Satan and Suns

i need some advice on how to stop suppressing my anger all the time.
i feel like at some point in my childhood i started doing this and it just became a habit i guess or like some survival mechanism of sorts.i dont know when i started doing this but growing up the only people that would ever see me get mad was my family at home,i feel like i would hold in all my anger from life and then just explode whenever sombody made me mad at home.
so,the result is i have anxiety all the time because i cant say what i need to say to people when they are bothering me,especially at work,and it drains me,its weird its like my anger is stuck inside and wont come out until i explode.i just want to be able to express my self naturally when someone is bothering me or irritating me instead of holding it in and exploding when i cant take anymore.i dont even like going to work because my anxiety gets so bad if somebody annoys me at work.
you guys usually have good advice thats the only reason im asking on here.i really dont know what to do anymore at this point.

i know its probly somthin i have to work thru by myself but wanted to see if yall had any ideas.

hoshiyoshido wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 21, 2019 8:53 pm

i know its probly somthin i have to work thru by myself but wanted to see if yall had any ideas.

Ultimatelty, you will have to find what works for you. Personally, i do have issues expressing most emotions,anger is no different. Here are some ideas though..

If you are good at grounding and focusing,you can ground and visualize your anger pulsing out of you and being dissipated by the earth.

There is a form of meditation,typically done by monks, referred to as deep flame meditation. You imagine either you are a flame or there is a flame over your crown and let it "burn away all your sins" or your "insecurities" or even your "anger". It would all fuel that flame until it burns itself out.

For me? I prefer a form of manifestation. When you experience a thought,or play through a scenario in your head,you get the same ceelings as if you had actually done those actions or said those things. I play over every possible scenario and every possible conversation in my head until i have completely exausted even the ability to think of anything happening differently. It recycles all of that energy repeatedly until it cant anymore. By the end, i will feel better. If you come away from it and wonder if something could be different--you would just go back to it because it means you havent put all of yourself into it.

My hear is pure thoughts chaotic..but there is a method.

As a person who had to learn to repress her anger, I understand the level of anxiety that can create.

We'll take this step by step, because it's a long, hard journey.

First - learn to acknowledge your feelings. Recognize when you're angry, and validate your anger. Literally, "I am angry about this, and I have a right to feel anger." You do have the right to feel anger. You may not have the right to spray that anger all over people above you in your life, or random people who have done nothing to deserve it, but you do have the right to BE ANGRY.

Second - once you start validating your anger, a lot of rage is going to start bubbling to the surface. Get involved in some type of controlled combat sport. Learn to kickbox, find a martial art studio. Anything where the movements are ritualistic, and energetic, and yet require control, will help. You want to get the energy out in a constructive way while also learning how to control your feelings in a healthy way instead of repressing them. Repression is not control, and control is not repression. Working a heavy bag helped me a little through this stage, but for awhile you're just going to be angry at everything and everyone, and you're going to have a pretty short fuse, because once you start expressing your anger, you have a lot of it to express, and because you've never learned a constructive or healthy way to deal with that particular feeling, it's not going to come out in constructive and healthy ways unless you take the time to teach yourself those ways. You may want to prepare the people in your life for the explosion. You also may want to prepare yourself for the sudden desire to burn your life to the ground.

Third - you have acknowledged your anger. You have learned to express it physically and under controlled circumstances. It's time to learn to verbalize it. This starts with writing, because that way you don't shit all over the people in your life who are important to you, or with whom you cannot afford to vent. Start simply. "I am angry." Go from there. "I am angry because..." Describe the full situation. Try to connect it to your past. The thing about anger is that it's a masking emotion. It comes out when you feel other things but don't feel that you have enough control over a situation to express those other things.

A few days ago the kitchen started to smell bad. I searched everywhere, and couldn't find the source of the smell. Yesterday while I was cleaning the microwave, one of my companions told me, "That smell is rotting potatoes." Well, I know where we keep the potatoes, so I immediately went to that cupboard, and sure enough, that was the source of the stink. Rotting potatoes are dangerous. The chemical they put off when they start to rot is deadly. Those potatoes could have killed our cats, even if the gas was dispersed enough to not harm us humans. I was angry, but also a bit suddenly shocked and afraid because WHAT IF! So I called my husband, and told him what the issue was (We have dead potatoes.) and how I wanted it solved. I set two boundaries. He needed to take out the trash as soon as he got home (the bags are too big and heavy for me - he wanted a larger trash can and we compromised - he could have his larger trashcan, but he would be the one to always take out the trash). Right now it's late autumn, early winter. The sun sets around 4:30pm here. Bird gets home around 7:30pm - so he would have to take out the trash in the dark, which he doesn't like to do, but he agreed that the potatoes had to go. My second boundary was that if we buy potatoes again, they have to stay on the counter where we can see them, so that they get used, or when they start to go, we can throw them away BEFORE they start producing the gas. I know that potatoes not stored in the dark go bad faster, but if it's a choice between storing them properly and forgetting we ever BOUGHT potatoes until suddenly they're putting our furbabies at risk, or letting them go bad faster but not having it be a health hazard, I'm gonna pick option 2.

So - I got mad. I cleaned up the mess, and that got rid of the energy of my mad. That let me think clearly again, at which point I went to the person who caused the problem in the first place, told him exactly what the problem was without blaming him, and without trying to make my emotional reaction his responsibility. I set boundaries, and requested actions, and suggested a long term solution.

