Self-Siege: The Battle Cry of Anger

Right at the onset...

I begin to feel the beat of distant drums pounding in my chest. As they bang out their all-too-familiar percussive melodies of disappointment, betrayal and outrage, my vigilance raises. My hairs and my nerves stand on edge. The wind is rushed out of my lungs like an eagle taking to flight, and my body tenses sharply as if desperately trying to cling onto the little breath it has left to grasp. A hazy fog descends from my mind across whatever vestige might be left of the mood I once held. Steadily, my gaze pierces through this fog and focuses in on the malevolent source of moral infraction that has dared to sully the moment. My cheeks flush; my vision tightens around its ever-narrowing view as if physically grabbing ahold of the environment. I can feel the heat of my face in my eyes. My nostrils flare just above the pursed lips that are readying themselves to launch an attack. By now, the drumming of my heart has reached my throat where my words are about to meet a different kind of snare. I feel trapped in a choreographed siege of a well-rehearsed toxic battle of which I am an unwilling combatant. But what else can I do at this point? I can no longer feel my arms and legs. My face and chest pulse with such raw anger that I’m sure doesn’t even belong to me but is instead pouring out of my genetic code from generations of unsettled inequity. And as I open my mouth to unsuppress the long overdue justice welling inside, I am again just a victim of the moment, blinded by my own pain. My values are violated. My beliefs are confirmed. But I am not avenged. I wasn’t triggered. I pulled the trigger myself, and in doing so, I blew everything up; most of all, me along with it. The attack is over, but not the battle. The rotting corpse of my emotional self is putrid with the stench of shame and disgust, and I must drag this emotional monstrosity out of the trenches of his own doing to shore up a humiliating treaty with my aggressor. I am incarnated with feelings of guilt, embarrassment, resentment and fatigue as I deign an apology in order to broker a peace. This is what an argument feels like for me. Of course, my rational self can tease out the nuances of exaggeration, but in the moment, this is my rage. Why?

               I am wronged. That is the interpretation, for sure. But when that happens, that interpretation transcends a cognitive faculty and very insidiously supplants itself as a feeling. It means, I have completely bypassed logic with belief and hold a view that I am being hurt. Anger is a complex emotion. It’s not so simple as to just get angry. Several things have to occur, at some level, in order to send us into anger. They don’t need to be conscious. They don’t have to even be validated or explained. They just need to surpass our own personal threshold. But they should be understood. In my own experience, anger happens for several reasons. Usually, for me, I feel attacked. This means that one of my personal values have either been infringed upon, disregarded or disrespected. There is a sense of wrongdoing being committed. This gets me activated. Often times, there is also a sense of disappointment. Something has let me down, whether it was another person, a social institution, the zeitgeist of the moment or just me. Yes, even me. Sometimes, I think I am the cause of my own disappointment (though I won’t be able to admit it in the moment). In any case, this infraction in values combined with disappointment creates some kind of problem to be resolved, and the mounting pressure to resolve it is palpable. Obviously, the pressure to resolve means that I must go against this pressure, thus creating a sort of psychological friction. Between the pressure and the friction, mounting tensions continue to rise and I am under stress. None of this is enjoyable, so I experience a flood of other emotions: sadness at the loss of the moment, fear of the unknown, fear of inability, disdain or contempt of self in that perhaps I deserve what is happening to me. Some of these activate subconscious or quasi-conscious beliefs I have. Self-worth, destiny, superstitions, and other dare-to-be-mentioned ugliness that resides just beneath the surface are shoved unwillingly into the spotlight. I am not feeling good about any of this. Worse yet, it seems that this sneaks up on me, without any warning or consent, and I now judge myself to be a victim. NOPE! At this precipice, a tiny thought wiggles its way into my mind and whispers, "How dare they do that to me..." Pride is called onto the field. Ego is activated, and I am in attack mode. Why? Because anger doesn’t feel helpless. It doesn’t feel powerless. It feels active, directed, consequential, at least in the moment under these conditions. There is a rush of adrenaline. I am an actor, not a side-character. I can…. nothing. I can do nothing. Because while this all feels right in the moment, it is a reaction to something, not a response.

               Reacting is yanking your hand back and screaming “Ow! I burned my #@&! Hand!!!!” But sometimes, we get stuck in that reaction either because we don’t know what else to do, because we don’t have the resources to do any better, or because in the past this functioned, kinda. I’ve never screamed at a stove so bad that my finger stopped being burnt. Although, we can scream at someone until they stop hurting us. But this analogy is important, because we aren’t really being hurt by the other person. Their actions, words, etc. may be harmful, unhealthy or toxic, but getting them to stop doesn’t stop us from being hurt. What stops us from being hurt is learning to respond. If you go on yelling about your hand, you never get to the part where you run it under some water or go to the emergency room for care. This is responding. The reaction is absolutely important, but there is a need to move past reacting and into responding. Only by learning to respond can we stop the hurting. Only by responding can we understand why we feel hurt, how it happened and how best to try to prevent it from happening again.

               My reasons for anger won’t be the same as yours. My process won’t be the same as yours either. But these don’t mean that we all don’t have "a process." Understanding this process, understanding which values and beliefs are being activated, which behaviors are merely “modeled repetitions” and which thoughts are automatic can help us in finding our triggers. Because in the end, these triggers are parts of our own weapons that we are holding as we prepare for battle. I am not saying that we shouldn’t be prepared to defend our values, beliefs and rights. What I am saying is that when the war drums start to play and you can feel your body prepare for battle, take a breath. Stop, remove yourself if you can. Get some air. Connect to your true self. Stay present. Breathe. You will be ok. You’ve reacted, now move on to responding. This is how we make progress. This is how we deflate conflict. This is how we navigate life back to peace. Don’t let your anger take control. Learn to defuse it by responding to the more manageable emotions. Besides, we are typically triggered by someone very close to us. Don’t forget they are on your team, not your opponent. Together you can steer your angers back to resolution before the battlefield is destroyed. Close your eyes. Breathe. We got this.