How to get rid of suppressed anger?
 

Ever since I was a kid I have been suppressing a lot of anger. I had a pretty shitty childhood growing up. Kids picked and teased me constantly. My parents used to beat the crap out of me. I never fought back or openly got angry at people. I kept it all inside. As an adult now, all that bad stuff is behind me. Instead I have to deal with bullshit everyday i.e. my job, stupid people, etc.. Yet I don't lash out. Instead I keep it inside. As I get older though I feel my suppressed anger catching up to me. I keep fearing the worst like one day I will crack like Michael Douglas in the movie Falling Down and go on a rampage. I obviously prefer to avoid that. So any ideas of how I can get my suppressed anger out of my system?

Boxing! Mabye even kick boxing. Ultimate Fighting might just be perfect for you! See where I'm going with this?

If your not a fighter, you need to engage in some activity where you can express yourself (like a sport or some type of art or rough sex!!!). One way or the other, your anger will most likely come out. Try to let it come out in a healthy way. I think the key is to find some activity that has emotional involvement and can be a form of expression for you.

Personally I hop on my freestyle bike and hit the skatepark whenever I'm pissed or need to get out some aggression. Jumping in a mosh pit at a hardcore show is also pretty good for getting out some anger.

Do something! Dont go postal!

I've tried many things, including a phase in my early teens when I was a cutter. Now I go fishing.

I head out alone to some secluded place with no distractions, and work through my problems. It's just me, the water, the fish, and my problems, and I always feel a lot better when I'm done. This could be applied to pretty much anything you enjoy diong.

I strongly encourage you to try and be athletic. As mentioned, boxing, kickboxing, or even just intense workouts can be very soothing. Don't do what I do and take the wrong road. I've got a lot of scars on my body, many still fresh, that are going to be with me the rest of my life.

Go buy a punching bag and let out your anger on that. But be careful not to injure yourself. I got out of control and injured my thumb and wrist....

I took my anger out by being depressed and anxious. A good recomendation is to find as many pencils you can and break them one by one.

Find somebody you can talk to who isn't going to try and fix you or make you feel better. Set it up in advance that you're just VENTING, there's nothing they need to do with what you're saying, they don't need to respond in any particular way, and they're clear you're saying it in order to let it go. All they need to do is HEAR you.

Then set up REGULAR conversations with them--every couple days, or maybe even daily at first--where you just do a brain dump, say anything and everything you need to say. When you get that they've HEARD it, you'll find it's largely disappeared for you.

Most suppressed anger (and other feelings) stays suppressed because it never gets properly heard by ourselves or anyone else. Just having it heard takes 99% of the charge out of it.

Open up. Talk with someone. Trust in a therapist to listen to you and possibly open up ideas and thoughts that will help you let go.
You have to make the choice to let it go and move on. Take that step- the anger is weighing you down and will keep building up inside of you, which can lead to serious issues and depression. Take care of yourself.

I had a lot of the same problems you mentioned. As many people mentioned find an activity that will serve as an outlet for it. Me, I found an outlet by playing hockey, recently I've started doing yoga also. While this is not as much an outlet for my anger it does take away a lot of my stress that contributes to my anger. Look around, you'll find something to suit your needs.


edit: spelling es el stinko

I am one angry S.O.B.. I have found the best thing to do is talk about your anger with others and when possible vent the anger you feel at that moment. If you are in your car and you've had a bad day and then someone cuts you off. Let them know. Call them an asshole. Even if they cannot hear you. The point IS to get it out. Make a conscious effort not to hold it in. Even if that means telling some one off or throwing your TV out a window.

I don't completely agree with you. I think he was looking for more positive ways of releasing his anger. Telling someone off or throwing a TV out a window is not a constructive way of dealing with anger.

I do, however, agree that he should release his anger as it comes, but by channeling his anger through a more positive outlet.

I know it sounds a bit clichéd, but taking deep breaths and counting to ten actually does work. When I'm angry I will usually pop in some "angry" music and go work out.

I agree with k1ng...........

yelling at someone for cutting you off avoids the issue that's eating away at you, for one- and for two, only makes things worse because you will become accustomed to being angry at every little thing, weighing down and burying the true issue underneath. That can really do some damage. Nip it in the bud as soon as you can.

The best advice I can give you is to get some professional help. You will feel so much better when you don't have to lug around a ton of anger and resentment.

I'm a big fan of drinking away my problems but I don't suggest it to everyone.

Get a hobby... rock climbing... target shooting... murder. It's up to you.

Ski

Listen to Black Flag "Damaged" and scream along with it.

