TRANSCRIPT
Three types of anger. The first type of anger is healthy, appropriate anger. Healthy, appropriate anger happens when something that comes from within us when we have been violated. It is a normal, healthy, expected, appropriate response to be angry when people violate us. And there are all sorts of ways that people can violate us that can produce healthy, normal, appropriate anger in us. They can attack us physically, they can attack us emotionally, they can attack us psychologically, they can attack us sexually. There’s all sorts of ways that people can be violated. Their bodies can be violated, their minds can be violated, their sexuality can be violated. But any of these things can produce anger in someone. And why would someone have anger? Why is anger healthy and appropriate in the situation of somebody being violated? The reason that anger is healthy and appropriate is that it is an emotion that allows us to defend ourselves. It’s actually our intuition saying, “Okay, time to defend ourselves.” It’s telling us we have a right to set boundaries with someone. We have a right to put up a wall around us that says, “You can’t come inside our physical space, our sexual space, our emotional space, our psychological space.” And anger, what is anger actually? It’s strength. It’s something that comes up but says, “No, I will defend myself.” It’s a protector of the self. It is an act of self-love to feel anger in situations when we are being violated. This boundary, it keeps people out. It’s a wall that keeps out an invading army or lots of invading armies. And it’s something, well, for me that I really love about myself. I can feel anger now. And part of the reason that I love it so much is I know what it’s like to not have anger. Once upon a time, when I was a little boy, up into being a teenager, even into my early 20s, it was so, so hard for me to have anger. Now, I think all little kids have anger unless it gets beaten out of them or it gets denied them in some way. Or when they have anger, whoever it is that’s causing this violation has so much power over them that they overwhelm their anger and they tell them, “Your anger isn’t going to be enough to stop me, and your anger is actually going to make your life worse. It’s better if you have no boundaries. It’s better if you withdraw into yourself, if you dissociate, if you stop fighting, if you let me have total control over your life in whatever area I am violating you, physically or sexually or emotionally or psychologically.” For me, it was primarily emotionally and psychologically that I was being attacked, and that was primarily by my parents. And what they did is they made it clear to me I couldn’t have my anger. My anger was something that made my life worse. It made them love me less. But I learned it in the outside world too, in all sorts of different ways. My anger is dangerous. Protecting myself, it’s not safe. These people really are, these people around me are more powerful than me in so many different ways. But even with my strength, even with my superpower of anger, it’s not enough to stop them. So I really did have to learn to dissociate. But primarily, I learned that in my family of origin, and I transferred that out into the regular world. Now, something I have come to consider over the last years, over the last decades, is that actually the outside world probably could have handled my healthy, appropriate anger a lot better than I realized at the time. But what I learned in my family of origin as a very young child was that my anger was actually so dangerous to me that I became a bit of a scaredy-cat in the outside world. I became afraid of how others would respond to my anger. So I became like unnatural with my anger. I had an unnatural relationship with it. I was actually afraid of my own anger because of what it had done to me in my family. So I transferred it out into the regular world, and I became someone who wasn’t angry a lot when I should have been angry. And people pick that up. I think that’s how sometimes people get bullied, is that bullies can see, “Oh, this person is not responding with normal self-defense protective mechanisms, normal strategies for self-defense. So I can actually keep picking on them because they’ll never defend themselves. They are an easy target.” So in a way, the early constellation I learned in my relationship with my parents, the early dynamics where my anger wasn’t allowed, were actually my parents’ anger with the okhla. The only anger allowed in my family, by that I learned to lose my anger. And I learned to develop a way in the world that actually reinforced the idea that my anger was dangerous. And I feel really terrible about this. So what happened to my anger? All that healthy, appropriate anger that I needed, that I had once upon a time, that eventually I, to a large degree, lost. Lost my ability to defend myself with this really important emotion. Where did it go? Because it didn’t just disappear. And earlier, I talked a little bit about dissociating as a strategy, pushing my anger down, burying, swallowing my anger, having things like, “Oh, I forgive instantly.” So when I should have been angry, instead, sometimes I turned around and forgave people immediately. Oh, because then I hoped if I forgive them, then they’ll love me. It was an unconscious strategy on my part. Since I couldn’t have my anger, I had to develop alternative strategies that weren’t so healthy, but they were still self-protective at some level. But what did happen to my anger? My anger got buried. My anger got pushed down. My anger went deep inside me. It never fully went away. And I think what happened is it became like an underground lake. It wasn’t allowed to be on the surface. It wasn’t allowed to be something that you could see and swim in and enjoy. It wasn’t something that I could see as a part of my conscious reality, as a part of myself. Instead, it became an unconscious part of myself, and it became a pool of anger. And it stayed buried