Types of Anger Issues
Jim’s father made a funny comment to him about his new haircut. He feels ashamed and humiliated by the joke and the laugh that proceeds from it, but he doesn’t feel he can express it. Knowing getting angry with his father would just make things worse, he pushes the anger down inside. He then goes about his day normally until someone constructively criticizes his paper at school. An explosion of anger comes out of nowhere and Jim responds to the criticism with inappropriate harshness. Jim has repressed anger and it’s one of the four different types of anger issues we are going to discuss today.
The most important thing to understand about anger is it exists to protect you from external or internal threats. It is a positive emotion, but it has some rules that need to be respected. Failing to respect these rules can cause anger to manifest in our lives in inappropriate and destructive ways.
Repression Is the First of the Different Types of Anger Issues.
When discussing the different types of anger issues, the first one should be repression. Anger, like all emotions, is like electrical energy that wants to discharge. It is meant to move through the body like electricity through a wire. It’s a signal from the mind communicating the meaning of something. It is supposed to be a fleeting experience that leaves new data about the world or ourselves in its wake.
When we disrupt an emotion and prevent our nervous system from doing what it wants to do, this is called repression. Despite the negative press, it gets in the psychology world, it’s a valid strategy for dealing with emotions at times. Due to the complexities of human relationships, it is sometimes best to stifle an emotional response. The problem occurs when we don’t bring back up what we push down. The body must finish its stress response eventually. The subconscious mind will create an opportunity for this by displacing the pushed-down anger onto a weaker and more defenseless target.
The lesson here is if you are going to stifle your anger for political reasons, you have to create a time to bring back up the stifled anger and let the body feel how it needs to feel. Without this, you can run the risk of being abusive to other people or turning it on yourself in an episode of self-destruction. As a hypnotherapist, I address this by reconnecting them to the emotion while in hypnosis and guiding them through a process of safely discharging it to completion. Once this has been done, the impulse to bully others stops manifesting.
Maladaptive Anger Is Another Type of Anger Issue.
The world is constantly changing. It’s becoming more and more collaborative and safe with each generation. However, sometimes, people’s childhood homes don’t match the collaborative and safe environments of the civilized world. Their subconscious minds are witness to events too intense for their child’s minds to process correctly. These events become trapped in the body as moments that never fully ended. The body and the mind begin to live in a constant state of survival and high alert.
Maladaptive anger is another one of the different types of anger issues. People’s nervous systems become calibrated to environments much more threatening than the white-collar offices most of us work in. Therefore, the way they respond to certain triggers or situations is inappropriate to their present-day culture. This causes them problems socially.
I address this type of anger by connecting people to these trapped moments in time while in hypnosis. Then, I guide them through a process of discharging the emotion to completion, allowing the event to go dormant into the mind’s memory. Once the mind has recognized the events are over and have gone dormant, the mind can shift the body out of being on high alert. Anxiety and depression stop manifesting as a result.
Defensive Anger Is a Protective Anger
Defensive anger manifests to protect us from an emotional experience. Unlike the two different types of anger issues discussed previously, which can exist to protect the body from physical threats, this is all about a person’s unwillingness to feel something. The most common form of this is using anger to push people away. We’re not pushing the person away, but the intimacy or vulnerability they are a symbol of.
We also use anger to protect us from grieving the past. When we get stuck on revenge or ruminating on anger over a person no longer in our lives, we are using it as a tool to keep us from feeling pain. In hypnotherapy, I reconnect people to anger while in hypnosis and then guide them through the process of moving through it to the more difficult emotions beneath it.
Self-Loathing Is the Final Type of Anger Issue
Intense episodes of self-loathing and self-hatred are often just episodes of trapped anger being directed toward the self. Unlike other different types of anger issues, this one can be deceiving, because the intense lows often don’t feel like anger. But when you move beyond the surface emotion, the anger can be found on a deeper level. It’s an experience like the mind is punishing itself over and over again to try and instill some lesson.
My work in hypnotherapy is all about getting to the deeper emotion behind self-destructive behavioral cycles. It’s often been buried in the subconscious for so long that people stuck in these cycles often don’t know the real reason for their self-harm. Once taken into hypnosis and what is subconscious is made conscious, people can resolve the true issue and forgive themselves.
If you enjoyed this post on the different types of anger issues, you may enjoy some of my other posts on emotional trauma like these on crying while sleeping, feeling too tired to sleep, and waking up anxious.
