What is anger? How can those recovering from trauma use anger proactively as part of the healing process? How can we distinguish between anger related to developmental challenges (for example anger due to abandonment as a child), versus anger lodged in the nervous system after an impactful traumatic event (“fight response”, “flash rage”), versus anger generated by cognition (rageaholism, low frustration tolerance)?
Anger and Trauma
In my experience, anger that is coming up in relation to past trauma is like a tiny plant that needs nurturing. It is the beginning of a process of healing, a process of building back what was broken, of developing an innate sense of having human rights and starting to express one’s conviction around having human rights. It is an important doorway to expression about one’s feelings about the violations they experienced, and it is a component of the telling of one’s story. It is an access point to one’s trapped life force, one’s voice, and lost aspects of the self. It can be the path to soul retrieval, the restoration of one’s memories of their true nature, or the recovery of natural innate ways of being that they have been cut off from.