in there for a long, long, long time. And this brings me to the second type of anger. And by the way, I’m making this video not just because it’s been something on my mind for a long time, but because a lot of people have asked me about it. People have written in comments. People on my Patreon page have asked me, “Can you make a video on anger?” And I’ve thought about it, and I have actually tried a couple of times. So this is a third go at it. But here goes. The second type of anger, and the reason I bring this up now about people asking me, is I think a lot of people have a very confusing relationship with their anger. They know at some level their anger is helpful to them or something important to them, but it doesn’t always come out quite right. And sometimes it comes out really in very wrong or unhealthy ways. So this brings me to the second type of anger, which is what I call maybe unhealthy anger or inappropriate anger or extreme anger, out of proportion anger. And in light of what I shared about myself, because I’m using myself as a primary case example or a primary model of these different types of anger, I pushed my anger down, but it was still there. And what happened with my anger that was still there is it would erupt sometimes. And it would erupt in inappropriate ways, in inappropriate proportions. It would erupt in reaction to triggers. Things could set it off. It would erupt in situations where unconsciously I figured out that I was safe to get angry, that the person who I was angry at or the situation I was angry at wasn’t gonna harm me in the way my parents used to harm me when I’d get angry. And so what would happen is I saw it many times in my life. Even as a kid, sometimes it happened, but more like as a teenager into my 20s, my anger would really erupt. It would erupt in situations where I sometimes felt violated or maybe even I was a little bit violated, but it would come out in such big ways. It would come out in ways like rage, or it would come out as that hmm at the moment felt.
Really good because it was like releasing a cyst, like a big pimple of pus. It would just come out, explode. But it was like the pressure was released, all that anger I was holding inside. But it was like it was a lot more than self-protective. It was like it wasn’t reacting to a situation in the here-and-now. It was actually ancient anger that had like maybe been waiting to be released for 10 years or 20 years or six months or some incident that happened a long time ago, some violation that I had that I couldn’t feel angry. Now I was feeling angry and getting angry at people that sometimes really didn’t deserve it or at situations that didn’t deserve it. And it would surprise me. It would be like, where’s this coming from? This side of myself that I don’t know. And yet I will say it did feel good. It felt good to be angry. And I think most people who feel angry really erupt with that kind of second type of rage anger. They can say it does feel good in the moment. The problem is afterward, it’s like whew, there’s consequences. People get alienated, people get hurt. If it would erupt, because sometimes it’s a kid, it would erupt in physical senses. I would attack, I would hurt people. Sometimes I would break things. And it was like all this rage just had no proportion, no connection to my real deep conscious self. And I was embarrassed by it. And it was something that was like, why am I doing this? And I didn’t understand where it was coming from. Other people also pulled away from me. They’re like, wait, why does he erupt like that?
And I’ve seen this with other people sometimes, especially when they get really drunk. Sometimes all this anger will come out. They have all these internal boundaries in themselves that keep their anger buried. But when they drink, sometimes the boundaries loosen up and it lubricates its expression and explodes. It’s like literally that scalpel going into a cyst and just getting it to explode. And it’s like sometimes there are times where they, well, if they’re drinking, especially much more vulnerable, much more open, much less self-control. They don’t even know what they’re doing. But afterward, when they sober up, when they wake up the next day, or for me, because usually my anger wouldn’t erupt when I was drinking because I wasn’t really much of a drinker. But what would happen is afterward, the next day, I would look at it in more proportion and just say, why did I erupt like that? And it was confusing and it made me sad.
The other thing is, and this is one area where I was allowed to be angry in my life, and I really do feel largely it was strongly inappropriate anger. What my childhood did allow me is to be angry at myself. So it was like I couldn’t be angry at people who were violating me, especially if they were my parents. I couldn’t be angry at people who were harming me and hurting me and breaking me in different ways, abandoning me, traumatizing me, rejecting me. But I was allowed to blame myself. I was allowed to have anger at myself, rage at myself. If you could have listened to the conversations I was having with myself, they were nasty. I like didn’t talk nicely to myself. I didn’t use loving words with myself. And this was all unconscious on my part. I actually loathed myself in a lot of ways. I had a lot of self-loathing. And what I found is that my parents weren’t bothered by that. In a way, it was like I was working for them when I hated myself because in some ways they hated me too. So when I hated myself, I was on their side. They didn’t really mind. So I learned it was okay to hate myself. And this one went on and on and on and on and on through my life for years of just a lot of self-hatred. And sometimes it can still crop up in certain times in my life where I feel vulnerable or I retreat to a childlike place in places inside of myself where I haven’t resolved all my trauma. I can still be very angry at myself for things that really I don’t have any reason to be angry at myself for.
