As I mentioned yesterday, the misuse of anger can be hazardous to your health, but it can also have disproportionate consequences for those people around you. An example of this last case might be Killing in Small Town which I saw recently. The movie is about a brutal ax murder where the killer strikes her victim 41 times. The murderer is a reserved woman who repressed her anger in such a way that when she got angry, she surely lost control! As I previously said, angry responses very seldom reach uncontrollable levels and when they do, they are usually because of misuse of angry feelings that have little or nothing to do with the immediate actual irritating situation, for example unconscious anger rooted in the past or in someone else. In general, the greater the awareness of how we really feel, the less chance there is to lose control. And needless to say, the murderer in this movie is so unaware of her anger, that it becomes impossible for her to have control once she explodes. In the movie (spoiler warning…) the anger was triggered by a childhood memory where she was hit in the head and also because her victim was trying to kill her in the first place!
The personality of this anger-repressed woman reminded me of what Theodore Rubin, M.D. explains in The Angry Book about cooling off our anger, whether it is due to childhood trauma, survival, or to sustain illusions of our ourselves about never getting angry:
We usually get angry when we get frustrated due to misunderstandings. Many people consider anger to be an all-or-nothing feeling and this shouldn’t be the case. We don’t have to loose control when we’re angry. Actually, angry responses very seldom reach uncontrollable levels and when they do, they are usually because of misuse of angry feelings that have little or nothing to do with the immediate actual irritating situation. It is mainly due to unconscious anger rooted somewhere else, i.e. in the past or somebody else. In general, the greater the awareness of how we really feel, the less chance there is to lose control.