Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Recently, we did an episode on the freeze response distress that focused on dissociation and emotional shutdown.
And before that, we had an episode on self-abandonment, which is closely associated with the Fawn response to stress. So we've kind of found our way into a little mini-series here of episodes dedicated to the different stress responses. going to be continuing that series by exploring the fight response. So to help us do that, I'm joined as usual by
I think I can fairly say my favorite guest, clinical psychologist, Dr. Rick Hansen. He's also my dad, so that might have something to do with it. So, Dad, how are you doing today? Well, I'm just really touched. So thank you. Number one guest in my heart, right? Well, you know, Elizabeth has been on the podcast several times. So I'm not going to play favorites here. You're both tied for first place. Okay, I'll take it.
That's great. Thank you. That's about as good as you can hope, right, as the parental figure here. I'm up there in the Hall of Fame with Elizabeth. I'm very honored to be in good company there. So as with all of these episodes, I would like to start by just exploring what's in the fight response. What do we actually mean when we say that practically in a context?
where we are humans rather than zebras. We can often really recognize these stress responses in animals, but sometimes it gets a little bit harder to do that in people, actually. But with people, when we talk about the fight response, emotionally, we're mostly talking about anger. Anger, rage, resentment, feelings like that.
And it's really helpful to recognize that anger is a protective signal. It helps us identify usually that somebody's trying to mess with us. We think they're trying to hurt us. They're trying to take something from us. They're trying to stop us from getting something that we...
really care about. And remember what we talked about, if you listened to it, or maybe go back and listen, to our episode on the freeze response, where we dug a little bit more generally into stress responses. All of these responses are adaptive. They exist to serve useful functions. So the question, over and over again, is how can we capture the useful aspects of it without getting so captured by the more problematic aspects of it?
But our tendency as people is to bucket emotions. We think about certain emotions as being kind of good, other emotions as being more problematic. and this has a lot of problems for starters it generates a lot of unnecessary shame for people it also leads to repression of emotions which we're definitely going to talk about during this episode and it causes us to disconnect from those more useful aspects. And I would be inclined to argue that.
The fight response in anger broadly is kind of the poster child for that. So for starters, feel free to respond to anything that I've said so far. But I would love to start by asking you, what do you think are the more adaptive aspects of the fight response that we tend to kind of lose touch with? Well, your setup is just great. And as a bit of context, including in reference to your point about we tend to bucket anger.
I don't know who said it, but I remember someone when I was back in grad school making the observation that in some ways, Freud's early writings at the turn of the 20th century... around 1900, were in some ways about the ways in which eroticism, sexuality, had been sidelined in the Victorian age. And these days, while people are acting all nicey-nicey and trying to get along in many settings, it's in many ways anger and aggression that is actually repressed. Biologically, anger's role...
One is to highlight a problem. So with anger, there's a release of norepinephrine. It's very alerting. It's energizing. And we highlight what's at issue. That's actually really useful when you're dealing with something like injustice. Second is that it's very energizing. So I would, as you know, prefer to have a client who's angry than one who is depressed, in part because with anger, there's more energy to work with the issue itself. So it's energizing. And third, it tends to be organizing.
So if someone is prone to dissociation or being scattered or feeling fragmented psychologically, there's nothing like being chased by a saber-toothed tiger to kind of pull the pieces together. And so for people, again, who are grappling with feeling disconnected from themselves and fragmented, sometimes some anger can be a good thing. The last thing I want to say is that anger is located socially.
So if you're situated in a family in which your own anger is shamed, denied, suppressed, punished, and so forth, or if you belong to a group of people. such as classically girls and women, or other groups that can be marginalized in society, very legitimate kinds of outrage. can be really pushed away. So there's nothing in what we're going to talk about here, including facing some of the risks and pitfalls and costs of anger, nothing about that is in any way, shape, or form to be fed into.
structures of minimization or denial related to anger. I wanted to highlight a couple of specific behaviors that are associated with the fight response that might actually be helpful for people to think about in this way. If you are standing up for yourself, you are, in a broad sense of the word, activating the fight response. You are pushing something else away that you feel is trying to mess with you. If you are holding a boundary…
Most of the time, if you think about fight, flight, freeze, fawn, that's associated with the fight response. I would put it in that kind of a bucket. If you are protecting somebody else, that's the fight response. So there are all of these different things. that are really, really helpful for people to get in touch with.
