As with everything else, I am working on this. It feels like an overreaction–there is clearly a place for anger in my world, but anger appropriate to the time and offense–comes from a place of perceived helplessness.
Peter Levine makes the case well that a principle therapeutic method is converting helplessness–freezing, or an actual helplessness–is “promoting” it through the nervous system hierarchy to the fight or flight response. Both are acceptable, but need to be vigorous.
Anger, of course, is a fight response. I can and have left dents in sheetrock walls with both my fists and head.
What I am realizing, though, is that anger has multiple sources. There is of course the proximate cause. I have been angry this week because the IRS apparently lost a tax return that I show as received and accepted, and which indicated a sizable refund. Instead, they sent me a levy notice for money that I did not owe, and I had not paid because a large number minus a small number is still positive. I tried to sort it out with them, but two people in a row hung up on me after conveying with their chosen words and tone of voice that they had no actual interest in helping me, and viewed what assistance they did offer as a favor to me, and not an ineluctable and important part of the responsibility inherent in being empowered to take people’s money by force.
Given Lois Lerner’s stunts, there is no reason not to believe there are people there capable of simply deleting returns to cause people like me trouble. The IRS has no cause to view itself with anything but organizational contempt [I would like to propose here that the IRS be formally decimated, in the Roman Legion sense: fire every tenth person, without regard to level or status. They are arrogant, and quite obviously believe themselves not just beyond the law, but even beyond the need to justify themselves. For the Cincinnati office, where much of the Fascist activity took place (more on that in my next post), fire one in five.]
Be that as it may, though–even granted justified rage–I am in a cage when I cannot escape anger. You have to let it go.
Here is the interesting point, to me, that I wanted to make: it is obvious that primal wounds are activated in situations like this, where you have a monolithic and indifferent, but abusive, entity; BUT ALSO anger can be the result of me enabling daily helplessness by not managing my affairs as diligently as I could, or could be reasonably expected to. I get angry at myself, and direct it outward, and that anger is the result of devolving from a conscious, calm, and controlled place, where I direct my actions with reason, purpose, and willing acceptance. I don’t know how to set limits yet–I don’t know when enough is enough–but I can clearly do better.
Tonight, I took the rage out on myself, and ate some food–calzones–that were not on my diet. It calmed me down; that, and talking with some folks at the bar that I’ve known for years about random stuff. That is the activation of the social self Levine talks about.
Whenever you break your word with yourself, that is a type of violence. You have done something to yourself that you would likely not have done to someone else.
It seems increasingly to me as well that much anxiety has deep seated anger as a root. It is an expression in your mind of a somatic reality that you have not yet processed. We are not meant to worry. Animals don’t worry, as far as we can tell. Some part of you keeps a tension in you to remind you it is there, but it cannot name itself, or bring itself fully into awareness without careful study and quiet.
I go everywhere. I try my best never to lie to myself. I see my flaws, and am trying to work on them. That is all I can do. I share this process with you in the hope it might provide you comfort or insight.