This would bring me to the question of, is it ever appropriate to have anger at oneself in a healthy way? Is there such a thing as healthy anger at oneself? And I would say yes. I would say this is also like having healthy guilt. If I really do bad things in the world, if I really harm other people or if I really harm myself or I say things that are terrible or I do things that really hurt other people’s healing process, I think it’s okay to be angry at myself. It’s like, yeah, wait a second, that’s like a wake-up moment and say, why am I doing this? Ooh, I don’t like myself. I’m mad at myself. And it’s a chance for me to really self-reflect.
However, what I have seen in the history of my life and the scope of my existence, especially when I was younger, is I had a lot, lot, lot more anger at myself, loathing at myself, than really I deserved to have. Maybe some I did a lot of stuff that wasn’t so good and I should have been somewhat angry at myself. But the anger I had at myself was also very much out of proportion to really what I had done bad in the world or bad to myself. And again, it was like having anger at me was something that was safe in my family. It was safe in my screwed-up relationship with myself. This was something that was allowed me. I was allowed to be angry at myself. So it was like a safe, protected area where my anger was okay. I could explore it, I could feel it, I could have it. But it really was largely very inappropriate.
And what I have noticed is as I have grown up more, as I’ve become more of a real adult on the inside, healing my traumas, working out the really bad things that have been done to me, taking distance from the people who really harmed me and didn’t ever take responsibility for it, learning to love myself, becoming much more self-actualized, doing so much grieving in my life, what I’ve seen is that dynamic of anger at myself, loathing at myself, also eruptions of anger in other people that were really inappropriate and out of proportion, that’s really gone down significantly to the point that it’s actually quite rare in my life that I have anger that is really inappropriate. Interestingly, it’s actually pretty rare in my life that I have anger that is appropriate either.
And part of the reason is having become an adult, having become a lot more wise and insightful, I often am able to avoid situations, avoid people that really violate me. So I really don’t have that much reason to get angry. When I was a child, I was being violated a lot. A lot of my life was unsafe. I was very vulnerable. I was small. I was a kid. I couldn’t defend myself very well, and I was at the mercy of the world. As an adult, it’s one of the gifts of being an adult, especially an adult who has done a lot of healing, is that the world for me has become a much safer place. And that’s not to say I live in an isolated little bubble. I’m out in the world a lot, travel a lot. I’m really vulnerable, and I’m not traveling with a lot of money. I’m traveling in ways that really put me on the edge of interfacing with a lot of people. But what has happened is the growth I’ve done on the inside really has manifested in a sort of self-protective way, and people pick that up. That’s what I’ve seen in the world. People pick up, oh, this is a person who is not so easy to violate now.
Physically, it also helps that I’m a large guy. It just does help if people are less likely to do physical violations of a large man. But I also think the emotional stuff is important because I notice I do get violated less, and I credit my being a large guy less than I credit the emotional healing that I’ve done as being self-protective. Because I haven’t met quite a lot of large men who do get emotionally violated.
Violated and all sorts of ways out in the world, and what I’ve seen is it’s largely because they haven’t figured out how to resolve their earlier life violations. As the result of that, they are walking around unconsciously so often like an open wound. Without even realizing it, they replicate situations that are like their early childhood stuff. So they replicate situations that they get violated. They may even be sending out messages that it’s okay to violate them. And not that everybody does it, but there are people walking around looking for people to violate. There are people walking around looking to replicate their own history of violations by violating other people.
And that’s not to say that I’m totally free from this dynamic of being violated, because it still happens. It just happens less. And the other thing that I’ve seen is that my anger is my healthy anger that is much closer to the surface. I’m much quicker to defend myself, to say, “No, that’s not okay.” When I was a kid, I learned “no” was a word that was dangerous for me. I didn’t even know how to say that basic word that sets the basic boundary between me and other people, which is “no.” I learned that “no” as a child was not okay for me. The answer when I was a kid, when I said “no” from the people who had power over me, was “no, you can’t say no.”