I think that to make a little bit of a broad generalization here, particularly probably people who tend to listen to a podcast like ours could be helped out a little bit by getting a little more in touch. with that kind of energizing aspects of personality that might be associated with the fight response. Another thing that I want to name about the fight response that is a little bit of a double-edged sword and will probably help us.
transition to some of the more problematic aspects of it, is that it's deeply grounded in an underlying sense of capability for most people. Often people fight because they are cornered. But if you are not cornered and you make the choice to fight, it's because you think you can win at some level, right? Animals don't tend to fight other animals unless they think they've got a pretty darn good chance of winning.
If you look at pack dynamics broadly, animals hardly engage in physical combat at all with each other. They've found much more effective ways to establish hierarchy that don't have all of the risks that fighting does. So if you're somebody who has that kind of modality inside of you...
there can be this underlying sense of self-efficacy attached to it which is a critically important resource that we talk about developing all the time on the podcast so if you're somebody who kind of already has access to that great that can be a very very useful thing to have The flip side of that, though, is that if you're fighting because you think you can win, there's a sense of perceived superiority associated with anger socially. That can be quite tricky and dangerous to work with.
If you think that you're at the top of the heap and you have a right to express this impulse that maybe lower status individuals in the group don't have a right to express, that's pretty complicated. There's an inherent tie to power with anger. And this is one of the reasons that anger as an emotion that we often think of as being quite destructive can actually be a little seductive and appealing for people. It actually feels good to express anger in a way that it really doesn't feel good.
to express the flight response or the freeze response or the fawn response most of the time. Those tend to feel kind of crappy for us. But expressing our anger, man, that can feel great. So just something that you have to keep a little bit of an eye on. You know, Forrest... I'm finding in real time now, as we're talking about this topic, that it's personally very engaging for me. Because when I grew up, anger was anathema.
So my own anger was completely suppressed, and there were very intense limitations in me. It felt like a valve in my throat. that would block the expression even of the anger I was aware of. And so I'm reflecting on not just anger, but the option to express anger. So I did not have that option. And it made me feel small and weak and like I was subordinate to other people who clearly had access to that option.
And then interestingly, in my early 20s, even after I had done a lot of personal growth type stuff in college, but it didn't touch this, I ended up doing a kind of psychodrama workshop. in which we play acted, getting intensely angry. So in that artificial setting, we had the option to look angry, and we acted it out, which...
really, really then gave me access to that anger. And then interestingly, because I had the option, because I knew what it was like to go to the nine or a 10 on the anger rage scale. I didn't have to because I knew I could. And so maybe one of the reflections here for other people listening is to ask yourself, what do you give yourself permission to feel?
What do you give yourself permission in principle to express so you do have the option? And then can you be judicious about whether to exercise that option or not? Yeah, that's really interesting, Dad. And I think that it speaks to something I did want to talk about a bit today. Because most people, particularly, again, most people who are listening to a podcast like this,
are well aware of the costs that are associated with anger. I could go through a whole list here, right? It tends to make us narrowly focused on a single thing. Chronic hostility has a lot of costs for our physical health. It can be super destructive. Because the other stress responses are more avoidance-oriented, whereas fighting is typically more engagement-oriented, the obvious costs of it are much higher. Because of all that...
we tend to socially stigmatize anger and therefore repress it in ways that we don't tend to stigmatize the other stress responses. This gets a little complicated when you start to talk about gender socialization and gender differences. because we do tend to socialize, for example, the flight response out of men. And you could argue that we socialize the fight response into men in a way that we don't with women.
But broadly speaking, as you were saying at the very beginning about Freud, we tend to tell people, don't express that anger because it's going to hurt other people and you'll regret it and then you'll be sad. But this just kind of has the consequence of what you're talking to. essentially trying to purify it out of people. But those emotions have to go somewhere, and they just end up getting bottled up inside in problematic ways. And then they leak out. Yeah, and that's the thing, right?
get nervous around people who never get mad because I don't believe it. Plus, it makes it hard to repair. You know, I myself have adopted a kind of admonition. aspirational standard of growth for myself, not to speak or act from anger because of its consequences, which has called me to feeling the anger inside.
