thoughts on working with anger or whatever

(Inspired by MattG writing about ScreamSquad, in ways that feel potentially misleading from my perspective)

Some people have never had the chance to experience or express their anger at all. Some people have, but only in a helpless way (cf Power-Under book - Trauma & Non-Violence).

These people need the chance to learn to really allow that energy to flow. Probably this applies to everybody to some extent, but it's only a major bottleneck for some. @fortelabs talks about it in his Groundbreakers post

When I was at the Bio-Emotive workshop at MAPLE in June 2019, one of the advantages of the workshop being hosted at a rural monastery was that there was a lot of space for people to go outside and yell/howl/wail/scream at the top of their lungs.

This S P A C E was definitely missing from the January 2020 event in downtown Toronto.

My sense is that this is part of why Doug emphasized in Toronto to focus on the hurt underneath the anger and process that. That seems to also work fairly well.

Then there's a thing that's like, how can you tell what part of your anger is a clear perception of something happening in the present that must change, vs what part of your anger is a past anger getting activated that didn't have the chance to be expressed at the time?

The first step is probably to take space from the person and/or situation that's activating the anger, perhaps by talking with someone else. That gives you space to tease apart these two parts, and care for each of them:
• understand & process the past feeling
• get clarity on the present boundary

If you try to do these while talking with the person you're angry at, it will tend to be hard to disambiguate past & present, for you & for them, which can lead to them feeling blamed for something that isn't fundamentally about them.

Often both aspects are present, but the magnitude of the present upset comes from a previous upset.

Even if you're not actually using blame, you can still find yourself asking someone to fix something that is not in their control, because fundamentally the question you're asking is "please don't ever trigger this emotional schema in me again" and unless the schema is very specific then it's basically impossible to succeed at this.

So the person might change the behavior in the way you request, but then they do something else that activates the same schema and it feels like they didn't understand and they crossed the boundary *again*.

This is why it's important to be able to differentiate in yourself the aspects of your experience that are current and the aspects that are past, because while anger tends to project outwards (though self-anger is also a thing, when you've severed part of yourself) sometimes the anger is from a previous situation so the leverage for changing your experience is still in yourself.

Tweets to maybe embed