I believe this is totally the case with damn near any emotion, even positive ones. Ever notice how when something awesome happens to you, you just NEED to tell someone about it? It's the same thing with negative emotions, except instead of making you anxious to tell of goodness, you start to turn into a sad ogre. Talking out your depression and anger will go much further than beating it out with physical activity, but then again there is nothing wrong with a little excerisize on the side of friendly therapy ;)

Man, you guys don't have rage. I have the real deal. I have to take Nexium everyday because I managed to get acid reflux disease at the earliest age my doctor has ever seen it. At my old apartment, I used to punch the walls so regularly that I had almost an entire wall cracked.

To be honest, the only thing that got me out of it, somewhat, was playing hockey and getting a girlfriend.

I've gotten over anger, I've gotten over depression, and now I'm just completely apathetic. I rarely have a repressed desire to kick anyone's ass anymore. I don't get upset unless tha gravity of a situation is staring me in the face. I don't know if it's another stage in my mental progress or if its a psychological defense, but I just don't give a shit anymore. I take life as it comes, and let the past stay in the past when it goes. I look at someone being an asshole, and momentarily consider that I'm doing a better job of dealing wtih life than they are if they're pissed off and I'm not, then I get on with life and let it go. Maybe I'm still depressed and in denial, but I'm indifferent to much of what happens.

I'm kind of curious as to how young you were when you got it. I was 19 when I did. Dealing with it for a few months is bad enough.

I started with acid reflux when I was 17, and still take Prevacid for it.

Exercise is the best! Or beat your wife...

Health, nutrition, and less violence, more defusing.

I am a great advocate of the right lifestyle. I'm less annoyed at the world, the less nitrates I eat, and the better my heart and lungs are doing on a 5K run at the moment. If I let my jogging lapse, my attitude falls with it.

But the biggest "cognitive therapy" for me was learning a NEW anger-management technique. People talk about "venting" their anger a lot, or about "being more in control of their feelings." That is a fairly common way to talk about management of many feelings, anger included.

For me, both of those statements were basically misleading. They suggested to me that I needed to "clamp down" or "get really overblown." That was not a good suggestion. It likened me to either a pressure-cooker (which was accurate) that needed its lid to be screwed down even tighter (which was inaccurate); or to a fire hose (which was accurate) that needed to be let loose to completely exhaust its supply of water (which was inaccurate).

I found that BOTH of those metaphors actually INCREASED my sense of anger. Either I was suppressing it, thus focusing on how much work and effort I had to put into the idea of controlling it, thus all the time focusing on exactly that which made me angry in the first place; or I was venting it, thus focusing on how much work and effort I had to put into the idea of expressing it, thus all the time focusing on exactly that which made me angry in the first place. Get the problem?

So, what I learned to do, was not so much VENT, as DEFUSE.

I find the term "defuse" very useful. For me, anger is like a mounting obsession. It feeds off of itself. (There is some veracity to the idea that all bad emotions are vicious, self-fulfilling cycles; whereas all good ones are virtuous, self-regulating cycles. Cf. Gaia Hypothesis, by Lovelock.) Anyway, by letting it BE and acknowledging its right to occupy my mental space, the anger becomes an entity that can feed off itself all the more. Instead, I needed to very gently, almost flippantly and rather silly-like, comically, nip it in the bud. Treat it like it hadn't started yet. Get dismissive about it. Allow it to fizzle out withOUT much energy involved in it.

So, in that sense, a sense of humor was the best medicine. If you go in for kick-boxing, or some other violent pastime, you may find, as I did, that the act of anger-management through sport doesn't so much reduce your lifetime of anger, as increase it. You may only ever take that anger out on a kick-boxing bag, or an opponent, but you may exacerbate your own angry tendencies more and more. By allowing the anger to exist, and to drive you, even if it's only to the gym, you're validating it, and thereby giving it the opportunity to feed off itself and grow more and more violent.

Instead, I recommend you don't validate it with kick-boxing lessons. You get out there and run, or ride a bike, or swim, or something else NON-violent, and yet physical. And do that BEFORE you feel some kind of suppressed anger welling up. That way, the testosterone and the energy that would have gone to feeding the vicious cycle are instead used up in advance. And the vicious cycle never gets started. And the physical fitness is an added benefit, too.

I am not an expert practicioner at this craft I call anger-management. I haven't been running much lately, for example, and I carry a lifetime of hatred for the manipulative young women who used my heart like a tennis ball, just for kicks, and taught me a lot of (rather false and dysfunctional) lessons about how to interact with the opposite gender. It's an ongoing struggle, a lifeSTYLE rather than a SOLUTION. Maybe I need a little bit of kick-boxing, but I suspect that if I pasted one of those princess'es faces on a punching bag and pounded away, I wouldn't gain some kind of catharsis that eliminated my fervor. Rather, I suspect I would simply re-ignite some old embers that are slowly dying away.