But being careful about dumping it on other people. And that's a fine line, and how to strike, it kind of depends on the culture. And again, just to repeat, I'm not trying, and I know you're not trying, to... tell people not to be angry about certain things. But what's interesting is that when you call yourself to be careful with anger, you then get really drawn into the softer, more vulnerable.
often more central aspects that are underneath it. It can slow you down so you get more in touch with yourself and more in touch with the other person. So then you can repair a lot more effectively. I guess there's a middle path here. I wonder what you think about it. If when somebody has an issue with us and we just blast them with anger, that certainly blows up repair. But if actually what they did...
bothered us or what we did really bothered them. And there's no way to sort of be authentic and real about botheredness that also disrupts repair. I think you're totally right. And you're probably talking about something that has come up in the room for you as a longtime family and couples therapist over and over again, because this is a major and central issue in relationships. You have a dynamic that exists between two people. where one person expresses a request or...
to use a word that gets a little complicated, let's say a complaint, but it's a complaint about something real. Like there is something that's worthy of complaint that's happening inside of the relationship, right? They're saying, hey, I don't like it that you fill in the blank. And the other person responds to that.
in a way that makes it very very hard to continue with the feeling which is driven at least in part by a sense of frustration and frustration is tied to anger right like their response to something maybe it's trying to make a lot of excuses for what's going on. Maybe it's sort of pleading to history. Maybe there's this kind of...
To use the word a little loosely, a slightly narcissistic turn of it back on the other person, where I respond to your complaint with my complaint over here, and my complaint is bigger than your complaint, so you can't complain anymore. The frustration has been short-circuited.
then you've got kind of two options for most people. They either go up, like you were describing, they raise the stakes, or they go down, they pull the anger back inside of them. And I think that both of those responses are useful, and both of those responses are complicated sometimes. And I'm wondering what you've seen about that kind of a dynamic when you've actually done work with people. It's a really interesting question. And there's a way in which couples end up in my office sometimes.
because they're looking for a neutral and knowledgeable person to help them think through a complicated topic. But much of the time, they walk in the door in which the structure is plaintiff-defendant. One person has grievances about the other person. And so they're in my office to try to find ways to deal with that. Sometimes also they have process issues, like they're not able to talk about things very well.
In that context then, the person who has a grievance, the person who has complaints, they're often angry about them. And then the other person is trying to fend off that anger or minimize the basis for it. And they're angry themselves at being pushed on because they don't, you know, if they'd wanted to give the other person what they wanted, the couple would not end up in my office.
Part of it is, what do we do when somebody wants something from us? And what do we do when what they want comes with this angry topspin? Because very rarely are people perfect about, oh, honey, I really wish you had... this or that, and what do you think about doing something different the next time? You know, it comes out with irritation. So can we separate out the irritation that's coming at us from the substance, the content, right?
that the other person's speaking to and that can be really hard for people to separate that out so part of what i'm doing as a therapist and i think it gets to what you've been getting at is helping people learn how to tolerate anger their own and other people's. One of the great things that helped me along the way was I'm now much more comfortable when people are angry at me or angry in general. I can stay in place with it.
And I think, too, that's a really important thing for us to develop, the capacity to stay in place with the anger of another person. not knuckling under, not becoming a doormat, but not fighting with it either. And then when the storm has passed some, being able to speak our mind in response to it. rather than having to either shut it down or flee or fawn to get it or freeze, to get away from it.
I think it's interesting that we've started by mostly focusing on the repression side of the spectrum. I thought that we were going to actually get to that later in the conversation. So let's say that you're working with somebody who you feel... has a lot of resentment. And I would describe resentment as repressed anger by and large. They're frustrated with something that's happening. Maybe it's a partner. Maybe it's just situations going on out in the world.
You're seeing them as an individual, not as a couple. And one of your goals or one of the goals that you've identified is the desire to help them kind of access those feelings more, experience them out. deal with that resentment, is there a typical arc to that kind of work that you have with people? Like, are there things that you would be focusing on or drawing their attention to? It's easier for me to do this as a therapist because usually they're not angry with me.
If they get angry with me, that's a golden opportunity, actually, to, I don't know what, to deliver the goods even better. Work with the material, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So step one is legitimize it. Join with it, validate it. If anything, kind of turn up the volume. Because very often when people have resentments, they're neither letting themselves feel it intensively and fully.
so that it flows through, nor are they processing it in a way in which they can completely release it and come to peace about it and just let it go. So step one is to help them really claim it. really own it and in part by validating yeah it was really bad what happened to you. Now, sometimes over time, I'll work with someone and because they know that I'm fully prepared to validate their anger and their resentments, then sometimes there really is a basis.
