Cooling Anger

Cooling Anger

1. Don’t say anything. If you are upset enough, anything that comes out of your mouth will bring things back to you that you don’t actually want. Say nothing. Drink a glass of water.

2. Go outside. Just stop and go outside.

3. Exhale completely. If you are in the fight response, you are not exhaling fully. Force yourself to breathe, and to exhale fully.

4. It’s important to understand why you are having a fight response. For some of us (me) the fight response is our go-to threat response. What this means for me, basically, is that if I get pushed out of connection, the vast majority of the time I’m going to get pissed. How do I get pushed out of connection? It depends. After three months of quarantine, more easily than before that. It’s important to distinguish irritation that builds up from a sudden impact in an event, be it relational, or otherwise, that shifts us into the fight response from the gradual accumulation of stressors. If you know you are in fight–a sure fire way for me to know this is if I start dropping f bombs in my internal talk–just dis-engage. I can get to a threat response from the gradual accumulation of sitting in front of a screen and dealing with obstacles for 8 hours. It could also happen in a moment when something goes sideways in the world. Or a news article I made the mistake of reading. Take a moment to figure out what triggered the state, because this will give you some idea of how to get back to safety. Know that the thoughts generated in the fight response are coming from the response. They are not your highest, best, or clearest thoughts. Resist the urge to act on them. If you find that you are reacting (these kind of thoughts are generally reactive), stop yourself. Dis-engage. If you are reading this, looking at this website, you have that self-reflective capacity. The point isn’t to shut down what you are feeling, side-step it, or pretend it’s not there: rather, the point is to understand what is driving it. We call this the Assess stage. You can learn more about in in the practice called 3 Steps: Assess, Down-Regulate, Connect.

5. Find someone to vent to/with. It’s good to have someone in your life who doesn’t get freaked out by your anger. It’s important to be clear about who this person is in relationship to you. Some people can stand with you in your anger and it won’t harm them. Some are too sensitive, or because of their relationship with you will feel unsafe for various reasons. Find someone you can vent to who feels safe. Make sure it feels safe to them. Tell them you are venting. Let your body release. If it’s about something that happened at work, or relationally, ask yourself (or have your venting partner ask you) If you could have said anything you wanted to them, what would you say? Then let your body respond to this. Often it is vocal and physical.

6. In Turning on the Connection System, when talking about stress physiology, we explore the importance of self-protective motor gestures. The fight response is about protecting us, and about establishing a boundary. This is healthy. Self-protective motor responses are about establishing this boundary. Sometimes, if your lines have been crossed, letting yourself experience a self-protective motor response is reparative. Sometimes you need to push against something. You could push against a wall. This impulse is connected to lifting weights, and to the bench and incline press specifically. Those movements are similar to self-protective motor responses. You are pushing a weight away from you. You are keeping it away from you. This is what the motor responses do–they keep a threat away from you. The key here is to feel the impulse to motion. To be mindful in the act of creating space, of setting a boundary.

7. Exercise, running, boxing…these are all ways to channel excess fight energy that are not destructive. This energy gets channeled into lots of places in our very violent society. Football is one of them. Fights, somewhat obviously. At a certain point, channeling like this can feed on itself in a way that is destructive, but sometimes we need to just get the energy out. Find a channel that is the least destructive. If you have to punch a hole in something, make sure it isn’t a person (they won’t like this at all.). Make sure it isn’t a wall in your house. I don’t want to tell you how many people I have known have punched a hole in their wall. More than one of them has done this where there was a stud behind it, and shattered their hand. Need I say more?

8. As you feel the anger, and are allowed to feel it, pay attention to what is beneath or behind it. Often, as Lee Mun Wah reminds us, anger is the outer layer and beneath it is hurt. Once you’ve addressed the anger, ask yourself about the hurt. What hurt you about what happened? Give yourself space to grieve. This turn from anger to grief sometimes takes people by surprise, and they resist it, but they are connected. Anger, and the fight response, is often about a boundary violation. And when our boundaries are violated, after feeling rage, after needing to defend ourselves, we often feel the grief of the violation. Biologically, there is a sequence: Fight…wound licking…grief. This is part of the healing process. These are distinct stages. Let yourself feel.

9. This is connected to the way that impatience drives both anger and grief. When we have an emotion that we don’t want to be present with, we often try to get away from it mentally. This can lead us into impatience, movement, momentum, which increases the intensity of the distress. See if you can return to an earth-based pace. This is one of the reasons it can be good to go outside, to be in nature. Let yourself be in a bigger space. Sometimes you need to scream, sometimes you need to smash something. Better a dead tree than a living person/ animal, etc.

10. Aggression, in research studies, has been shown to be a density dependent factor. This is why tight spaces, crowds, cities, long lines, pressure, compression, are all drivers of the fight response. Often resources buy us space, silence, insulation. Yet if we make the effort, sometimes there are ways to get away from it even in the midst of the chaos. When you feel like you are in a pressure cooker, look for the non-obvious door out. Finally, be self-compassionate. Recognize that things make us angry because they have happened before. It’s not the first time. Anger can be righteous: a felt registration of injustice. It’s what we do with that energy, which is a powerful energy, that determines whether we build something new or destroy. Some things do need to be destroyed, torn down. But the wise always remind us that carrying anger in our hearts is like drinking poison and then expecting someone else to die. It’s good and necessary to find ways to clean our hearts.

SUMMARY: In the practice Core Neurobiological Self we explore the concept of our essential Self being like a drop of pure water. This is the nature of the untraumatized nervous system, integrated, and full of resilience. In this analogy, when we are not feeling safe–when we get pushed out of a felt sense of safety, which is the doorway to turning on the connection system, we find ourselves in various defensive states. In Polyvagal Theory, we learn that the neural circuity undergirding these states is comprised of two primary circuits: the sympathetic circuit, a high-energy circuit, and the dorsal vagal circuit, a shutdown circuit. Threat responses (stress responses) happen when these defensive circuits turn on singly, or in combination. When we feel that we have to defend ourselves, our bodies make a decision, generally beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, about which platforms of defense to surface. Do we fawn, fight, flee, freeze, or shutdown? When we talk about down-regulating the fight response, we are talking about coming out of fight. Each of these defensive platforms is evoked for different reasons, and the paths out of them are different. This is one of the critical insights of Polyvagal Theory. To understand the pathway out of a defensive state, we have to understand the state, and we have to understand what it takes to return to safety. In the practices model, we often refer to down-regulating these states by the primary emotions that are associated with them. The primary emotion associated with the fight response is anger, so we are talking here about cooling anger. In our analogy of the water drop, when we go into an anger state, it's like part of the drop boils and turns into vapor. This is a good analogy, because it helps us imagine and feel how we've changed state. Like water that goes from a liquid to a gas, even though it is the same substance, it may be unrecognizable in this new form. Like a gas condensing back into vapor, a nervous system that gets kicked up into the high energy state of sympathetic arousal–the fight response–may take a good long time to cool back down. Particularly in a world where some of us, by virtue of our unearned privelege, get to take up space with our anger, while others of us are forbidden from showing it lest we frighten those who control the institutional violence of the state, working with anger is an art. But we know also that holding onto anger is unhealthy for us. The Buddhists say it is a kind of poison. From a physiological standpoint, however, the fight response is the cleanest of the threat responses; the least confused. And so while it is not easy to work with, its presence indicates that we are unwilling to be violated.