Anxiety/Anger Regulation Both anger and anxiety are powerful emotional reactions, closely linked to basic survival instincts. Anxiety makes us aware of potential danger, while anger enables us to fight more fiercely against a threat. But anger and anxiety can also hurt us and those nearest to us. Anger and anxiety can literally make us sick. Anger may express itself as aggression, abuse, hurting people, or destroying property—but it can also manifest itself in a more subtle form, for example, treating loved ones with impatience or coldness. Stephen Stosny writes, “One sure sign of an anger problem, whether hidden or subtle or obvious, is feeling like all your troubles are the fault of someone else, or that other people are always trying to put you down or push you buttons. If that’s the case, you will tend to see yourself as a reactor in life, rather than an actor. Eventually you’ll become a reactaholic, with your thoughts, feelings, and behavior totally controlled by whoever or whatever you’re reacting to. The more reactive you are, the more powerless you feel; anger is ultimately a cry of powerlessness.” Along with Stosny, Asclepeion Center staff see anger as a reaction to deeper feelings—“core hurts” such as feeling disregarded, unimportant, accused/guilty, devalued, rejected, powerless, unlovable, or unfit for contact. When anger taps into a pool of old core hurts, it may feed on that pent up psychic energy and become a self-reinforcing habit. This is how we get, as the old saying goes, “a dollar reaction to a nickel’s worth of stimulus.” The dollar reaction is valid, but 95 percent of it comes from the old, stored-up, core hurts rather than the event of the moment. At the Asclepeion Center we work with clients, coaching them in how to use their own capacity for self-compassion to tune into—and heal—their core hurts. This training provides the tools to halt the anger reaction in a crisis; it also helps people begin to drain the pool of old core hurts. This process helps people to shake the habit of getting angry and enables them to feel more compassionate toward others. Anxiety can also become a habit that produces a dollar reaction to a nickel’s worth of stimulus. Anxiety also taps into hidden pools of feelings, either from core hurts or from traumatic experiences. Traumatic memories—laden with all the intense fear that we felt during an initial frightening initial event—tend to be stored differently from other memories. Traumatic memories are often retained within us, but out of our awareness—manifesting themselves as pain or tension in specific areas of the body. Thus, our bodies literally “hold onto” anxiety, experiencing it in the form of pain as well as emotional discomfort. (More at Colloid Fluid Model.) Asclepeion Center staff work holistically, drawing on the complementary approaches of training clients in the management of own emotions, hands-on healing, and insight therapy. Through this tri-fold approach we help clients to better regulate their anxiety and anger. BACK TO TOP