To look at them with that therapeutic twinkle and the eyebrow raised and, you know, sort of essentially ask, hmm, hmm, was that, what do you think? Is that really such a big deal? You know what I mean? But you can't get away with that unless you clearly have established your credentials to someone who is on their side. So that's part one.
And then I think part two in the trajectory, it's to start moving toward, okay, what do you want to do about it? And that's when you start getting into the payoffs of... the anger, but also the cost. What are the costs for you in carrying that? Thinking about it, ruminating, being preoccupied, holding onto it, that grudge, that grievance.
Buddhist metaphor, getting angry at others is like throwing hot coals with bare hands. Both people get burned. You're burning yourself. I think in AA they describe resentment as like taking poison and waiting for others to die. We often resent people and we're angry at people that we have no recourse to. We can't do anything about it. Maybe they're no longer alive or they're just not in our life anymore. We both left high school 25 years ago.
nothing to do at this point. So it's not good for you. So facing a cost and then shifting into, well, what can we do? And that's where I think that kind of building on Peter Levine and trauma, that Immobilized anger is the worst of both worlds. It feels horrible, it's bad for your body, it leaks out in relationships, but it doesn't move you into productive action. So then at that stage...
I'm trying to help the person tap into and be actually mobilized by the adaptive functions of the anger that you highlighted into appropriate action. So those would be kind of almost like three stages, stage one, validation, stage two, a fairly poignant exploration of how is this affecting you? What are the... payoffs and what are the costs? And then third, okay, let's make a plan here so you can move to a release in part through taking action.
Yeah, there's something about this that's reminding me of a piece of content that I bumped into when I was doing prep for this episode, which was this great video from Dr. K. If you're watching this on YouTube, you're probably already familiar with Dr. K. It's Healthy Gamer GG, I think is the name of his channel. if i'm remembering correctly huge channel mental health he's a harvard psychiatrist really smart guy and
He had a video titled, Can Anger Actually Be Healthy?, where he made a point that I thought was really interesting, which is that unhealthy anger. Because part of what we're trying to do here, as I said in the intro, is distinguish the useful aspects of this thing from the more damaging aspects of it, right? is that unhealthy anger is associated with thwarted expectations. So this is a space that a person has claimed or wants or has a desire around that they don't actually own necessarily.
And I think that for a lot of resentment issues and a lot of repressed anger, they get to just poorly communicated expectations and assumptions that we have, particularly for the behavior of other people. Not all, but probably most of the anger that people feel is directed at somebody else, at another individual, maybe a group of people. And a lot of the time it emerges inside of our relationships, and that's where resentment can be really problematic.
I forget what the, God, I keep on forgetting this word. The Gottmans identified that there was a feeling that tends to lead to divorce, and it's not resentment. Well, disdain. Disdain, disdain, contempt and disdain, yes. Yeah, for the other. That's it. And I think that resentment is a gateway drug to contempt and disdain. Wow, that's interesting. Wow. Totally.
Yeah, because it never comes out. It never has anywhere to go, to your point, Dad. So I wonder how much of this—because sometimes we do communicate ourselves clearly to other people, and they still do stuff that frustrates us, of course. But a lot of the time we don't. and we just have a belief about what somebody should do or should care about or should want that they actually haven't opted into.
But because we're too concerned to actually engage the material, we never get to a place where we can process this stuff in a real way. So we just kind of hang on to our resentment about it without giving it some kind of a release. Well, why don't we do it then? Fear. I think fear. I think that a lot of the time when we don't express these things, it's because we know deep down that we're not going to get the answer that we want.
that the other person really doesn't agree with us about that or doesn't think that they should do that. Or even if they do kind of say they will, we know that they kind of probably actually won't.
A lot of the time it's important to acknowledge that we're wrong about that assumption that we're making about the behavior of the other person, but that's our deep feeling. We don't think that they're going to say yes, otherwise we would have already asked the question. But what if it's not unreasonable? So what if, to use some examples that you've talked about, you have an expectation that if you work hard, do your job, you'll get promoted, but you suddenly start to discover that
The deck has stacked against you for various reasons. Or maybe you've really invested in a relationship. You've been straightforward. You've been caring and kind. And the other person just... dumps you or isn't kind about it or even cheats on you. These are expectations. Yeah. What do you do about that? Well, I think this is where we get into the more adaptive parts of the fight response.
