“I’d rather be angry than hurt”, I said to my husband, exactly a week ago today. He would differ on that. He’d say I yelled it. It was one of those days when the whoosh of your anger surprises you and you cannot stop the train from crashing. Righteousness, entitlement and all those grandiose feelings that accompany unjust anger feel good. (Note this keyword, more on just and unjust anger later).

What Are Emotions?

Emotions are a key to vitality, they contain a tremendous amount of energy, they are arrows pointing to what our animal body deeply, truly wants. They originate from the limbic part of our brain, and in their pure form, they do not involve rational thought. Their purpose is to move us towards reward (pleasure) or away from threat (pain). Emotions, often irrational and visceral, carry with them our deep desires. Have you ever tried to convince yourself to want something? It doesn’t work very well, does it?

It takes 90 seconds for an emotion to play through our neural circuitry if left alone or unacted upon. If the continuously trigger-able mind gets involved, it can last as long as we continue to loop it around and around in the thought realm.

Multiplicity of the Mind

When we are triggered, reacting with fight, flight, fawn or freeze states, the part of us that takes the driver's seat is reacting to a body memory.

We are invited, by the present issue at hand, to re-visit a past hurt. Our reflexive fight/flight/freeze/fawn subconsciously accepts the invitation. The part of us re-acting is called by many names: in depth psychology, Jungian analysis and shamanism it is called the shadow, Terry Real calls it the adaptive child, in IFS parts work - the re-active parts of ourselves are called protectors, or you might have heard the term inner child.

In any case, this re-active part came to existence at an early/earlier age and acts like what we thought back then was adulting. Our current, wise(r) adult selves go offline as soon the limbic part of our brain and our prefrontal cortex disconnect.

It is embarrassing to admit that while in fight mode, it is not the wise adult part of me who is trying to get my needs met. It is little Vanda dressed in mom’s gown and shoes with misapplied lipstick who is doing her best to defend my honor. “Your rejection hurts and you can’t hurt me like that. I am big and I am gonna yell at you.” 🥴 🤦

In case of anger, this primal emotion often triggers our sympathetic fight/flight response. Think of this sympathetic threat response as biomechanical overkill.

I am a natural deep feeler. I like to just feel and not think. I feel deep grief, anger, heartbreak, I am moved easily by stories. If you have no access to tears and need a surrogate feeler I will be angry for ya or shed the tears.

On the other side of the coin, I have to admit I do enjoy the seductive and enthralling power of anger, I find it comforting. High on catecholamines I feel strong, clear & purposeful, however dark in nature that purpose might be.

It hasn’t always been like that. In the past, I had phases where access to anger was out of reach. I would appease, manipulate, and strategize to get my needs met or collapse in defeat. I will cover the fawn and freeze responses in the coming emails. Today we focus on anger and the fight response.

How To Interrupt a Fight Response

Obviously - the fight response is just and appropriate when we are being attacked, emotionally, verbally, or physically. We do not want to interrupt a fight response when we need to protect ourselves from snappish comments, micro or macro aggressions.

We do want to interrupt a fight response when we are reacting out of proportion to what is happening and are likely to cause relational or physical harm.

🙋 In all transparency, these are my own notes to self. I aspire to follow my own advice more often than I typically do. In reality, I am able to about 50% of the time. “Give yourself grace”, says my therapist and I often stare back at her blankly or with bewilderment. Ok, grace included, upgrade me 70% of the time. Welcome to the messiness of the human experience.

Step 1 - Awareness

You gotta catch yourself as the whole body whoosh of the fight response comes on. Catch the train, it is much harder to stop it once the train has left the station.

Slow down the interaction. We tend to go into automatic ANS responses when we accelerate. Name what is happening.

Step 1.1 - How do I know I am Triggered?

Using absolutes: never, always, everyone, nobody - universal themes that reinforce aloneness, usually unprovable. “everybody knows…” “you never…” “you always…” “nobody cares/hears…”

Your shadow/adaptive child complains quite a bit. Beware of complaining. Make requests instead.

Step 2 - Give Yourself a Timeout

A time out is the cord you pull to stop a runaway train, a brake, the thing you use to HALT an interaction that either has crossed into or is quickly crossing over into a hot mess.

Time outs have an only job – to stop abruptly a psychologically violent or unconstructive interaction. Take your time out from the “I” perspective. Not punitive, because the other said, did, was. Do it because you don’t like how YOU are feeling, what is coming up for you, what you are doing or about to do. Take distance - responsibly and lovingly, not provocatively.

Step 2.1 - How To Take a Timeout Responsibly

Two pieces: 1) An explanation, and 2) A promise of return.

“This is why I am seeking distance and this is when I intend on coming back.” Provocative distance-taking is when you just take the distance without explanation or care for your partner’s anxieties about your leaving.

Don’t let yourself be stopped. Check back in again in an hour, three hours, a half or a whole day and return when you are truly ready to make peace. When you come back just be good to each other. Give your partner a hug and a cup of tea. Do NOT try to sort through whatever the topic was that triggered the time out for 24 hours. (this part of my own advice I have yet to take and I aspire to, if you tried it and it works let me know!)

Step 3 - What to Do In A Timeout

Slow down the feeling, name it. Check-in with your emotional capacity.

1. If you have the capacity:

feel the sensations in your body. Think back at other times you have felt this way. What do they have in common? Trace back the earliest memory of this feeling to find when the shadow / adaptive child formed. Ask what absolute (always/never) statement they believe.

To interrupt the old pattern, give yourself space to feel the original hurt. Be angry about the back then, try softer. Often when we sit with the body sensation of anger, when we don’t hold it back by denying or repressing it, it subsides and shows us the grief underneath, the injustice, and defeat, it morphs into and lets us see what is lacking, what is the unmet need.

