ANGER IS NOT THE PROBLEM

The glass smashed against the wall before I realised I’d thrown it.

It started with a standard argument at the end of a night out.

Things built up slowly at first.

Raised voices.

Shouting mean things at each other.

Arms waving.

But then I felt it rise from my feet.

Like a volcano erupting.

A rage burning through my entire body.

An explosion that ended with me throwing my glass of water at the wall.

It smashed about a metre away from my wife’s head.

Then came the sudden collapse into a deep shame as the rage cleared and I realised what I’d done.

It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced something like it, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Back then I thought I had an anger problem, but years of psychological and emotional work later I know the problem I had wasn’t what I thought.

And it’s not what most people who have similar problems think it is.

The problem isn’t that we have too much anger.

It’s that we suppress the normal anger we do have.

The explosion I described is rage, not anger.

Anger is a perfectly healthy emotion that’s essential to being a fully functioning human.

But many of us have been taught since we were little kids that anger is bad.

So we suppress it.

Which is what leads to explosions of rage.

My favourite way to describe it is that rage is the manifestation of suppressed anger.

Think of it like a bucket you’re carrying around with you.

Every time you suppress healthy anger the bucket fills up a little bit.

After a while the bucket is full, then whatever next happens that causes you to suppress anger makes the bucket overflow and rage to spill out.

The final twist in this, though, is that there are two types of rage.

The one I described earlier is what most of us would describe. Like the Incredible Hulk exploding.

That’s overt rage.

But there’s another type: covert rage

It comes out as passive aggressive comments, sarcasm, huffing and puffing and eye rolling.

Both overt and covert rage are signs of a human who suppresses anger, creating an unhealthy, dysregulated nervous system that spills out in many parts of life.

Counter-intuitively, the solution to both types of rage is to learn how to feel our healthy anger properly.

To reprogram our subconscious system to teach it that anger is a healthy and necessary part of life, provided that we use it the way it’s intended.

If you experience overt or covert rage in your life and it causes problems that you’d like to get rid of, there is a way forward.

It just takes some work.

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