What Are Your Anger Triggers?
We help people transform anger and other difficult emotions
By Jon Terrell, M.A

Do you find anger triggers all around you? Do you get caught up in rage and anger?

Anger is a difficult emotion.

If we let it explode outward it can cause damage. When anger triggers us and we try to hold it back it can negatively affect our health, cloud our thinking and destroy our life.

Learning to express anger appropriately is a skill that can be learned. In many cases the real issue that makes us angry is something we are avoiding, just below the surface.

What are your Anger Triggers? 
Who pushes your buttons and why?

When it’s “not fair.”

If you feel you’re not getting what others are getting, that you are being discriminated against, you can feel angry.

Example: You go out to dinner with a friend and they order more drinks and more expensive items and then want to split the bill with you. You get angry because he/she wants you to pay a larger share of the bill than you think you deserve.

Example 2: When you feel you pay your taxes fairly and you find out that some rich person is able to find tax loopholes and not pay any taxes.

When your boundaries or expectations are violated.

Example: A telemarketer calls you on your home phone at dinner time. (You expect only calls from people who know you at home.)

Example 2: You are awakened from sleep by noisy neighbors who have hired a rock bank for their all-night party.

When someone fails to acknowledge something that you hold important.

Example: Your partner forgets your anniversary

When you or your loved ones are endangered

Example: A driver cuts you off and you have to swerve out of the way.

What do all these triggers have in common?

We experience and express anger when we are feeling small and victimized. We blow up at various anger triggers to avoid the feeling of smallness, and the hurt that goes with that.

[NOTE: If we were truly violated, as in a child sexually abused or physically assaulted, there can be a deep tangle of feelings, including fear, rage, grief and shame. Recovering our life energy from the past and getting our life back can best be done with the help of a trained therapist. The deep emotional healing work of our Grief, Loss and Difficult Emotions Retreat can accelerate that work.]

If you find yourself angry a lot, by this and that, you may need to work on the real cause of your anger and the real cure for your anger: Your own uncomfortable feelings of being small and victimized.

It feels easier to project anger out there than deal with the internal feelings of being a victim, of being unworthy and unlovable. But learning to feel your feelings and work them through is something you can learn. It will change your life.

This is where the true gold of growth and healing can be found. To free ourselves from being forever triggered by other people's behaviors we need to heal the parts of ourselves that feel unworthy of love, that feel small.  

We've been hiding these parts from others and from ourselves. And to heal these parts we need to feel the emotions we are caught in, particularly the grief of not being seen or heard or honored.

This is the true work of psychotherapy as I see it, and it is also at the core of our retreats. At our retreats folks can work through years of pain in a short period of time, and gain the tools they need to live a new, freer and passionate life.

For more information of dealing with difficult emotions go to Healing Emotions.

Here is another perspective on anger called Conquering Anger.

Jon Terrell, MA, offers psychotherapy for individuals and couples at his office in Northampton, Massachusetts and in downtown Manhattan.  For more information on our programs, or if you have a question, contact him using the contact form below.

Jon Terrell, M.A.
Fitzwilly's Building
25 Main Street, Suite #342
Northampton, Massachusetts 01060

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