2. If you don’t have the capacity:

Try this metaphoric two-step tool from Integrative Changework that focuses on purposefully changing neural pathways.

• Notice the familiar feeling, in our case anger but it works the same with anxiety and the like. Notice where in your body you feel it.

• Next, give it a metaphor. Ask “What is it feeling like in your body? What does it remind you of?”

• Once you got your metaphor, ask “What has to happen for this to change?” Usually the answer is the opposing force.

For example: Your anger is showing up as hot hands squeezing the throat. On asking what it needed to change, you will imagine the hands loosening hold and blasting the hands with an ice thrower, as opposed to a flame thrower (come with me here, I know it is a stretch). Or maybe your metaphor is having a black box in your stomach. On asking what it needs to change, you open the lid and it turns into a jack-in-the-box that makes you laugh. Once the metaphor has been changed, a new neural pathway is activated, and the feeling dissolves.

Sounds too simple? It is! The unconscious mind LOVES a metaphor, so if you can trust this method, it can be incredibly impactful at switching up those pathways.

3. Not in the mood to do any spiritual work! 🖕

I get it. Sometimes I’m just pissed! I wanna go at my punching bag. I have dislocated a rib and needed a couple of chiropractor sessions to make up for this outlet.

Punching your punching bag works partially but not because it helps healthily channel anger. It exhausts you, so you feel calmer.
Gabor Mate warns that channeling anger with aggression recruits your neural pathways to do that again in the future.

Instead - to relieve some of the strong energy anger comes with push against your mattress - like a wrestling move. Take a towel and squeeze it like you were to wring it out. Do some rage cleaning. Scrub the hell out of the kitchen counter or the bathtub.

Using your breath to influence how you feel in the moment - the box breathing and extending the lenght of the exhale - can be very effective to ground back down.

Sing!
Let me tell you a story about unjust anger and a projection of my shadow:
Unjust anger and my shadow manifested when my daughter couldn't stay still at bedtime. She is a little wiggly worm. I reacted with excessive rage about this innocent yet annoying thing, disproportionate to the situation. It turns out, I used to be the same and my parents used to hold me down when I was little until I fell asleep. When my daughter wiggles my body remembers this and wants to do the same to my daughter. Me letting her wiggle, to do this thing I was not allowed to do makes my body beserk. My amount of anger was so high I swear I could charge up a rocket to Mars. Therapy and EMDR helped lessen the impact, but the anger still surfaces. Singing to her helps regulate my emotions and strengthens our connection. When I feel my rising irritation to frustration to anger, I’m able to put on the brakes and sing songs to her, it regulates me, makes me feel safe and connects me with her. (singing lessons paying off!).

Also, in those moments when you’re trying to get out of the house with kids on time and put on shoes and socks and nobody is listening. Singing helps here, too. I sometimes go into an operatic voice, 🎶 “Hats On Shoes On Time to Gooo!” instead of the instinctive yelling. It expresses my sympathetic charge and calms me and brings me back down into equilibrium.

Hope this helps!

Step 4 - Coming Back to Balance

Some other, less obvious ways anger shows up: judgment, gossip, criticism, resentment, jealousy…

What is your relationship to anger? Do you feel it easily and it covers up hurt or loss or a sense of betrayal? Or do you bypass anger and go straight into sadness?

The window of tolerance is the range of experience where the thinking and feeling mind work together. Nervous system regulation is about being flexible and getting back to balance after dysregulation. Balance allows us to be present, curious, connected, self-aware, and grounded. Ideally, we are flexible in life, responding to events and grounding afterward.

The more time spent in balance, the easier and quicker we can return after dysregulation. Purposefully brining about and spending time in a state balance expands our window of tolerance and our ability to come back to it quicker if we got past it.

So my fellow fighters - your system is likely to be upregulated more often than not. The downregulative practices of mindfulness, meditation, and intentional breathing are for your benefit specifically.

(These don’t work for freezers or fawn-ers much, more on that in upcoming emails).

Here are three practices to help downregulate a fight-prone person and to help spend time in the balanced state:

• Train your mind to switch to the opposing emotion, sensation or thought with this Yoga Nidra

• My Christmas gift to you: I recorded my current personal contemplation practice for you - listen to this guided meditation here:

  • a brand new breathwork meditation

  • the somatic meditation practice 

  • both on Insight Timer

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Resources

🐰 Shall we, Alice? 🕳️

🕳️ Watch this charming lady explain her beef with Carl Jung himself revealing the workings of the shadow. (2 mins total)

🕳️ Terry Real approach to couples therapy is the best kind of tough love. In this hour-long video, he illustrates relationship dynamics through the lens of the biology of triggers. His whole YouTube channel is a treasure trove of honest, straightforward 15-20min videos about being a human. 

🕳️ Parts work is a new-ish approach in psychology using the multiplicity of the mind without pathologizing our parts. 
Here is a good 7-minute Intro To Parts Work. 
Dr Tori Olds does a good job explaining Internal Family Systems (IFS) in more depth if you wanna go down the rabbit hole. Her videos are 15-20 mins. 

🕳️ Gabor Mate 9min video on expressing anger, and emotional system and immune system. 

And by yours truly:

🕳️ My current personal contemplation practice recording: practice along here: meditation - get yourself in a balanced ANS state and spend time there.

🕳️ A Yoga Nidra mind training to be able to counterbalance your rougher emotions more easefully when triggered. Practice switching to the opposing emotion, sensation, or thought.

🕳️ Somatic meditation practice - learn to be with the body sensations coming up and practice curiosity instead of dismissal.

Merry Christmas, Kwanza, belated Hannukah & Solstice.

Until next time,

Vanda

Next I’ll Cover: ways to get unstuck - things that can help specifically move us out of Flight, Freeze, Fawn.