Destructive Anger
Traumatic and accumulated stress commonly show themselves through painful and destructive expressions of anger and rage. Skillful therapeutic work with anger can be transformatively helpful not just in limiting destructive outbursts, but also in freeing the tremendously powerful, life-affirming energies contained within anger.
Anger is perhaps the most misunderstood and feared of human emotions. Many people, at some level, find our own aggression undesirable, scary and even shameful. Some people who have experienced trauma and received little support in understanding and consciously feeling their anger become stuck in a painful rage-and-shutdown cycle, which oscillates between rageful outbursts and emotional “shut down.” Threatening or overwhelming events in a person’s life can compromise their ability to accurately assess danger; as a result, their psycho-biology is primed to respond to mild irritants or even non-existing threats with full blown rage. Explosions of rage can be tremendously destructive and result in damage to both their relationships and regard for themselves.
Perhaps counterintuitively, persons who habitually express anger destructively—or “rageaholics”—actually have limited capacity to truly and safely feel the fullness of their aggression. For good reasons, persons who consistently struggle with destructive anger have not yet fully developed the capacity to expand with and consciously allow the power and energetic intensity of aggression.
I work with anger first by helping clients appreciate its vital physiological, psychological and relational functions. This process often involves helping clients free themselves from prohibitions toward, judgements about and fears of aggression. Understanding the function and capacity of anger helps to open up and shift our relationship toward it.
The client and I can then turn toward safely expanding their capacity to experientially allow, express and embody anger without harming oneself or others. I employ a wide range of experiential exercises to support this process, including movement, dynamic resistance, vocal expression in combination with experiential tracking. A guiding intention I have in working with anger is to facilitate titrated experiences that feel enjoyable, powerful and safe to explore, without “too much” intensity that spirals either up into full blown rage or down into collapse. This intention supports the client to expand with anger, allowing for a potentially new experience of anger with relaxation rather than with constriction. Successful work with anger in this manner leads to a life-changing fruition: the experience of a fully embodied power, strength and dynamic sense of capacity.