Calm Your Rage

Do you experience sudden outbursts of anger that happen when you least expect it? Have you noticed that you feel extremely angry towards certain people or certain types of people? Maybe there's someone in your life that gets under your skin and yet there doesn't seem to be any rational reason for it. That has been the case with me at various times in my life. I was a teacher for a long time and I would notice lots of different personality traits in my students. Sometimes fellow teachers would say things that would irritate me and I'd wonder why I'd feel so much irritation as a result of their comment.

The word rage never came to mind when I thought about my reaction to certain situations, but now that I've learned more about the conscious and subconscious mind and how our minds work, I realize that there was a level of rage that was gurgling and bubbling just below the surface.

Certain personalities or specific words or phrases would potentially case that gurgling rage to erupt. Sometimes the eruption was minor and no one else would even be aware of it. Occasionally I would do or say something that was out of place and I'd wonder why that happened.

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What is trauma?

Now I realize that what triggered my rage was something related to an early trauma in my life. So when I say trauma, I want to be clear that an event that was traumatizing to me, may seem like a nothing event to you. I used to think that traumas were always events like a car accident, a house fire, sexual abuse, or a robbery.

A quick online search tells us that, “In general, trauma can be defined as a psychological, emotional response to an event or an experience that is deeply distressing.”

Another definition says that, “Trauma is the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event.” It goes on to say, “Experiencing a traumatic event can harm a person’s sense of safety, sense of self, and ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships. Long after the traumatic event occurs, people with trauma can often feel shame, helplessness, powerlessness and intense fear.” You may have experienced trauma and don’t even know it.

Suggested Resources

Book: Lighter: Create Lasting and Healthy Habits to Lose Weight & Keep It Off for Life Without the Struggle by Erika Flint

Book: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

App: Insight Timer

Related Episodes

Dreams To Destiny; Mark Victor Hansen & Crystal Dwyer Hansen

Find Happiness and Success Even Through Traumatic Events; Forrest Willett

447 Discover Your Energetic Solutions Through Sheevaun Moran

Do You See Your Angry Self?

Trauma can take the form of abductions, terrible invasions of privacy, sexual abuse, violent attacks; all kinds of awful things happen to people in the world. Some of it is remembered and some isn't.

Generally speaking, our subconscious mind has the ability to remember and categorize vast amounts of information including incidents, words spoken to us, even smells, sounds, images, sensations, and emotions.

Only a minuscule amount of this information makes it to the conscious mind. So much of it we are not able to recall. It seems to be lost forever. Even though it seems to be lost, sometimes this information comes out in dreams and sometimes is triggered by certain random things that might surprise you. Maybe a brief musical phrase from a song, a certain aroma, or the face of an innocent stranger.

Some people who experience terrible traumas are unable to remember them at all, or maybe they just remember random bits and pieces. Traumatic events are usually not remembered sequentially, with a beginning, middle, and end. If anything is remembered, usually it's short, abbreviated chunks that can show up as memory flashes. Some people are bewildered at what these apparently isolated memories are all about.

A lot of people are confused when these memory flashes trigger anger and rage that they didn'