Today we’re going to talk about how to release repressed anger.
If you’re unsure about what repressed anger is or how to spot it, check out my article on the Top 5 Symptoms of Repressed Anger, then come back here to learn how to release it.
I’ve tried four methods, which I’ll share with you today. They’ve all proved useful and helped me taste the joy and fullness that comes when you release repressed anger.
To me, the key is to reintegrate your anger back into your psyche. Until you do so, you’ll forever be plagued by this emotion, because you won’t realise that it’s yours in the first place. Once you have reintegrated it, you’ll be much better placed to control, direct and express it as you please.
Let’s get right to the first technique, which is called shadow work.
1: The 1-2-3 Technique
The 1-2-3 Technique from Ken Wilber is the most direct and revealing method that I have found yet. This is a practical set of instructions that’s perfect if you want to discover and release repressed anger. It can be like discovering a heap of buried gunk inside you, and feeling the relief of cleaning it all out.
The “1”, “2” and “3” mean 1st, 2nd, 3rd person. This is a short way of saying that the traits and emotions you consciously embody, and which aren’t in the shadow, are in your 1st person. They’re not projected outwards, and you feel and live them in their fullness. In our case, if your anger is in your 1st person, you feel it, you can express it and direct it, and you’re fully aware that it’s yours.
However, we all have emotions and traits that aren’t in 1st person, and it’s in great part due to the mechanism of projection. When emotions and traits seem disgusting to us, we project them outside ourselves. They remain part of us, but they’re underground, dissociated, repressed, dumbed down, like a phantom limb. We’re unable to acknowledge that they’re ours.
Repressed traits are in the 2nd or 3rd person. They’re still part of you, but appear to be directed against you (2nd person), or “out there”, with a vague, undefined victim (3rd person). The second variety is more extreme, more dissociated, more deeply buried in the subconscious.
If that sounds a bit abstract, don’t worry: there is a simple practice that helps you take any anger in your 2nd and 3rd person and reintegrate it. The concept of projection might sound strange if it’s foreign to you, but after some practical 1-2-3 work, it will start to make sense on a visceral and emotional level.
How to do the 1-2-3
You can practice the 1-2-3 at any time, whether you feel angry or not. Repressed emotions tend to torment us throughout the day, so you’ll often notice traces of them whatever your main emotional state is. The whole four-step cycle should last about 15 minutes.
- Choose: Select the quality you want to reintegrate. In this case it’s anger, but you can work with a whole range of emotions.
- Awareness: Bring your attention into your body, and start to feel and observe the anger. It helps if you’ve done meditation before. If you haven’t, just sit still for a few minutes, and pay attention to the various parts of the body where you feel it. Your goal is not to change it, but to simply observe these sensations as they are without resisting them.
- 3rd person: Next, we seek anger in the 3rd person. Maybe you have a vague sense of it existing somewhere out there, far away from you, as though “out there” in society. Now, ask it what it wants, as though it were a person, and respond to yourself as though you were it. For example: “What do you want?” “I want to smash shit up… I want to kill!” When you ask the question, you’ll notice little whispers and expressions of anger, and your job is to vocalise them. Repeat this until you feel that you’re more in touch with it.
- 2nd person: Next, we go to the 2nd person. We feel the effects of our 2nd-person anger as though we were the victim of an angry person. That means we feel fear, smallness, sadness, melancholy, and so. Do the same: identify subtle thoughts that feel like an anger directed against you. Perhaps it takes the form of a person. Ask them questions, and respond as them, to yourself: “I want to kill you, you little b@stard!”, and so on, imagining they are you.
Keep going with this, until it feels like you can truly speak as the monster. You are the monster that is getting angry at you. Now, try to feel that there is no monster, no 2nd-person anger. You are it. You have released it!
By the end of a session, you should be able to get consciously angry, to feel rage, to feel that urge to “move forward, move towards”, as Wilber describes anger. You’ve taken some of your anger out of 2nd and 3rd person and re-owned it.
You might like my episode on how to reown repressed anger.
Method to Release Repressed Anger #2: Dreams
Now, dreams aren’t the best way to release repressed anger per se, unless you can lucid dream, but they are an excellent source of intel. Dreams show us our repressed emotions. If you or another person expresses a given emotion in a dream, chances are that the emotion is repressed inside you: it’s in your 2nd or 3rd person.
In the case of repressed anger, I speak about how it shows up in dreams in my article on the Top 5 Symptoms of Repressed Anger.
Two years ago I went through a period of using the 1-2-3 technique most days, and I could see the difference in my dreams. My dreams were changing as I trained myself to release repressed anger. I could see it was working.
A good place to start is to write down your dreams every morning for a month and look for patterns. If you realise you’re constantly being chased by fearsome animals or encountering rage-filled, out-of-control characters, it’s likely you have repressed anger. Once you realise that, you can start to change it using a technique like the 1-2-3.
Lucid dreams are a different story.
In lucid dreams, it’s quite easy to act out your shadow self, because your everyday filters are down, and you know you’re dreaming. It’s as though the dream state destroys our persona and leaves the more primal, unfiltered version of ourselves.
If you can lucid dream, you can practice being angry, with no fear of repercussions. Go to an empty building and start smashing it up. Get into a fight and start laying into someone. Go crazy at someone you’re angry with in real life. The more skilled you are at lucid dreaming, the better it will work.
If you become lucid during a dream with monster or fearsome animal, the distance between you and your repressed anger is quite small. It’s staring you in the face. You’re expressing it, but unconsciously, as though it were directed towards you. Try to literally become that animal or lion, absorbing all its raw energy, realising it’s actually all yours. I’ve never done this, but I suspect it will work.
3: Watch Yourself and Do the Opposite
This technique is great for everyday situations, especially when you notice yourself doing the opposite of expressing anger, or are feeling the symptoms of your repression of it.
When we have repressed anger, we tend to be overly nice, sweet, pleasing, and polite. It’s true that we have to adopt a polite, civilised mask to function in society, and that our personality type can predispose us to those characteristics. But if this is a persistent thing and it feels very forced and restricting, it’s likely a symptom of repressed anger. We’re being this way because we’re trying to mask our own anger from ourselves and others. It’s a kind of smokescreen.
I want you to be very aware of moments when you feel disempowered, overly nice, polite, or even sad and melancholic. In that moment, it’s possible that anger is the source. You actually feel like “moving forward, moving towards”, but you’re pushing it out of your 1st person.
What to do is step into the anger you feel but aren’t allowing. Express it somehow, in a way that’s not going to cause an issue. Don’t smile so much. Don’t be false and sweet. Don’t smile if you don’t want to.
These might seem like small steps but when practiced consistently can make a big difference to your ability to identify and express your authentic emotions. You’re training yourself to be the opposite of who you’ve outwardly been.
Final Way to Release Repressed Anger: Acid
I’ve never been so aware of my anger, and felt that I had managed to release repressed anger, as when I took acid. I spoke about this in a recent podcast episode. This level of release may be available with other psychedelics, but I can’t be sure.
The only problem is that often it’s difficult to control the theme of acid experiences. My trips vary between purpose, shadow, and spirituality according to what I’m focusing on or most inspired by at the time.
I think if you’re working to reintegrate your anger in daily life, it’s more likely that this will be a theme in your psychedelic experiences. You can also do psychedelic therapy with a professional if you want focused guidance.
Join tens of thousands of like-minded people today.
Follow the Deep Psychology PodcastSubscribe on YouTube
- Spotify
- YouTube
The post How to Release Repressed Anger first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post How to Release Repressed Anger appeared first on Deep Psychology.
