Summary: (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/wp-content/uploads/marty_lefkoe_headshots_053_2-01_edit_210-150x150.jpg) The first time I really allowed myself to experience my anger I fainted. I was about 36 and had successfully suppressed my anger since childhood. And there I was in a group therapy session, hitting a mat with a stick with foam wrapped around it, screaming: “Mom, I’m really angry at you.” When I started the exercise I was only mouthing empty words, but then at some point the words became real and the anger surfaced. It terrified me so much that I literally passed out on the mat. I fainted the next couple of times I tried that exercise, but eventually I was able to experience anger toward my mother that I had never allowed myself to experience. And I was able to remain in an upright position. Although there probably aren’t many people who first experienced their anger in exactly the same way I did, there are millions who are terrified of experiencing their own anger or being in the presence of the anger of others. Many people get in touch with that anger in therapy or some personal growth course, and millions never do. In addition to the fact that suppressing your anger is suppressing a part of yourself—in other words, having a part of you be unknown to you—suppressed anger has been implicated in serious illnesses, especially heart diseases. So if you want to discover why our anger is so scary that we need to hide it, even from ourselves, and if we want to be able to experience anger without fear, read on and let me explain how we can do that. The Primary Source of Our Fear The primary source of our fear of anger is three specific beliefs and two conditionings. The beliefs are: Confrontation is dangerous, If I’m angry I’ll lose control, and Anger is dangerous. And the conditionings are: fear associated with anger and fear associated with confrontation. There can be a several others relevant beliefs and conditionings, but it is my experience that when these five have been eliminated, most of the fear we have of our own anger and the anger of others will be gone. The source of these five beliefs and conditionings is almost always a childhood where one or both parents frequently displayed extreme anger. (I’ll explain why some people frequently express anger in a minute.) If we are terrified by the anger of our parents as a child, the typical reaction is the five beliefs and conditionings I listed. The group therapy I described above helped me get in touch with my anger and allowed me to experience it instead of suppress it so totally that I didn’t even know I was feeling it. But my fear of anger did not disappear totally until I eliminated the five beliefs and conditionings several years later. Now what about people who aren’t afraid of anger, but who themselves are angry a lot and express that anger as verbal or physical abuse? What is the source of that? People Who Get Angry Easily Kids want affection, attention, and acknowledgment. When they repeatedly can’t get what they want, they are likely to feel powerless. Also, frequently being told: “Just do it because I said so” can produce the same feeling. This leads to the belief I’m powerless. This is a basic self-esteem belief that makes us feel out of control and insecure, because if we are powerless then we don’t have the ability to do what we think needs to be done. In other words, on a subconscious level we know our survival is always at stake. When we form such a belief as a child we need to find some way to deal with the ever-present anxiety it produces. As I explained in a blog post last year (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/how-do-beliefs-produce-%E2%80%9Cdriven%E2%80%9D-compulsive-behavior/ (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/how-do-beliefs-produce-%E2%80%9Cdriven%E2%80%9D-compulsive-behavior/)), when we form a negative self-esteem belief as a child we need to develop some strategy to deal with it. For example,
