Let go of anger. Anger doesn’t serve you. Your anger controls you, you don’t control it. Holding onto anger is holding onto sickness. Anger is toxic.
Anger gets a bad reputation in the world of emotions and recovery. As if it were emblazoned with a Scarlett letter A, anger is something that we should seemingly be ashamed of, get rid of immediately, and try to fix because anger is a volatile, unpredictable, extreme emotion.
True recovery should teach us to be fully present with all of our emotional experiences, anger included. After all, anger is a natural part of our human experience because anger is intimately connected to the fight or flight response which accompanies trauma. When we go into fight or flight mode, we are put on the defense against a real or perceived threat. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol course through our veins to help us keep our emotions at bay in order to take physical action for survival. Anger is one of the emotions which slips through a loop hole with fight or flight. Like the Hulk getting angry and turning into a large green fighting machine in order to enforce justice, we become angry in order to enforce protection over our lives. Simply put, feeling threatened makes us angry.
Living with unresolved and untreated trauma can keep us in a state of fight or flight all the time. Trauma creates a dysfunctional nervous system and the nervous system is what helps regulate the fight or flight response. A constant state of threat can mean a constant state of anger, chronically enraged by the presence of trauma and ready to fight to protect ourselves. Trauma is angering, from many different angles.
Anger can be seen as a secondary emotion rather than a primary emotion, rooted in fear and sadness. We aren’t just mad that trauma has happened to us and we aren’t just angry as a result of having a disorder nervous system. We are also sad that trauma has had to occur in our lives. Not only are we sad trauma has occurred in our lives, we are sad that trauma has had a negative affect on our lives. We fear what living with trauma means because we fear trauma will define us, control us, and prevent us from living a happy healthy life- enough to make anyone angry.
Your anger is a choice as much as it is a natural response to trauma and life.
The Guest House Ocala offers concierge style customization for residential trauma programs, as well as treatment for related issues like addictions and mental illness. Our private estate offers you the privacy and comfort you need to do the work and heal your mind, body, and spirit. For information on life at the estate and our programs for healing, call: 1-855-483-7800