my beliefs. Is it wrong to expect a friend to accept me and my beliefs without having to agree with them?
I admit that one of my mind body triggers is feeling that someone is pressuring me to believe or do something I do not agree with. It is sure to set off symptoms.

 

So your true trigger is actually the people pleasing side of your personality?
Why do you care so much about what someone thinks you think? Where in your life has this repeated, and can you let it go?
It must be deeply enraging that you must constantly compromise your own beliefs to feel accepted by others. It means you must not internally accept yourself to have friends?
I’m friends or acquaintances with many people who see differently than me. My neighbor is a conspiracy theorist, I’m most certainly not. We have loads of other things we both similarly care about which is why we are friendly. We have agreed not to discuss the stuff that we think is utterly ridiculous. I in no way expect her to hold my beliefs, so why should I think she expects me to?
Without over dramatizing or dissecting stuff, you must look at what is real vs what parts of our thoughts are illusions we thought were truths, and decide what serves us and what doesn’t. Essentially, we can absolutely soften or change some of our triggers. You can do this by creating internal boundaries or you can learn the art of responding vs. reacting.

 

@Smokey73, for me it's about where do you draw the line? I'm generally tolerant of my friends with differing world views and on the other side of the political spectrum from me (probably leading to TMS) but at some point one has to draw the line, don't they? For example, if you were a Jew in Germany in the 1930s and your friend joined the Nazi party......?

I personally make the mistake of holding on to friends that cross the line with my beliefs. My other friends will say things like, "Why are you still friends with so-and-so?" The hidden reality is that I have my own problem with "wanting people to like me" so I try to see past the issue and try to "understand why they believe what they do." I also have a problem with ego and feel like I can change them if only I could educate them on why they are wrong. Which of course is not the case. In many, many years of discussions and debates I think I've changed the minds of approximately zero people. Okay, I think there was maybe one somewhere along the way that said they changed their mind from our discussions, but that is about it. Yet still my stupid ego that thinks I'm god and still tries!
(And then gets frustrated at why can't the other person see the truth!)

 

Wow, what a great discussion, everyone! Love this quote from @Cactusflower. How the rage makes you feel about yourself. This is all hard stuff. I can’t stand even writing privately about “unacceptable” thoughts. It helps to know I will throw it away. Layers are being peeled back as I journal each day. A lot of things have been hiding in plain sight. I also have a lot of rage that took place because of the pandemic, which is when this round of symptoms swamped me. And a huge source of that was the rage I would feel when following topics on social media. I have since given that all up.

 

Question— what is the art of responding vs. Reacting?

 

I feel like I’m learning on the forum from you guys how essential it is to know your feelings in real-time. This quote by @Baseball65 is a great example of that, and something I can aspire to. The other day after journaling and getting in touch with some feelings, I finally let them rip on somebody, and I have to say, it felt good!

 

Responding is sort of like like teaching your body and thoughts to jump to immediate conclusions that invoke what some may call a “trigger” - activating the nervous system response to fight/flight/freeze.. you really don’t feel like you have much control over this reaction (which is a lie, because you do!)
Responding allows you to take a pause and choose how you be - your body calm, and at ease even if you are angry, sad, frustrated.. responding allows you to sense and feel what is going on in the body without much judgement if it is “good” or “bad” - it just is.
Reacting: holding your breath while jumping for joy and clapping your hands at good news
Responding: taking a breath and slowly breaking into a smile while you feel joy spread through your body.
Neither of these are “bad” just one activates the nervous system wildly.

 

Thank you so much for this! I’m going to try using it.

 

Hi @Booble,

let me share my thoughts on your original post.

As a consciously (and continually) angry person myself, I understand what you mean as you talk about your friend and the surrounding political situation. You bring to my mind the relationship between anger/rage and control. Anger is seductive: with the promise of overpowering emotion and even violence, it appears like the fuel, or the energy, you need to gain control of and in the world.

Like many seducers, though, anger lies. Rather than putting you in control of the situation, anger takes control of you—and being OUT of control is why you got angry in the first place! Anger also leads to poor decisions, as well as (as we know) personal pain and discomfort).

The tension between needing to be in control of the world around you at all times and accepting the world as it unfolds before you is as old as humanity …. But the world from 2020 on seems like it has made this struggle more intense and much more personal. (So give yourself a break on this one.)

I think that your answers lie in your questions you ask at the end of your original post. There will be no shortage of stupid people doing dumb, reckless, selfish things. This is the truth. What will you do about it?

I also want to add that mentalizing anger could still be considered repression or evasion of anger. I do this all the time. Mentalized anger (“I’m so fucking angry”) is acknowledged and conscious but not necessarily felt or processed.

Speaking personally, mentalization is obsession; feeling is processing, working through.

Hope this helps

 

So true! Working so hard to go from mentalization to processing!