Anger toward Inward

So many of us try our best to avoid conflict of any kind- often at great expense to ourselves and our relationships. We haven't learned how to express our anger, we have been told we have "no right" to feel angry, or the adults around us showed us how to express anger in not so healthy ways- exploding, keeping it all in, or being passive- aggressive. Anger turned inwards may also result in a lack of appropriate assertiveness, stress, low mood or self-harm

As far as Myers Briggs Personality Type, those of us who are "feelers" tend to have a very difficult time with conflict and expressing or even recognizing our anger. I am a feeler so I understand this well! As feelers our relationships are very important and having them be calm is when we feel the best. So when feelers have conflict in relationships, they get all tangled up inside- fret, worry, ruminate, etc. We don't like feeling like that, so we avoid conflict and speaking up, which often then we turn our anger inward onto ourselves in the forms of melancholy, low self esteem, worry, apathy, and (for some)self-injury.

Thinkers are not afraid of conflict, and tend to handle it by hashing it out, then moving on. It doesn't 'stick' with them, it's over and done with. But if they are in a relationship with a feeler, it's not over and done with for the feeler. The feeler has angst about it, wants to talk more and resolve it; feelers often get overwhelmed by the conflict, they feel flooded with emotions and then don't know how to handle all those strong emotions.

If we cannot find some way to assert ourselves and state how we feel, we harm ourselves and the relationships. The relationship suffers because most often our response is to distance ourselves, and if this occurs for a long enough time, the love we feel is greatly impacted- in fact, some of the first work I do with my couples is to express the resentments they are both holding in- it actually helps us to feel closer, and we can put those resentments to rest after they are verbalized and understood (maybe not agreed with, buy validated in some way). Non expression of our resentments can lead to someone being "done" one day in the relationship, seemingly out of nowhere, but something had been brewing for quite some time inside of them, even if they didn't recognize it.

We harm ourselves when we don't express our anger, because this leads to self doubt, a stifling of our energy, and the message that our feelings don't matter. If the wounds are seriously egregious, we may start to harm ourselves as a way to express some of the emotion; it's a coping mechanism, and we are handling the anger in the best way we can. But, turning the anger outward where it really belongs, is very healing for us.

Learning how to express anger is such an important part of taking care of ourselves. Few of us have been taught this or had role models for healthy expression of anger, so it's no wonder we struggle!

In the following posts I will write about those who externalize their anger, and also ways to express our anger that are healthy for us and our relationships.

A good resource for those who have a difficult time expressing anger is I Hate Conflict by Lee Raffel.