And I learned that. Well, what happened to me is I have learned how to say “no” as an adult. And when I sense people are starting to violate me or coming toward violating, or even actually unexpectedly do violate me, I often can just say, “Ah, not okay.” I don’t even need to say it in English because a lot of times in other countries where I don’t even speak the language, and there’s ways agree. And so many people I’ve seen respond very quickly to. They’re putting out feelers in a way. They’re grooming me to see if it’s okay if they can violate me. And just that tiny little bit of anger that comes up in me is all that it needs to tell them, “Nope, I’m not a person you can do that to.” Mmm, nope, mm-hmm.
And I feel it. Anger is a feeling for me, and it’s like a quick little burst of adrenaline that comes up that’s like, “Hmm.” And I have to fight for myself and get strong. And by the way, I’ve seen women do this also. I’ve seen women that are very strong. I’ve seen women that have healthy anger that’s stronger and quicker to come out than mine, and it’s like I really admire them. I also think a lot of times, especially if women are out in the world traveling like I do, I’ve seen women that hitchhiked—not that I would recommend it at all, very dangerous—but the women who I’ve seen who do that often really have anger that comes out very quickly if people are starting to violate them, and it seems to work very well in their defense.
Transition to a Third Type of Anger
Now I want to transition into a third type of anger, and this is the most confusing type of anger. This is the most confusing type of anger that I experience. And this third type of anger is not something different than anything I’ve talked about so far. Actually, it’s a mix of the first two types of anger. And this is a type of anger that I still do feel. The mix is that it’s a mix of ancient historical anger mixed with modern appropriate healthy anger, and it’s very confusing sometimes to sort out what type of anger is this and what of my anger is healthy and what of my anger is unhealthy.
And I think this actually may speak to the question when people ask me, “Can you talk about anger? Can you do a talk about anger?” I think the reason is because so much anger that people feel is confusing because it’s a mix of these first two types. It is this third type of anger. So what I mean by that is someone’s out in the world, I’m out in the world, and someone does a violation of me that actually at some level taps into my unresolved historical traumas, my unresolved historical violations from childhood. And it taps into a place in me where I wasn’t allowed to be angry. It actually is very close to that type of violation, except it happens now when I’m an adult. But because I haven’t fully resolved the trauma that that present violation relates to, I’m still confused.
That lake of unresolved anger in me, although it’s much, much, much, much smaller than it used to be, it’s still there. I still have anger about my unresolved childhood traumas, the stuff that goes back to when I’m one year old, and I just haven’t fully gotten to it. I haven’t cleared it out yet. I see signs of it. And in fact, one of the ways that I know that I still have unresolved trauma from early, early childhood is that I still do see eruptions of this anger. It’s rare, but what happens to me sometimes is when someone does violate me, does something to me that gets through my defenses somehow, sometimes it even happens in intimate relationships, and I can find myself really getting angry in ways that are out of proportion. But part of it is healthy, and it’s a question of sorting it out.
Now one thing is that when I am violated and I do respond with purely healthy anger, that also can feel good at some level. It can be scary, actually. When I have adrenaline, that’s not scary. Sometimes I feel fear afterward, but when I defend myself, it feels very good to have that kind of righteous anger. The problem is that unhealthy anger also can feel good—it’s like soothing the ancient wound of my inner child, saying, “Oh, I should have defended you back then, but I’m doing it now by using a proxy person.” I’m basically using, I’m directing my anger that should have been directed, let’s say, at my parents, at some modern stranger forty-something years later. But it’s a mix because that person does deserve some anger, but it’s out of proportion.
So how do we sort it out? How do we sort out if our anger is in this third category where it’s a mix of healthy and unhealthy anger? Well, my answer is that is our life work. That is the work of healing our traumas. I think the only way to do it is to self-reflect. And for me, when I’m in the very moment of feeling anger where I’m not quite sure, actually at the moment it can feel really good, but afterwards I can look at it and analyze it. Because I find when I have anger, even small amounts of anger, it’s a real chance for me to gain perspective on myself, to look at it, to analyze it. Because it is a fairly extreme emotion compared to love and kindness and even sadness, happiness, joy. Anger is different than all of the other ones.
And since I don’t feel it all that often, sometimes I don’t feel it for a week or two weeks or maybe a… it’s a real chance to look at myself and see this other side of myself, this color that makes up the whole picture of who I am. And especially since it was one of those feelings that I was denied, it was one part of myself that was denied so long ago, I am fascinated with my anger. So whenever I feel anger, I want to take a step back afterward and really look at it. Often I need to call a friend. I really need to do this. Sometimes when I break up a fight that happens on the street, see something horrible, my anger will come up and I’ll be like, “This is a violation. Someone’s rights are being violated.” I’ll stop it. I’ll break up the fight. But afterwards, it’s like it’s so confusing. Why did I do that? But bah, was that too dangerous? I had all these feelings, anger and stuff like this. I need to call a friend. I need to process it.
