We hate feeling vulnerable, powerless, or afraid. It is uncomfortable, scary even – it reminds us of how we were children, and we could not protect ourselves.
When we do feel powerless, we try to feel anything but – and so, anger becomes very enticing. Anger helps you feel strong, energizing, powerful – like you can take on the world. Helplessness occurs when we feel we lack power to change a situation. For example, if someone criticizes us, we may feel inadequate, small, stupid, but instead of acknowledging these uncomfortable feelings, we lash out in anger to regain a sense of power, and to force someone to back off violently rather than having a discussion as to why their comments make us feel small.
Vulnerability can feel threatening because it exposes us to be potentially hurt more. We use anger defensively to protect us from the deeper pain of helplessness. We have all gone through a breakup or job loss, and we often channel our feelings of anger at the person who caused the breakup or let us go from work by blaming them, rather than sitting with the feelings of helplessness that you lost someone you care about, or that you are worried about when you will get your next job – how will you pay your bills now?
Anger, curiously, propels us into action with an adrenaline rush that allows us to fight back or even distract ourselves from feeling our emotions even deeper. When someone cuts us off in traffic, anger gives us the excuse to honk, shout, or think about how wrong the other person was so we can feel “in charge” again, rather than leave us feeling stuck. Anger is also more socially acceptable than helplessness, because vulnerability is taught to be a sign of weakness, but anger is assertive or strong.
All it does, however, is hide your grief on how helpless you truly feel. Anger helps you focus outward, on someone or something outside of yourself that is to blame, and allows you to distract yourself from feeling uncomfortable with your helplessness. If we focused internally, we would actually have to face and deal with our own feelings of inadequacy, insecurity or worse – realize we were not ever in control, and have no authority or ability to change a situation.
And to realize we only have control only of our own reactions and not anyone else’s is both terrifying and liberating.
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