|
Here's something I see constantly in my office: someone with severe anxiety who "never gets angry." Anxious about everything - health, relationship, work, safety. But angry? No. They're not an angry person. Except that's not quite true. What Your Family Taught You About Feelings
You learned early which feelings were acceptable and which weren't. Not through explicit rules, but through what happened when you expressed certain emotions. Maybe when you got angry as a kid, your parents shut down. Or got angry back - bigger, louder, scarier. Emotionally immature parents often can't handle their children's big feelings, so anger gets punished or ignored. Maybe you were told "we don't do anger in this family." Maybe anger meant someone got hurt, someone left, or the whole house went silent for days. So you learned: Anger is unacceptable. Anger gets you rejected. Anger means you're bad. If expressing anger threatens your connection to the people you depend on, you stop expressing it. You have to. You're a kid. It's survival. The Transformation: From Anger to Anxiety Conventional wisdom says unexpressed emotions just go away. They don't. Your body registers an experience that warrants anger - you're treated unfairly, your boundaries are violated, someone hurts you. Your system produces the physiological response of anger because that's what bodies do when something needs to be pushed back against. But if you learned anger is forbidden, that response can't complete. The feeling doesn't disappear. It transforms. Here's what happens: Anger says: "Something out there is wrong and I need to address it." Anxiety says: "Something is wrong with ME and I need to control it." Anger moves outward. Anxiety turns inward. When you can't feel angry at others (parents, partners, bosses), that energy redirects. Instead of anger at your father for being critical, you feel anxious about being good enough. Instead of anger at being dismissed, you feel anxious about being too demanding. The feeling is still there. It's just been relabeled as something "safer" - something that doesn't threaten relationships, something that makes YOU the problem instead of them. How This Shows Up in OCD and Panic The Harm OCD Spiral. You're terrified you'll hurt someone you love. Intrusive images of stabbing your partner, thoughts of pushing your parent down the stairs, fears of losing control and acting violently. You check your feelings constantly: "Do I want to do this? Am I a dangerous person?" What you're not acknowledging? The rage underneath. Maybe rage at a parent who controlled you. Maybe rage at a partner who takes you for granted. The obsession lets you feel horrified by anger instead of actually feeling the anger. The Panic Pattern. Your chest tightens. Heart races. You can't breathe. You're convinced you're dying or going crazy. It happens in specific situations - during conflict, when someone's upset with you, when you need to assert yourself. What's actually happening? Your body is preparing to fight or flee, but you've learned you're not allowed to fight (express anger) and you can't flee (leave the relationship). So all that energy gets trapped in your chest. That's not a heart attack. That's unexpressed anger with nowhere to go. The Checking Compulsion. Did you lock the door? Turn off the stove? Send the right email? You check obsessively because you can't tolerate the possibility of being responsible for something bad happening. What you might not see? The deep anger about being held responsible for everything growing up. About being blamed when things went wrong. The compulsion lets you be anxious about responsibility instead of angry about being blamed. The Somatic Anxiety. Tightness in your chest. Stomach in knots. Jaw clenched. Shoulders up to your ears. Your body is holding what your mind won't acknowledge. That tension isn't random - it's the physical preparation for anger that never gets expressed. The Way Through Isn't More Anxiety Management You can learn every grounding technique, do all the CBT, practice mindfulness for years. And sure, those help manage symptoms. But if you never address the anger underneath, you're just getting better at coping with the anxiety while ignoring its source. The therapeutic work isn't learning to be less anxious. It's learning that anger is information, not danger. When you can actually feel the anger - not think about it, not analyze it, but actually let it rise in your body and exist for a moment - something shifts. The anxiety often drops. Not because you've "managed" it better, but because the feeling finally landed where it belonged. Anger tells you when something needs to change. When you're being treated in a way you don't deserve. When boundaries need to be set. When you need to push back. You don't have to yell. You don't have to be aggressive. You don't have to blow up relationships. You just have to stop being afraid of the feeling itself. What This Means for Treatment If your anxiety or OCD has been treatment-resistant - if you've done ERP, learned the skills, challenged the thoughts, but something still doesn't quite resolve - this might be why. The obsession or panic isn't the core problem. It's the defense against a feeling you learned was too dangerous to feel. This is where psychodynamic therapy and EMDR can be powerful additions to exposure-based treatment. Psychodynamic therapy helps you identify the emotional conflicts driving your symptoms - seeing how current anxiety connects to old patterns with family. EMDR can help process the experiences where you learned anger was dangerous, allowing your nervous system to finally complete what got stuck. Until you can access that feeling - really feel it, not just intellectually understand it - the anxiety will keep finding new forms. New obsessions. New panic triggers. New things to check or avoid. The question isn't "How do I manage my anxiety better?" The question is "What am I angry about that I haven't let myself feel?" Christopher Toomer is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker specializing in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Psychodynamic Therapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy for OCD and anxiety disorders. He provides evidence-based treatment for adults and children 8+ at Indy OCD in Carmel, Indiana. Comments are closed.
|