Anger attacks: what is their origin and how to get rid of them

Many of our reactions and emotional responses are based on learning we do in our past, sespecially in our early childhood. We have a clear example when we suffer an outburst of uncontrolled anger. We must take this excess of anger as a sign, that tells us the amount of accumulated anger that we carry.

It was not until a few years ago that the emotional world of childhood began to be taken into account. In the past, children were forbidden to express any kind of difference with their elders. Nor, as much as the situation experienced was unfair, could they show anger. All the repressed emotions of these children did not disappear, they were buried under the rug and over time, already in adulthood, they ended up exploding.

Over the years, unexpressed emotions are coming together and concentrated in the body.

Over time, this cluster grows, Until the day emotions can’t be held back more and they escape in the form of an emotional outburst. When anger spills out of control, it is like a tsunami that washes away everything in its path. Everyone, including the person suffering from it, is harmed.

On the other hand, I must point out that if this repressed anger is never expressed (even in the form of an outburst), it also ends up escaping, but in a more subtle way, such as, through some kind of somatic disease.

Although it pains us to admit it, most of us have lived histories, more or less, repressive. Almost everyone has some level of anger inside.

How can we heal repressed anger?

An essential step in any therapeutic process is to heal this repressed anger. In the case of Ricardo, a man who came to my office a while ago, his anger was unleashed when one of his children contradicted him. As he told me in his first session, I couldn’t control it “As soon as I feel it, it goes off in tenths of a second,” he explained to me.

In another of our sessions, Ricardo told me how his father had instilled in him, through blows, the idea that children should obey their parents without protest. Despite the injustice that he assumed, forced by fear, he spent his entire childhood suppressing their desire to protest.

The boy grew up, in his father’s eyes, as a “good” boy.

Now that he had become a father, the idea of ​​blind obedience was so ingrained inside him that the fact that his children contradicted him worked as a trigger for all the frustration, the pain and anger that he had accumulated in his childhood.

Although she did not want to yell at her children, in moments of stress, she found it impossible to control herself. On occasion, he had even hit them. Later, she greatly regretted having done it, she knew perfectly well the pain that this violence entails. Besides, one of his biggest concerns was the There would come a day when he couldn’t stop. This possibility terrified him.

Recognize the source of anger

Ricardo’s greatest turning point in his therapy was the fact that he recognized that the anger he felt in his present was not against his children, but rather the contained rage against his father, which he had accumulated in his childhood. From that moment on, we were able to work to heal his anger.

A very effective way of working on contained anger against characters from the past is through visualization exercises. Through these, the person can express their anger and virtually unleash it.

By dosing and releasing this anger from the past, we can, so that it stops hurting in the present, understand its origin and relocate it.

For Richard, his way of releasing his anger was to recriminate his father for how badly he had played his role. In one of our sessions, he was able to yell at him and vent virtually all of the pain, frustration, and anger that he had bottled up every time his father had mistreated him.

When you work with the past, the present is released. Of course, you can have moments of anger, but these no longer erupt in uncontrolled anger. The problems of the present will remain in just that, problems of the present. They will no longer be a trigger for all the anger of the past because it has already been understood and worked on.