Why I Used To Lose Control of My Anger….And What Changed.

What I’m about to say is not comfortable for me at all.

One to the biggest challenges I’ve worked through over the years has been managing intense bouts of anger and its repercussions. Having grown up in a household where anger was freely expressed, often without restraint, it’s understandable that I might have absorbed that model of self expression. This doesn’t however excuse the effects of that anger on other people.

As a teenager I used to have raging verbal battles with my parents. As I got older the triggering of anger began to seep in to my friendships as well as my romantic relationships. I felt so confused internally as to who I really was and I had been so steeped in foundational relationships in my life where anger was the predominant currency. Expressing anger in a way that hurt people actually felt normal to me.

Growing up there could be huge, and at times scary, rows between my parents, and then literally five minutes later they were sitting around chatting as if nothing had happened! That set me up in my early life with the erroneous impression that erupting in this way was ok and that there weren’t really any consequences.

That hypothesis quickly began to crumble when my behaviours started to interact with people who didn’t have those childhood experiences and who hadn’t regularly been on the receiving end of angry outbursts. I then began to realise the corrosive nature of these eruptions. It would result in me losing friends, experiencing the hurt of another person for days or weeks based on what I had said, and in lots of cases the ending of intimate romantic relationships. Although I was never physically violent, as I learned, my words contained the power to harm.

As always, I’m sharing this in order to highlight the process I went through, to gradually emerge from the shadows of these behavioural patterns.

What I started to notice was that, underpinned by early childhood experiences, there was a growing reservoir of frustration, dissatisfaction and inner emotional turbulence within me. I spent my days, and often my nights, trying to run away from these feelings and thoughts by working far too hard and by ‘partying’ even harder. 

But you can only run from these powerful undercurrents for so long. 

Every few weeks there would be a breach in the emotional compression chamber and anger would flow forth. In my mind I became used to being the person that exploded but, as I got older, I understood more and more the negative effects of these patterns. So I began trying to stop the outbursts from occurring.

The problem was that the pattern was so deeply ingrained at the psychological, emotional and physical level, that I was simply unable to find a method of halting the cascade of inner events. It literally felt like I had no control. No matter how long I talked about it in therapy, no matter how much I understood it intellectually, no matter how much I just wanted it to go away…..it wouldn’t. And so I continued to suffer, and so did the people around me.

The words that we spray around when we’re angry essentially come from a place where we have lost control of our ability to mediate what is happening internally and how it expresses itself externally. Our minds, emotions and bodies become hijacked by an intense inner experience, in some senses triggered by something external, and we completely succumb to its power. 

In those moments of anger we may feel completely disconnected from any ability to self regulate, sooth or calm ourselves. Somehow that energy needs to get out and in many instances we have trained ourselves to believe that the best option we have is to let it flow into the world without a filter. We even may feel justified or that we have a right to behave in that way.

As I sit here and reflect back I’m fortunate to say that it has been well over a decade since I last allowed anger to consume me in this way. That’s not to say that I don’t experience anger but I now have a different relationship with it. 

What else have I been doing for well over a decade that coincided with this shift in my behaviour…..yes…of course you know the answer...….yoga.

But not just the yoga you might think. 

We must always remind ourselves that yoga is a practice that was designed by the ancients to help remove suffering (duhkha) from our lives. The yogis of these times saw clearly from their experiments with consciousness, that in order to find inner peace, we need to transform the mind and to shift our relationship with our subconscious patterns (samskaras). That means that gradually, through our practice, we wish to reveal the patterns that cause us to suffer in our lives so that we can gradually create new, and more beneficial patterns to supersede them. This is deep work that requires patience, dedication and guidance. I’m grateful to have had a teacher and lineage that were able to support me through the process.

For instance if we take the physical practice of asana. We can use it to get to know the landscape of our inner sensations. When we bring our attention to the body on the mat, not only are we attempting to make the mind more focussed, we are also getting to know ourselves and how emotions and thoughts show up as a felt experience within. This allows us to become more intimate with the sequence of events that start with a very subtle inner smouldering (the early stage of anger) when we are still in control and haven’t yet been hijacked by the overwhelm. By recognising the onset of what can become an intense experience, before it has reached its peak, we give ourselves a chance to off ramp from the usual outcome.

But this is only part of the picture…

This first part we might call our capacity to redirect the trained nervous system response to our anger trigger. We notice earlier on in the build up and then we might have a range of tools we have practiced such as slowing down our breath, becoming the witness of the experience, chanting a mantra or going for a walk to help calm ourselves down. Just to be clear this isn’t about suppressing anger, this is about allowing ourselves to be with the anger in a way that doesn’t cause harm but that allows us to express what we need to once we have arrived back in a place of inner balance once again.

If we are able to move ourselves towards a place where we recognise triggers, know how they feel internally and have tools to bring us back to balance, this can have a significant impact on the way we live our lives. We are empowered towards a practice of self regulation which helps us to diffuse the rise of inner tension, and all the negative outcomes, that can flow from this place both inwardly and outwardly too.

As always it’s important to understand that when we wish to make a change at this level it takes time and commitment. For me there was a deep necessity to move on from limiting and self destructive patterns. I knew that if I didn’t prioritise this work I might struggle for the rest of my life to be at peace and to know how to foster lasting meaningful relationships. I still prioritise that work today which is why you’ll find me practicing every morning & evening, and to the best of my capacity, channeling the teachings of yoga into my daily life.

Next week I’ll go into two more aspects of this framework for transformation when we look more deeply at the psychological component of anger and what yoga tells us about it, as well as the process of removing some of our external triggers.

As always, let me know how you’re getting on with your journey, and whether you’ve been facing similar challenges. I respond to every mail I receive.