How Anger Helps Recover Vitality After PTSD

Among the limited options available to manage relational trauma as children and teens, many of us with early relational wounding took the behavioral route of being reserved, respectful, compliant, and often tuned into other’s needs above our own. With this scripted option to manage an abusive environment, we learned to “do no harm,” and, in fact, may have evolved instead to be particularly sensitive, kind, and empathic towards others.

What was less developed were the part(s) of us that needed to learn to “take no sh*t.” We learned, or were forced to learn, to relinquish our innate “fight” response, which would have created healthier boundaries; to do anything like asserting ourselves with appropriate anger threatened those with power over us. Back then, enforcing boundaries invited the real possibility of dangerous reprisals. So, we shut it down.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn

With relational trauma, there’s a trifecta of choices to respond to caregiver threats; they are commonly known as fight, flight, and freeze responses. A fourth response—fawn—is a strategy identified by Pete Walker, which has been the missing piece to complete the complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) response repertoire. In my view, “fawn” responses are adaptive responses often derisively labeled in adulthood as being “people-pleasing.”

Kids who went the “fawn” route were part of the quiet brigade. They were the ones who generally didn’t act out, but were good, kind, cooperative, or responsible people. They perhaps performed well in life, and probably looked good from the outside, but underneath appearances, these kids were really too good for their own good. Because they had to relinquish any “fight,” or self-protective anger at their mistreatment, they lost access to a key emotion that guards personal integrity and a cohesive sense of self—healthy anger.

Shame and Anger

The biological, evolutionary, and social functions of anger are to help us know our boundaries and empower us to set them. Much of the relearning in healing from early relational trauma is coming to recognize, accept, and comfortably express our anger in appropriate and clarifying ways. Healthy anger, when reclaimed, is not only a birthright but a means through which we rebuild our vitality. The tricky part for people accustomed to the fawn response is that often, even a hint of anger is immediately traded out for another emotion, particularly shame. This happens so quickly that one is ashamed before ever registering one might really be self-protectively angry.

Shame is an emotion that can bind every other emotion. Without going further into the four scripted responses to shame covered in a previous post, typically, with the fawn response, shame is managed with “withdrawal” or “attack self” scripts. Both of these scripts adaptively served to make us smaller targets for continued abuse, while regrettably shutting down our access to self-protection.

Redefining Our Anger

Because we came to understand anger as an emotion of “power over,” something wounding and to be avoided, we have to begin by redefining what healthy anger is for us. Healthy anger does not trample over others' thoughts, feelings, or boundaries. Healthy anger actually seeks “power with” another person by clarifying the terms of the relationship in a cooperative, honest, and restorative way.

Begin by redefining anger for yourself by asking these questions:

• How did I come to understand what anger was? How did I see anger displayed or expressed in my family? Or did it go underground?
• What positive or negative associations do I make to having anger, my anger or another’s?
• Do I feel ashamed or guilty when I feel angry?
• What is my anger “style”? Do I shut down, lash out, or chastise myself for having anger?
• What small steps may I take to begin to connect with, and name, my anger? For instance, how do I know when I’m mildly angry? What physical sensations do I feel? Heat in my chest, a reddening of my face, clenching my jaw or fists?

Trial and Error in New Learning

As you come to identify, elaborate, and define how you experience your anger, the next step is to get clear about the issue(s) your anger is spotlighting. Before acting on the anger, sit with it long enough to define the problem, and then the solution, boundaries, or clarification you seek. Finally, gradually learn to “speak for your anger, not from your anger,” meaning let anger inform you while at the same time speaking from a measured place of clarity, decisiveness, and respect for yourself and the other. None of this is clean or easy, but the effort is worth the reclamation of an incredibly important and empowering source of new boundaries, self-worth, and emotional vitality.

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