But it’s especially so if I have anger where there’s a part of me that feels like, “Mmm, I reacted too much. I reacted too strongly against this violation or perceived violation that was happening.” And I really need to sort it out with someone who I feel is not angry, someone who is rational, someone who is neutral and is on my side.
And also, I can write about it in my journal. A lot of times I do that. If I have an anger situation, I really want to write down the whole scenario and reflect on it from a distance to see what was the violation that happened, what was my whole internal process that was going on that led to me having anger. How much anger did I express? Really trying to weigh what was the violation, to what degree was the violation, to what degree did my anger come out? Was my anger more and more than proportional to their violation? Was it less? Was it right on par?
And also, there’s a part of me that needs to study my intuition and just look inside myself and say, ask myself the question: to what degree was my anger appropriate? To what degree was my anger inappropriate? And often the answer just comes from within me. Something in me knows if I allow myself to be silent and to listen to my deep inner voice, I can hear the answer.
The part of mmm, part of the big reason I think is deep down inside me, I want to tell the truth to myself. And we all have that capacity to tell the truth to ourselves and to really let ourselves know what’s going on. Because part of the reason I think we so desperately want to tell the truth to ourselves and by extension in the long run to others is that we want to heal. I want to heal.
I really find a great value in being honest with myself because that allows me to grow. And there’s nothing that feels better than growing. It’s scary; a lot of pain can come up. But in the longer run, I’ve experienced it again and again. The real relief in life comes from telling the truth and from me self-reflecting and really saying, well, what is the answer? How much of my anger is old historical anger, leftover stuff, that deep buried stuff? And how much of it really is appropriate anger that really deserved to be in that situation at the moment?
So what I can do a lot, to the best ability that I guess I have, I don’t know that I’m doing it perfectly ever, but I can at least try to approximate some level of coming up with a true answer. A healthy, right answer is to figure out, well, some of my anger really was quite appropriate and some of it wasn’t. Sometimes it’s actually what I come up with is, you know, I was really angry and I really did erupt with anger, but 75, 80 percent of my anger actually was totally appropriate for the situation.
And the really, the reason that I was left over with this feeling of like, oh, a little bit like creepy or off or something didn’t feel right is that 20 percent of my anger was old historical anger. And what I find is when I do that, then it’s like I need to own that. And sometimes I need, if the situation is right, if it’s somewhat, especially if it’s someone I’m in an intimate relationship with, I need to go back and talk about that with them as, hey listen, yeah, I did feel violated. I did feel like I needed to defend myself and my anger was healthy, but I really do feel like part of it was old historical stuff. I need to own that.
But it’s also easy to get caught up in the trap with just apologizing all the time. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. The real amend, the real apology is not that verbal thing you go, oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m explaining my psychology. The real thing is to look inside myself and say, okay, that inappropriate anger, maybe that 20 percent of inappropriate anger out of that situation was coming from old historical stuff. Now what am I going to do about it?
Because that means there’s something going on in me that I wasn’t quite in touch with. And that anger, that inappropriate anger, that little proportion of inappropriate anger that’s erupted shows me it’s a roadmap, it’s a clue that goes right into my unresolved traumas. And what it really tells me is, okay, now you have more work to do. Here’s a new job for you. You have a freelance job; you now need to work on healing that historical trauma. And that anger, that’s a clue that’s gonna take you right back into what happened to you.
So look at it. Why were you that angry? What happened? And what can you do about it? How can you solve it? That it can open a door to tons of journaling for me, lots of self-reflection. Sometimes it can last for weeks or months where I really need to think about it and think about where did that come from? Whoa, what am I missing? What, what, what have I been missing in myself for all these years? Because that tells me that inappropriate anger still tells me about a split-off side of myself, a split-off violation. How can I change my life? What do I need to do differently?
And for me, that’s very, very hopeful. So all these things, ultimately, all sides of anger ultimately are things that can help us, that can help us have better boundaries and can teach us about ourselves. And most importantly, I think, especially with the inappropriate anger, most importantly, it’s clues to help us resolve our historical traumas and to come back to being a healthier, more whole, full, loving person again.
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