• They are, first of all, the same entity. Anxiety is the sensation generated by your autonomic nervous system’s response to a threat. Stress hormones and inflammatory proteins are elevated and when a given situation doesn’t resolve (chronic pain), more of these molecules are secreted in an effort to regain control. The result is anger, which is anxiety with a neurochemical chemical kick. It is a response to the environment and not primarily a psychological issue.
• Anxiety and Anger are universal, powerful and necessary for life. You are not going to get rid of them.
• Anxiety represents a feeling of vulnerability and helplessness. The intention is to be so unpleasant that it compels us to take action to decrease it. So, we are hard-wired to avoid this emotion at all costs. In nature, there are significant penalties for being vulnerable.
• Anger feels powerful and is often effective in regaining control. It is a rapid response that solves or masks anxiety. It also gives you the extra boost to resolve a threat.
• But what happens to your thinking when you are angry? The blood flow to the frontal lobes of your brain is diminished, the inflammatory proteins in your brain sensitize you to sensory input, and much of your reaction emanates from the more primitive centers of your brain. You are flooded with a barrage of angry, intense, and irrational thoughts. It is temporary insanity.

• Anger both masks the feeling of anxiety and also turbocharges the system, which created it.

Reasons to forgive

There are numerous reasons to process and let go of your anger.

• The main one is that you simply cannot heal when you remain angry. The essence of healing is normalizing your body’s neurochemical state to that of a safety profile, which is profoundly restorative. If you whole system is fired up and remains so, how can that happen? It can’t and won’t. You can improve somewhat without forgiveness, but the deep healing can’t occur until you can calm down and truly let go.
• Another core concept of solving pain is stimulating neuroplastic changes in your brain. You physically can cause your brain to change its structure based on where you place your attention (suppression doesn’t work). That means you have to move towards your vision of what you would like your life to be like instead of continually trying to fix your prior life. You cannot move forward until you let go of the past, especially your deepest wounds. Most people in chronic pain remain angry at the situations or people who have harmed them. The more legitimate your gripe, the harder it is to move on. But how does holding onto the past make your life more enjoyable.
• Anger is destructive, as it is supposed to be. It your body’s last ditch effort to escape threat. It is destructive in every direction, including self-destructive. It is the reason why many people completely neglect every aspect of their health. It is tantamount to slow suicide.
• Anger is abusive. It also destroys relationships. The key element of successful human interactions is awareness of your needs and others’ needs. How else can you constructively interact with those close to you. Anger completely blocks awareness at every level.
• Anger destroys families. We evolved language and the human consciousness through language and social interactions. It is ability to cooperate that took homo sapiens from the bottom to the top of the food chain. There is a deep need for human connection. Unfortunately, close family connections are also the strongest triggers. Why would you ever be unkind to someone you care for so much? Why is the incidence of domestic abuse so high? It is maybe the most disturbing paradox of our human existence.

• When you are angry, you are in the fight mode of the survival response of fight, flight, freeze, or faint. Your body’s response is to mobilize every resource to survive. The blood supply to your gut, bladder, and the frontal lobes of your brain diminishes and is shunted to your heart, lungs, and skeletal muscles. You can’t think clearly, although it might seem like you are. That is why it is so critical to, “take no action in a reaction.”
• The problem is that this reaction that blocks awareness also blocks the creativity needed to constructively solve the problem. It really does represent temporary insanity.
• Forgiveness is the most powerful and definitive move that you can make to take charge of your life. It is actually a selfish and bold act. You are no longer allowing someone you dislike (despise) continue to be in your head and run your life. You don’t have to like this person–ever. You are just breaking the link between the past and present.
• I often asked my patients that what is your day like when you are angry? Forget about your pain. It isn’t a great day. So regardless whether you are in pain or not, anger will compromise your capacity to enjoy your day. You are in Hell and you may be so used to being there that you might not even know it. Take a deep breath and think about this scenario for a while………

Why hold onto anger?

It keeps you safe. It protects you from both emotional and physical pain. There are few, if any, rewards in nature for being vulnerable and humans are part of this reality. In essence, you are being asked to give up your anger so you can experience anxiety. Raw anxiety is an unpleasant feeling. It is this interaction that may be the root cause of why it is commonly thought that you cannot really be open for change until you “hit bottom.” In other words, the anxiety is so out of control that it can no longer be contained by either functional or dysfunctional means.

So, it is not an unwillingness to give up anger that is the problem. It is inability to feel and tolerate vulnerability. That is why a critical aspect of The DOC Journey is the sequencing that allows you to learn tools that allow you to feel safe. You will learn how to regulate your body’s neurochemical reaction to both internal and external threats. Each person is unique and has to engage with the process on his or her own terms.

One of the antidotes to anxiety/ anger is control. But another one is to give up the need for control. That is what the whole DOC Journey is about–awareness, calming down, stimulating neuroplasticity, letting go, moving towards a vision, and enjoying your life. You can’t fix chronic pain, but you can crowd it out of your brain and life.

What do you want? What do you really want? Don’t try. Do it!!

The post Forgiveness–The Continental Divide of Freedom and Hell first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Forgiveness–The Continental Divide of Freedom and Hell appeared first on Back in Control.

