Focusing Tip #299: “I get painful surges of engulfing rage.”

“I get these surges of anger, out of nowhere.”

Graham writes:
“I get these surges of anger, out of nowhere. I can’t say that they are something in me, or somewhere in me. I find myself abruptly going from one annoying thing to another and suddenly I’m plunged into a painful state of rage, horribly uncomfortable — it isn’t enjoyable rage. I don’t feel strong and full with it — it is a sort of rage and weakness and impotence all at once, and I am in it, I’m not outside it. It isn’t ‘something in me’ — not to me, no, it feels like ALL of me. In that moment, I’m just all anger.

“How do I deal with sudden surges of engulfing anger, anger that I don’t enjoy feeling, that makes me feel really uncomfortable. I guess, for one thing, there must be a sense that my anger is not OK — or dangerous. Yes, that rings a bell — when I was an angry boy my father convinced me that if I went on showing temper he could and would kill me. A sense of sorrow and shame about that…”

Dear Graham,
It’s beautiful how, even while writing to me, you got a shift in your understanding of the part of you that doesn’t like the angry part. No wonder, if your father threatened your life if you showed temper, anger would feel dangerous even now.

So there is something in you that finds the angry, rageful feelings dangerous to allow, dangerous to feel. You are beginning to understand why it feels that way, so you can speak compassionately to this part of you — we can call it the part that is scared of the angry part.

You can be present for both — you can be the space where both are there: something feeling rage and something afraid of that.

Because YOU are Self-in-Presence, this makes your inner world a safer place for both emotional parts…and now they can each be in process, and the body’s own change can begin to emerge.

Why a part of you might take over completely and refuse to be called “something in me”

I suspect you had been identified with the part scared of the rageful part. I can hear this in your language, when you say things like, “anger that I don’t enjoy feeling, that makes me horribly uncomfortable.”

If you’re identified with a part that doesn’t like a rageful part, and try to use language like “something in me,” of course the rageful part will refuse that language. It is quite sensitive, and it can tell that the language is being used to try to control it rather than as a way to get to know it better.

These two parts have been in a life-and-death struggle, what Barbara McGavin and I call a “Tangle.” The rageful part has a part of your unlived life, waiting to live forward, as well as painful emotions needing to complete. The part scared of the rageful part and trying to control it is convinced that even feeling it can put your life in danger. This intensity of this struggle can feel quite painful in itself. And since each of these parts is trying to save your life, neither one is going to give up.

Only one thing can bring relief and the possibility of fresh air: being Self-in-Presence, holding the parts in acceptance for how they are. Not taking sides…recognizing that each side in this inner war has been trying to protect you and trying to hold onto your integrity. Acknowledging this to each of them.

When you can do that, then something new can happen: insight, fresh feelings, relief, new possibilities.

Graham wrote back:
As I read what you wrote to me, this image came: it’s like being a little boy clinging to the mane of a runaway pony when that anger is there. That part holds the fear, while the anger goes on, a parallel process, co-existent, that is the flavor of this deeply uncomfortable anger, it is anger and fear together, terrified anger, full of dread. (And, strangely, a wider sense of the beauty of the boy and pony galloping along the beach on a sunny, windy day, a vastness of perspective encompassing all.)