D'ya get the metaphor? Interesting discussion ...

Very wise statement ... the "having heard it" / "that they heard it" really rings chimes for me. Often I felt I had to say it over and over (no matter what "it" was) until someone had the good sense to say, "I get it." Then it was, like, poof, defused. You get in this cycle of wanting to do what you're doing, and then the act of doing it exacerbating your need to do more of it, and then the exacerbation making you ... etc. But "OK, I see" sort of cuts the recursion. Snip.

Back atcha, final_identity. I really like this approach.

It starts with knowing you've got an anger thing, that anger is your first response to... well, most everything. And if you can watch yourself pull out anger as a response to something, you stand a chance of interrupting it. You can say to yourself, "Oh, look. There goes my anger thing!"

At that point, it's not you anymore, it's it. And you can laugh at an it in a way that you probably can't laugh at yourself.

I know for myself, when I lose my sense of humor it's time to look hard at where I've given my identity over to some automatic cognitive or emotional mechanism like this.

VERY accurate statement.

This is just what I received here when I posted the thread about the apt manager over me. I also vented to a couple good friends and my mom. They all listened, sympathized, and offered their support emotionally. Since that I have "lost" most of the anger I had towards her. I'm still upset with her but I believe I could face her and actually speak to her if I had to without blowing up and screaming in her face as I wanted to a week ago.

Thanks to you all who listened here.

Friends are great for your sanity. Whether they be cyber or real. ;)

Ya, that'll solve everything.............:rolleyes:

I go outside and scream when it gets really bad. The treadmill helps out in the evenings. I have a bag and karate gloves for when I need to hit something. Exercise is the best thing.

Mentally - Ask yourself if you really care about what is bothering you. Will it matter tomorrow? Next week?

Read about anger control techniques.

Yeah but breaking stuff feels good. Even if it is your hands on a punching bag. :D

Deep breaths counting to ten works well.
Actually I heard of the glory of 30....
take 30 quick breaths in a row....it really calms you. I've done it before interviews and times where I have some tension or nervousness.

Batting cage -- draw little faces on the balls, and smack the stuffing out of them - it's fantastic therapy.

Sailing helps too, it's the quiet and solitude that helps let go of the day/week/year

Well, yeah, sure it does. But it seemed like he was asking for more constructive ways of releasing his anger. I was going more for non-violent ways of expressing anger.

Not that I think a punching bag is a bad way of expressing anger. I was referring to your suggestion that he should throw tv's out the window and yell at people when he's having a bad day.

Even writing out your anger can help. You can get as nasty as you want---and eventually you'll start writing things that you didn't know were inside you. Helps to heal in a harmless way.

I pretend stuff doesn't bother me, until it doesn't. Sure I have my hide in my cocoon (since I can't really make a cocoon, I mean my house) and say fuck the world. And playing hockey every friday morning is my key. I enjoy it enough that I look forward to it, and reflect upon all week.

If all else fails I just run people over with my car, figuratively...

hmm....what i used to do what buy an AWM and enter a noobie server and keep sniping everyones heads off in counterstike

very satisfying :D

You have some sound advice from folks here Jesus Pimp.

For my ten cents I often think of anger as an intense feeling of powerlessness and a deep sense of injustice. While it is important to let off steam about that it returns. In the long run some help with how you feel about what's happened in the past and the impact it has on how you feel about yourself and others might have a more lasting effect. For what it is worth the fact that you are thinking about how you feel and not acting it out sounds hopeful.

Working out has worked wonders for me. Its a great release. You get to focus a lot of energy and get great positives as a result. I have not been one to do much anger suppression though. I tend to be pretty open about how I feel. However, when I am angry, a great workout makes me feel a LOT better.

I agree with samiam. Some sort of physical outlet would be good. Sports or karate worked great for me.

On a similar topic I used to get road rage quite often. I found out it was on the tighty-whitey days that this happened most. Now I'm strickly a boxer guy and road-rage is almost nil. Cramping the "meat and two veg" was bad for me.

Just a thought.....

Good luck

I'd suggest karate. The physical aspect is good in the beginning, and the mental aspects are great later. I think that in admitting you know that these things are wrong would prevent you form doing the same.
In this life there is suffering, but it will pass. Try not to think so much about keeping anger inside, but let it pass through you, like a boat passes through water. The boat splits the water, and yet leaves peaceful water behind.

I thought about martial arts but it's near impossible to find an authentic instructor.

I find learning not to care is a method of coping on its own. Laughing helps, too, especially if you just bust up instead of getting mad at another angry and intrusive person. Try saying who fucking cares to yourself a few hundred times. Then live it.

Wow, I'm surprised Hal hasn't answered with this yet:

VENTANGER!