What Your Anger is Really Saying
Anger…it’s a huge thing…a powerful, explosive energy..it’s hot, its fiery and it can burn, especially when we don’t know how to deal with it.
In this episode, I want us to explore what is anger, why is it there and how to release it safely, because if we don’t understand what it is or know how to handle it, it can consume us, harm our relationships and even cause physical damage.
So let’s start with what it is… simply put…its a nervous system response, the ‘fight’ in ‘fight or flight’. If someone is crossing a personal boundary, not honouring or respecting us, we feel anger, if something is unjust or unfair, we feel anger. Anger is our boundary, our no, it’s our pushback energy and it’s designed to protect us.
Yet it’s part of a more complex system, when it hasn’t been or felt safe to express our anger, when it has been overridden, and we haven’t been able to remove ourselves from the situation, our nervous system shifts states to keep us safe. We may find ourselves shutting down (freeze response) or fawning to appease the threat - all of this is happening beneath our conscious awareness and is essentially out of our control.
When we’re exposed to this kind of threat day in, day out and we’re unable to escape - for example if the abuse is happening in our home, school or workplace and our boundaries are being constantly violated we may find ourselves operating from the freeze or fawn nervous system responses.
It’s not that we don’t have power or courage or words we’d like to say to our aggressor, its that our nervous system takes over to keep us safe, and our anger and what we’d like to communicate seems to disappear, and we feel powerless to act in the way we’d consciously choose.
Many of us are afraid of confrontation as we’re afraid of the anger within, perhaps we’ve been burned by another’s anger and felt how unsafe it feels to be on the receiving end so we may have chosen not to act in that way, believing that anger is bad or wrong. In other cases, and I would argue, that in the case of abuse this is most likely - the anger that has been unexpressed is still living as a highly charged energy in your nervous system and that when triggered, it feels explosive or too much inside of us, out of proportion to the situation, so we keep it in, fearing its power to overwhelm us as well as the other.
What’s needed here, I believe, is to befriend our anger, to recognise it for the messenger it is, to recognise the boundary that’s being crossed and once the intensity of the emotion has died down, we can take clear communication and action to uphold the boundary or correct the injustice.
The problem is the excess charge in the system, all the times that you weren’t able to protect yourself, every time your no was overridden, every time you couldn’t get away and that charge wasn’t released, in my experience, it lives on until its honoured and released.
So how do we do that? If you fear confrontation, feel anger that’s disproportionate to the situation or have been in an abusive situation where your boundaries were violated again and again, I recommend taking a bit of time on a regular basis to feel and release the anger. By this, I don’t mean punching a pillow, which doesn’t necessarily release the charge but may even serve to engrain the anger pathway further, but releasing it safely in a way that means that it’s processed out of your system for good. EFT Tapping is a wonderful tool for expressing and releasing anger, while tapping on the specific tapping points and simply saying how you feel, you are both activating the vagus nerve and releasing the charge, so you’re not deepening the pathways of anger, you’re releasing and healing them. Every piece of anger that you release safely in this way is a piece that’s released for good and over time you should feel lighter in your system and when you experience injustice of a boundary being crossed, your anger will cease to overwhelm you and become the messenger that it is, alerting you to the fact that there’s something wrong and that you need to do something about it.
This is where your power lies, in being able to feel your anger, to recognise what it’s pointing to and to use that information to clearly and calmly enforce a boundary or to stand up for yourself against an injustice, when it’s essentially safe to do so.
When we know that we can protect ourselves, we feel safer in ourselves, in our relationships and the world.
Our anger will always rise to protect us, we don’t have to worry about that. If you find yourself in physical danger, your nervous system will automatically shift you into the response it deems safest for you in the moment.
You’ll simply be able to feel freer and calmer and more spacious within, when the excess charge has been released.
Sometimes we get stuck in a loop of feeling and expressing anger in a destructive way, again, it simply depends on what your nervous system has determined is the safest approach for you to state your boundary or to stand up to unfairness. Its not your fault if that’s whats been happening, however if you’re not in any actual danger, then cooling your body can really help with shifting out of the fight response and bringing you back to your center.
A technique you can use to literally cool an angry state is the yogic breathing practice of sitali (if you can roll your tongue) or sitkari (stacking your front teeth on top of each other) if you can’t. Inhale through rolled tongue or stacked teeth, letting the air cool as it moves along your tongue and feeling it cool your body all the way into your lungs. It literally takes your body temperature down a little and as anger is a heated state, helps you to cool off. Similarly taking a cool shower, splashing your face with cold water or running your wrists under a cold tap will also serve this purpose.
When we weren’t able to express our anger as a child, perhaps it wasn’t safe to be expressed in our home or was deemed culturally inappropriate, it can lead to a sense of powerlessness and a pattern of people pleasing and fawning to avoid confrontation which makes us more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by narcissistic personalities. So if you’ve felt unable to speak up for yourself and defend yourself, it’s not your fault, it’s just what your nervous system learned was safest at the time, and now you’re an adult, you can change that, you can heal your brain and nervous system.
There are so many ways to approach the healing, but one thing’s for sure, your power lies beneath your anger, and freeing the excess charge from your system puts you back in the driving seat again with regard to boundaries and standing up for yourself, and once you can do this comfortably, you’ll feel in charge of yourself and your life again.
As well as EFT Tapping, energy healing such as Reiki [https://www.claudiamaxine.com/reiki-healing-courses], Sekhem [https://www.claudiamaxine.com/sekhem-initiations] or Angelic Healing can be directed to the source of the injustice or boundary violation you’ve experience to help free the charge from your nervous system, hypnotherapy can work directly with your subconscious mind to help reprogram your emotional and nervous system responses in the moment and brainspotting can help the excess charge to somatically release at your body’s natural pace.
These are just some of the tools I use in my H.E.A.L. After Narcissistic Abuse - The Journey to Your True Self [https://www.claudiamaxine.com/heal-after-narcissistic-abuse] pathway. It’s a healing pathway I’ve created to support women recovering from narcissistic abuse to heal their nervous systems, help them to understand what happened to them, both physically, emotionally and psychologically, and to heal the deeper layers of personal and ancestral trauma that left them vulnerable to this type of abuse in the first place, so they can be free from toxic relationships forever.
If this sounds like something you’re interested in, you can find more details on my website www.claudiamaxine.com [https://www.claudiamaxine.com/].
I also offer a low cost monthly membership, my H.E.A.L. Sanctuary [https://www.claudiamaxine.com/heal-sanctuary] which is packed with nervous system healing resources, energy healings and a monthly healing call where we meet in community and put some of these tools into practice as well as receive a deep energy healing to support you wherever you are in your healing process.
I look forward to supporting you on your healing journey.
Sending you much love and many blessings,
Claudia x
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