Many years ago, one of my colleagues said this to me (and I’m paraphrasing):
“It seems my biggest job is to help people get comfortable with anger.”
I nodded fully because I couldn’t agree more. Getting comfortable with anger is top of the list for me.
Here’s a powerful excerpt from my favourite medical author, Gabor Maté, writing about anger and its connection to illness:
“People diagnosed with cancer or autoimmune disease, with chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, or with potentially debilitating neurological conditions, are often enjoined to relax, to think positively, to lower their stress levels. All that is good advice, but impossible to carry out if one of the major sources is not clearly identified and dealt with: the internalization of anger.” – from ‘When The Body Says No – The Cost of Hidden Stress’
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In this vlog I start this ‘tour’ of healthy aggression and the emotion of anger by teaching you how our primary healthy aggressive responses start to wire up during infancy and why the way in which we are cared for when this happens will determine how we will, or will not, move forward in life.
Life force energy, stepping forward in life, asking for what we want, and feeling full self-worth (just to name a few key attributes to being healthy in body, mind and soul) begin their apprenticeship this early in life, and healthy aggression is a big part of that.
Anger and healthy aggression are essential ingredients for human mammalian health and for us to get this essential part of our DNA back we must start with the basics so I hope you take some time to watch this vlog.
One Article To Compliment This Vlog
A lot of the discussion on the topics of anger and aggression are, for the most part, inaccurate, and I sense this is because they lack the understanding of nervous system physiology and especially the reality that we, as humans, are animals with a very robust biological fight response that needs to express when we are harmed or need to protect ourselves and others. The energy that gets trapped and ‘internalized’, as Gabor Maté points out in the excerpt above, speaks to this.
This is one of my favourite articles from 2015 that dives into the distinctions of anger, fear, hate, rage, and violence. It’s titled, The real deal on fear. And, why we’ve become masters at avoiding it.
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Resources I Mention In The Vlog
ARTICLE: Anger As Medicine: How to Cure Self-Sabotaging Behaviours
BOOK: Waking The Tiger, by Peter Levine
VIDEO: Why healthy shame is good for us and toxic shame isn’t
