Anger

Ahhh yes, anger. I loved anger like I used to love red wine, cheese, bread and butter. It feels so good whilst it's happening but left me feeling really down, full of regret and often embarrassed after and wondering why I continued to do it to myself.

It can of course be a perfectly reasonable reaction to something; a loved one is threatened, instances of injustice, feeling disrespected or undervalued. In the therapy room however it is often cunningly disguised, for anger is (especially if you’re a man) very seductive. In my own life and with clients, I have witnessed how easy it is to let the soothing confidence of anger go coursing through the veins.

It is so addictive with its façade of power and strength. What we often miss however is the initial feeling that surges the anger through us. It’s all so fleeting and happens almost instantly and is therefore very hard to notice. So many clients describe situations as making them feel angry. My response to this is, if the word anger was taken off the table how else might you describe what you felt.

The answer is never really anger at all. That was just the aftermath; the security mechanism that kicked in like a big brother stepping in front of us to confront the bully. The original feeling was actually humiliation, fear, sadness, shame or self loathing. In the therapy room anger = vulnerability most of the time. It whisks us away from feeling vulnerable, emasculated, or timid and takes us to a place on high that is so far from vulnerability it doesn’t even appear as a dot on the horizon.