It’s because every human being is attached to being a victim since it feels so powerful. It also masks feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, which we hate. Even after many years of being out of pain and practicing the DOC concepts, I frequently still dive into being a victim. It is a core pattern for me, and I finally realized that it isn’t going to ever disappear. The greatest obstacle to solving chronic pain is the willingness to learn about the nature of it and use the strategies to solve it. We become addicted to the power of pain. But here’s the problem.

A few years ago I labeled myself as “enlightened”, which meant in my mind that I was above going into the victim mode and could maintain a sense of tranquility regardless of the circumstances. It was a bad idea and it turned out that my “enlightenment” was just another form of suppressing negative thinking. Suppressed anger and labeling both block awareness and my relationships suffered.

The problem is that when you’re in the victim mode, it is a complete package of behaviors and the behavioral patterns are much stronger than your conscious brain. Every time you’re upset you are now a real or perceived victim. By definition you’ll engage in destructive behaviors, including self-destructive ones. Even though you “know better”, it won’t stop you. The conscious brain is no match this energy.

My List        

I have a list of various behaviors I do when I am upset. They include: a) stopping my own practice of expressive writing b) quit exercising c) eating poorly and at irregular hours d) feeling in a bad mood and making sure those around me are fully experiencing it with me, e) making excuses for not getting things done f) blaming others. There are many others that are subtler and some that are quite destructive. These actions are just a small aspect of my anger response. I was truly a victim of a chaotic family and unfortunately this pattern is a significant part of my core behavioral patterns.

If you feel that you aren’t angry or don’t exhibit this kind of behavior think again – or seriously ask those close to you what their observations are? Every human has this problem whether he or she recognizes it or not.

What Do You Do?

I’ve finally given up trying to not be angry. It takes too much energy and it is an inherent part of life. I am continually working on approaches to deal with it.

First, it’s critical that I am aware that I’m angry. There are many ways to disguise it, including rationalization. Since I’m “right” then what I’m experiencing really isn’t anger. My default disguise is just “feeling frustrated.” It works both ways. I may not feel angry or frustrated, but I am engaged in self-destructive behaviors. As I mentally work backwards, I can usually see that I’m upset and what the trigger was that set me off.

Second, I’ve accepted that I like the power of being a victim and after over 20 years of recognizing and watching it, that the role isn’t ever going to disappear. I will never wake up one morning and ever want to give it up. I focus on becoming more aware when I have gone into that mode and more importantly, observing people’s reactions to my words and actions.

Third, since I teach about the consequences of anger and benefits of forgiveness, I become upset with myself for being angry. It’s a double-hit. I work on “failing well,” since it’s inevitable that I’m going to behave badly. Being a self-critical perfectionist magnifies the problem.

Finally, a strategy I’ve adopted with some success is minimizing destructive behaviors while I’m upset.

Cut Your Losses

Logically, minimizing the destructive aspect of anger is my only choice. Some examples that I am working with include:

• Eating a lesser amount of junk food.
• Exercising even for five or ten minutes, regardless of how I feel.
• Re-engaging with the expressive writing exercise– even if it’s only a couple of sentences.
• Not making anyone the target of my frustrations, especially my family.
• Looking at what set me off and how the situation might look from his or her viewpoint. What may I have said or done to start the reaction?
• Recognizing that my anger response is often out of proportion to situation. Just being aware of it has helped me step back and not take action while I am in this fired up state of mind.

I’m making progress in cutting my losses. Some weeks are better than others.

Addictions

I have an extensive experience in weaning patients off of high doses of opioids and other addicting drugs. My view is that an addiction is an addiction regardless of the form it takes. They all inflict varying forms of damage to your body and life. The problem with drugs is that the toll is so high. The general approach to rehabilitation is structure and control, which is effective for many people, but often isn’t sustainable.

The key is to understand that the driving force behind addiction is anxiety. No one wants to be an addict, but unrelenting anxiety is intolerable. Anxiety is an unconscious neurochemical survival response and necessary for survival. When you can’t escape it, you’ll produce more stress hormones and become angry. Since it isn’t primarily psychological, it’s not subject to isolated rational interventions.

So, when a patient goes into the self-destructive role, I ask if there is a set of  “victim behaviors” that are less destructive? Instead of feeling guilty about “failing,” can you connect with compassion for yourself? There is a much higher chance you’ll come out of the hole more quickly and move forward towards the life you really want. One of the approaches is to learn how to “fail well.”

What about You?

What is your “anger package?” What self-destructive and other destructive behaviors do you engage in when you are feeling sorry for yourself? Is being angry and acting badly so much a part of your life that you don’t even feel anger is a problem? I frequently see patients who tell me they are not angry but it is clear that he or she has not taken one step to care for his or her health. Self-neglect is one of the ultimate self-destructive anger-based behaviors that is akin to a slow suicide. There is no other explanation for it. You have to be aware you are in this mode before you can address it.

What can you do to minimize the damage when you are in your victim mode? Can you contain yourself when you feel like yelling? Are you able to simply eat less when you feel like binging? What about having just a few cigarettes instead of smoking for a week? Are you able to allow yourself to fail and get back on track quickly? Is there something you can do besides jumping back into your full drug habit? Even if you completely fail, how quickly can you let yourself off of the hook?

Anxiety and anger will always be a part of your life? What can you do to limit the damage?

The post Anger: Damage Control first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Anger: Damage Control appeared first on Back in Control.