Emotions
Are You An Angry Young Man?
Anger is one of the emotions that I have found most difficult to deal with in the past. I grew up in a house where anger was handled in ways that I found very frightening, leading me to become very afraid of conflict. This meant that I made a decision fairly early on in life that anger was a “bad” emotion that I should suppress at all costs. I became very ashamed of anybody knowing when I was angry.
I ended up internalising a lot of rage and unhappiness. I just didn’t know how to let anger go and how to get it out of my system. It wasn’t until the last few years that I even realised just how angry I was deep down.
I now know that anger is not “bad” emotion; it’s just a signal that our needs aren’t getting met. Anger provides energy for us to act assertively in situations where people are treating us in ways we don’t like. If we’ve learned to be passive in the face of our anger, that energy gets trapped in our nervous system.
Because I have many years of internalising my anger, the situations where I would have liked to act assertively have long passed. Yet I’m still carrying that anger in my nervous system.
So the question becomes: How to let it go?
The one thing I didn’t mention explicitly was what exactly emotional trauma is: the emotional residue left in our brains and nervous system attached to memories of any emotionally overwhelming past event that we weren’t able to fully express and release at the time.