This whole thing is a learning process. You're not going to be perfect right out of the gate. It's going to be messy, so you'll want to prepare people for that. Ultimately, you want to get to a point where you acknowledge your anger and the reasons for it, accept that you have legitimate reasons - validate your feelings, figure out if there's a root issue that's being ignored and if there's a way to solve it, get rid of the excess energy if you need to by doing something active and constructive, and then sit down and describe your anger.

I feel ----- because ----- and I need ---- to happen to solve this.

Work really hard to not make other people responsible for your feelings. Do not use words like, "you make me." It puts people on the defensive and it's not actually true. You react to situations - no person is making you react, your history makes you react, your chemistry makes you react - you are reacting to stimuli - not unlike a tree reacting to the sun by producing oxygen.

I hope this helps.
-Raven

Nyctophilia Raven wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 22, 2019 7:58 am

at which point I went to the person who caused the problem in the first place, told him exactly what the problem was without blaming him

Sorry, but I need to clarify this because it actually does sound like I was blaming him. My husband does the grocery shopping, because he also does most of the cooking. So he was the one to buy the potatoes, and he was the one to forget to use them.

I don't go into the kitchen to cook, only to clean (unless I've suddenly found extra "spoons" and I'm baking with them), so there was no way I would know that we had potatoes that hadn't been used. So yes, he was responsible for the potatoes. However, I am responsible for my valid emotional reaction to the potatoes going unused and becoming a health hazard. I am responsible for my feelings, and for how I express them.

thx raven and gauche
im going try all these methods i think they will be very helpful.

Hello Hoshi!

So while I can not really relate too much personally to suppressing angry thoughts as I generally am not an angry person, I can sympathize and understand on the level of suppressing emotions in general.

I think the first thing to do when you identify the problem that you see, you find the root cause of it. What is making you angry in the first place? Is it because you say 'Yes' when you really wanted to say 'No'? Is it because of the people that you are around and the environment that you are in.

Once you are able to identify that, then you can take the self empowerment road and instead of expecting other people to change their ways, you give yourself the power in changing the situation by IMPROVING yourself. I emphasize the word improving because you should never strive to change yourself for other people because then even if you are technically improving as a person through these changes, because there is such a negative connotation to 'change' especially the reasoning being because of someone else, there can be resentment that takes place instead defeating the purpose of growth.

A lot of the ttime the best way to come to peace with emotions that you are feeling is to just learning to be at peace with accepting people for how they are. It doesn't matter how often you talk to someone, how you word something, people are going to feel how they are going to feel. They obviously feel justified in what it is that they are doing or saying because if they didn't feel justified, they wouldn't have done or said it in the first place. People generally want to be good, everyone is always just trying to do the best that they can with the information and resources that they have available to them at the current time. I haven't really run into a situation where people's sole purpose was just to take someone else down through their own actions.

Realizing this helps you to no longer internalize the things that are being done to you and said to you. Because we only feel these emotions when we make the actions about us. I feel like we all could use a healthy reminder once in awhile that the world doesn't revolve around us. We can convince ourselves so hard of these narratives that people are doing these specific things because they just KNOW how it is going to bother us. It's pretty obnoxious to really think that your presence is just so pronounced in everybody else's life that all their thoughts do is think about you when its really not the case.

Coming to peace with how people are doesn't excuse people for the actions that they are doing, but it gives you peace of mind to realize that a lot of the emotions that you are feeling stem from a place where you are making situations about yourself when really, the actions and words other people do and say is just a self expression of what is going on in their own life. You can easily get an idea of the quality of life someone has in the language and verbiage that they use when communicating with other people.


While what I said in all this doesn't really help in the case of suppressing emotions, as I am not one to speak on what you should do as I am not qualified to speak on something like that..I hope this post brings you a new perspective to view things to perhaps no longer even experience the resentfulness or anger that occurs in your life nearly as often.

when i posted this i was just thinking about suppressing my anger all the time but its not just anger its more than that
i have social anxiety so its really hard for me to tell people what im really thinking and how i feel if they are making me uncomfortable or crossing my boundaries,i try the best i can to ignore my anxiety in the background and be a normal person when im at work.i try to limit who i talk to because som people try to make a connection that isnt there and become too familiar and i dont like that.it irritates me when people try to force a connection by talking to you all the time and i dont really know how to deal with that.i mean ignoring them doesnt work,so what do i say leave me alone ,i dont want to be your friend, idk.i feel like i am overacting somtimes but i really just want to be left alone at work and nobody seems to understand that.theres very few people i actually want to talk to at work but it seems like all the people i dont like want to talk to me all the time and it makes my anxiety act up like crazy. i wish i could just say "leave me the fuck alone ,i dont like you,i don want to talk you, i dont want to be your freind, but my anxiety wont let me say it .
i know to sombody without anxiety this probly seems stupid but to me its real and it makes going to work and dealing with people a pain.
i didnt really know how to explain it in the title of the post,i mean i do have a problem expressing my anger but also dealing with people i dont like and telling them when they are crossing my very strict boundaries.

"I have social anxiety and I'm sure you're a great person and what you have to say would be interesting, but my anxiety is acting up right now and I can't hear or see anything beyond that. I need some space please."

When you tell people a problem and at the same time present them with a solution, while letting them know that you "care" about them and that it's not their fault, it's just an issue... they back off. And they back off thinking you're an amazing and strong person.

Total forgiveness on their end. "I have this issue (it's not your fault). Here is the solution. Thank you for helping me solve this problem that I have."