"Pushing, Shouting, Shoving in Tampa Town Hall" and "Town Hall Free-For-Alls: Screaming and Chaos" cry TV headlines as healthcare reform is debated. We see enraged and truly terrified people screaming in turbulent gatherings.
Sadly, the raging behavior does not help the people doing it get closer to having their needs met. The problem is not that they are feeling angry, but that they are not using their anger to clarify for themselves specifically what their needs are, and plan how they could more effectively act to have their needs met.
I work with many conflict avoidant people, so problems I see with anger are often related to a difficulty or unwillingness to experience anger. And it seems that there is much helpful material written about how to stop destructive actions, but there is much less written to support people who avoid anger. So this post outlines some of the ways people lose self esteem and zest by various anger avoiding methods.
The problem: self contempt and rejection for feeling states
The anger avoidant person believes that they are a bad person for merely having the feelings of anger, irritation, disappointment, frustration. But it's not just anger that people reject themselves for feeling. Any of the other emotional states can trigger people to have a secondary shame reaction.
A major cause of people's contempt towards themselves is related to their perceived inability to regulate their emotions. Two aspects of self esteem, feeling competent to manage your self and feeling loveable, converge in the area of how we talk to ourselves about our feelings.
Examples of self rejecting ways people talk to themselves about their feelings
Here are some of the self contemptuous, shaming ways that people respond to their own emotional states.
"What's the matter with me?" says the distressed person, holding back tears.
"Who would want to be around me," I'm such a downer, wails the sad person.
"They just ridicule me, and leave the room when I'm anxious," frets the anxious.
"I'm way too needy to be around people," says the lonely one.
"I disgust myself, so I know I'll disgust them too," cringes the shamed person.
"I don't deserve them in my life," says the abusively angry person.
Four zest killing, self esteem lowering responses to our own anger
Here I talk about one use of anger to avoid other feelings, and three ways people avoid anger. All of these strategies lower self esteem, and all of these strategies can be changed to more beneficial methods.
1. Aggression
One person may easily be aware of feeling angry, but unaware of the other feelings, and the needs that are fueling the anger. That person may bully, aggressively hurting others. Later, they may feel guilt and shame about their actions, and their self esteem is lowered. On a deep level we all need to feel compassion for others and when we act counter to that need, it comes back to bite our own self esteem.
2. Suppression
Another person may feel the anger, try to suppress it, or minimize it and therefore not benefit from the information it is giving about their unfulfilled core values or needs that are discounted. If someone has a belief that they should accept everything, they may not set appropriate boundaries. With lack of self protective boundaries they in essence hang out a "walk on me" sign. The usual scene with suppressing anger is that the internal pressure builds up until the self-suppressing can no longer hold and emotional eruption follows. Then the person feels remorse, shame and self esteem plummets.
3. Turning against the self
Yet another person may turn their anger against themselves and shame themselves. The condition for this dynamic is that something in the environment disappoints the person, and then the person finds fault shames themselves. This helps them still feel connected to the disappointing other. After all, is the inner experience, the other person didn't do anything wrong, oneself self was defective.
An example of someone who grew out of responding to her own anger this way is Annie (discussed in previous posts). She initially came to me feeling great shame and agitation. She had been seeing a therapist who routinely came to session 10-15 minutes late. Sometimes he would even leave a session for ten minutes to make coffee for himself.
She felt grateful to him for seeing her early in the morning before work, so she did not feel entitled to have her anger. As she continued to accept his behavior and accuse herself of being needy, her self esteem kept dropping. "I was just getting worse and worse," she remembers.
While Annie initially could not tolerate her own anger at her previous therapist, she learned to recognize and use her anger. She learned to recognize his lies as his integrity issue, not her unimportance. She learned to recognize she needed to go into business for herself, and not expect him to acknowledge her.
4. Non-recognition of anger
The fourth response to our own anger that I want to talk about here is that of not even recognizing that we are feeling anger.
Why is non recognition of our own anger a problem? What you can't recognize, you can't regulate. As John Gray's book title asserts, "What You Can Feel, You Can Heal." In fact, in my very first therapist training, I learned that an important function of therapy is to "give people a language for their feelings so that they don't need to act them out."
Before we can recognize that we are feeling angry, we have to have learned to name the feeling and recognize how it feels inside ourselves. Ideally we are taught to name our feelings as a young child. But as I have found in my practice, people often do not recognize their own anger. This often happens in families with rigid, authoritarian family rules. The children in these families are often taught that they should not show anger towards their parents with their faces, words, tones of voice, or actions.
Josie's Journey
Josie (a fictional composite) grew up in a family in which the parents based their self esteem on how obedient the children were. No dissent was allowed. Josie often heard her parents criticize her older sister: "Get that look off your face, Missy." She heard threats: "You don't like it? Well, then, Miss High and Mighty, I'll drive you to the prison in just 20 minutes. Then you'll appreciate what you had." Not only the threatening words and tones, but also the scornful looks, taught Josie to want to avoid and to not even recognize her anger.
But it was not only the fear of receiving contempt that made Josie unable to recognize and use her anger. It was also that she had never been taught to recognize her own anger. She was never told, for example, "Yes, Honey, you are angry right now because you need to have your rights to your own property respected, not have your backpack stolen. Let's look at what can you do to get it back." So with no words to name her experience, she could not recognize it, think about it, and use it. When someone has not had their experience named and explained, the experience can remain unconscious. (Contemporary psychoanalysts would say this unrecognized experience is the territory of the unvalidated unconscious.)
How Josie came to recognize her anger
By the time I met Josie, she was 45. This story shows the work she did before she met me. Her previous therapy work had taught her to recognize her anger (though she still had trouble from time to time). Being able to recognize and use her anger made her able to work so successfully with me to improve her marriage.
She was 25 at the time the following events unfolded. Josie's husband had just told her that one of his secretaries had walked into his private office, told him she was in love with him, leaned over his desk, kissed him and said that she wanted to have an affair with him.
Josie turned white as her husband was telling her this. She felt strangely disconnected, and had tears dripping from her eyes, without experiencing anything she could verbalize. Later that day, Josie thought about suicide, and thought that if she woke up in the middle of the night still feeling so much pain, that she would take enough pills to kill herself. Fortunately, she did not wake up in the middle of the night, and also fortunately, she had a session with her therapist early the next morning. Her therapist responded to her story, "You don't seem angry with him. I wonder why. I am angry with him." Josie puzzled, "But he didn't do anything wrong. He told her he loved me and wouldn't have an affair."
