Defusing Inner Rage

One thing that has come back to me lately is that I have never gotten truly angry or enraged about this awful, monumentally unfair paralysis scourge that landed on my head 26 years ago. I wasn’t angry in the early days; I was in a state of shock and numbness. Throughout the years, I’ve been, off and on and in various degrees, sad or lonely or confused or depressed, and I tried to deflect them all with a jokey, dismissive cover. I figured early on that no one wants to be around a dyspeptic crip. No one. I never felt like throwing a beer bottle at the TV or some other expression of unadorned anger. I haven’t shaken my fist at God. Mostly I’ve mourned.

It goes under the heading of repressed anger or rage, often from unresolved trauma. Go online, and there are hundreds of books and articles and programs to learn how to fess up to this pent-up anger, work to release it, and feel the load off your back. Paralysis isn’t the only such trauma in my life I’ve choked off, but if something can un-repress its residual psychological damage, it’s worth looking into.

How do you know you have repressed anger? I’m just a reporter here, not an expert, but some often-mentioned signs I can see in myself include:

• Never feeling angry, but often feeling sad or depressed
• Overuse of sarcasm or cynicism
• Frequent negative or self-critical thoughts
• Feeling bitter, envious, or resentful of others.
  
  

I probably skipped a few good ones, but this is enough to see if you’re in the ballpark. These signs seem relatively easy to spot in yourself or by a pro, yet I’ve endured endless hours of therapy where the subject never came up. I had one crackpot therapist who would sense the occasional tightness in my solar plexus – an impediment to smooth breathing – and not even give it a name. It just made him uncomfortable, so he’d walk out of the room for a few minutes. I now think that gut pain was in part, both latent anger and anger at this guy for being such a putsch and never indicating how to relieve it. If I had simply stood up and told the guy to bugger off and left, I would have felt a lot better. This is not a slam against all therapists, mind you, just this therapist.

 I can’t do this subject justice here, but I can recite widely-promoted approaches to the problem – therapy, of course, since most of the material is written by therapists; meditation and mindfulness; or other psychological or mental tools to relieve the symptoms. I’m not that good at most of those things. But physically-based relief methods are also widely touted. As I’ve said, cardio conditioning and resistance training (specifically weight training) aren’t just to help you look good for your reunion. Resistance training can reportedly mollify repressed anger. Or not. But it’s a route worth trying.