This month of September, I have been conducting group classes on childhood and parental wounds. One of the topics that we touched on in the highly interactive sessions, is ANGER.
Anger comes from a space of feeling unsafe. When you think about the fight / flight response to stress, usually it comes from not feeling okay or safe. Your system will then produce adrenalin to keep you ready for action to protect yourself from the perceived sense of danger.
When you have grown up in a home where there were chaos all the time, what happens is your system becomes accustomed to staying in crisis mode and over time you may develop anxiety.
Anxiety is the fear of the unknown and the need to have control.
When you are losing that control or have no predictability or consistency – you don’t know what is going to happen – you go into an anger stage. The people around you are going to experience your high levels of frustration, anger and even sometimes rage. Why? Because you have been accustomed to feeling unsafe. That is how you find that people develop hyper-vigilance where they are constantly watching over their shoulder and constantly feeling afraid. People also develop phobias like a fear of enclosed spaces because they don’t feel safe – ‘If there is no escape, then I am not going to feel safe over there.’
These things are often triggered by our feeling unsafe when we were growing up. Some of us, through some work and sometimes through spiritual resources, will eventually develop a feeling of safety. If you are more outgoing or more aggressive and you have anger issues, you are likely to fight and have rage and you are always ready for a fight. If you are not aggressive in that way, you become passive aggressive where you turn your anger inside. This means that you will not express it but it is going to show up. Sometimes you develop high blood pressure or depression because of all this anger that you keep inside when you do not feel free to express it.
If you often feel unsafe, you again go into self-preservation and you will experience outward anger where you are aggressive towards others or you turn that anger inside which is what we might call passive aggression. When you turn that anger inside, you can develop panic attacks because that is a lot of negative energy that you have turned inwards.
Remember that because you are constantly on alert mode, then your body is going to be unable to manage that level of adrenalin in your body. You then begin to feel dizzy and like you cannot breathe and sometimes you can faint. This is because the body has been triggered so much and it feels it is unsafe and unable to manage the high alert. That is how you end up feeling that you are not breathing very well and you pass out. That feeling of being unsafe is very terrifying.
Where anger that is rooted in a childhood where you were never allowed to speak up or you internalized a lot of anger as a child, that can over time develop into anxiety disorders like panic attacks ,PTSD and even depression. This is where you constantly feel that you are a victim of life…a victim of others…you can’t say no to people…you get so mad…you isolate yourself and don’t want to come out and speak out and if you do, you usually react so badly that you could end up in a hospital or a police station for assault.
It is very important, if you have issues with anger, to look back into your childhood and see whether your current situations are triggering unresolved issues of holding on to anger, grief or feelings of betrayal from back when you were a child.
It is very beneficial to look back to where you have been so that you can dump out what you don’t need any more and now you can unlearn some unhealthy coping mechanisms. You can then enjoy your life now and not carry all this baggage that you have carried over the years
If these are issues that you are struggling with, feel free to get in touch with me for personalized sessions where we can chart a way forward for you.
We will continue to hold the classes on childhood wounds every Saturday night this October, on Zoom. They are at an affordable cost of Ksh 375 only, and open to people from all parts of the world.
You can email us on info@gracekariuki.co.ke or Whatsapp +254797490404 for more information
As always, I encourage you to continue to live by design.
My Youtube video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQj7_Hp8e0g
