Friday, August 23, 2019

Anger

The topic for my recovery meeting today was anger so I have been reflecting on my expression of anger, both past and present. During my formative years in my family of origin I was not taught healthy ways of dealing with anger so I tended to stuff it, intellectualize, blow up in periodic rages and become destructive — the best I could do! When I got into recovery, at 36, I noticed that a carpenter associate of mine would get very angry, express it vigorously and loudly and then forget it a few minutes later. I decided he was psychotic. Then I noticed that my dog did much same and the behavior seemed to work well as long as the expression of anger was not destructive. I adopted that behavior as my model. I then noticed that most of my anger was due to some underlying feeling like hurt or fear and that my anger was only the surface emotion so I worked on feeling and expressing the underlying feeling, avoiding the anger entirely. I have since discovered that most of my underlying feelings have been about things that actually matter very little.