If you're repressing an adaptive response, then yeah, there are problems on both sides of the spectrum. We can have unhealthy repression, which is kind of more in the lens of what I would say you're describing. which is where there really was something that was truly problematic and we're pulling back on our expression of anger. because we're not socially situated in a way where we can't express it, where we're not comfortable expressing it, whatever it is.
On the other side of it, we can have more of what I'm talking about, where somebody is becoming resentful about something because of a communication issue. There's a should in their mind that is not being met. And that can be resolved often by actually communicating the thing that you really care about. To me, these are just kind of different bucketing. And a lot of our goal here is to figure out whether or not our response is appropriate to what's going on. And I think that...
the path to that is self-awareness and clear seeing of the world around us in as much as we can, and we get to those places by slowing down and paying attention. I don't know, I have a hard time attaching to this. this kind of thought that you have about this, Dad? Because I don't really get it, to be honest. It just seems categorically different. If I may be so bold, and I've said this to you when you were more, I think, in your 20s.
I think I made the comment that, with curiosity, that I've generally not seen you get angry. And I would say that in the last few years... I've experienced, maybe because I'm going downhill, are you actually being? annoyed with me from time to time. I don't think you're going downhill, Dad. Okay. Well, either I'm going downhill or you're getting more comfortable expressing annoyance. Sure, yeah. I appreciate it. I noticed that.
When you come in and, you know, your face is set in a certain way and I can say, oh, storm's coming. Oh, no. Squall's on the way. I like it. I like it. I feel good about it. And I think that's a lot because of our history. We have invested a lot in all the rest of that. I like it and I feel good about it. I'm glad for you. And I want to be better.
And it's never really over the top on the zero to 10 scale. I mean, you're barely cresting a three. You're probably down two or under. But in any case. So are you asking a question about that? I'm making an observation that is a good thing, I think, in relationships to create a frame, a context.
in which we can welcome the expression of anger. Sure, yeah, totally. Especially if you know and can feel that there's stuff under the surface that's just begging to be repaired, but the other person just won't talk about it. Yeah, yes. And thanks for bringing it in the room. For starters, I think you're right. During, I forget if it was the freeze episode or the self-abandonment episode, but during one of them.
I referred to myself as having a fawn sensibility. If you thought of the different stress responses as almost personality types, my lean is definitely more toward fawning than it is towards freezing or fleeing or fighting. Fawning in some ways is kind of the opposite of the fight response. I'm not an oppositional person. I'm a, let's keep it moving. Let's keep the train on the tracks. Okay, sure. Smile, nod, and move on as much as humanly possible.
is still my tendency. But as time has gone on, I think that I've experienced more the costs that have been associated with repression. Because my anger drug of choice is definitely that more irritation side of the spectrum. I do think that I am somebody who's more than capable of getting irritated or frustrated as opposed to
pissed. And so there's a realness to this material for me because I suppose most of the time when I ask you how do you work with somebody who has this set of problems, it's theoretical for me.
But I've definitely gone on a bit of my own journey with more repressed frustration in terms of finding useful ways to either think of it or express it out. So for me personally, I think that a lot of the… The concept of resentment as being driven largely by unexpressed requests or desires is totally real for me. When I'm mad about something that has a real source associated with it, kind of like in the counterexamples that you're raising, what if you're resentful about something that's real?
I'm pretty capable of kind of either shrugging and moving on or telling the other person to go screw off about it. I have good access to both of those. It's more that world of... unexpressed feelings or related material that i tend to struggle with a little bit more so i think that's kind of why i orient toward there a little bit does that kind of all track well thank you
And so we're highlighting situations in which we have not really expressed ourselves reasonably. There's also the case in which, of course, We have communicated what we need or want. We have made an agreement with them. Or there's a reasonable sort of standard about ways of being with other people.
So I think if I'm following you right, and I love this structure and what you said there about the fawn response is really interesting. I would describe myself as more into freezing and then gradually, very slowly, has been a kind of reclaiming of... potency. This might seem surprising, but I have always struggled to eat enough vegetables. Ever since I was a kid, I just didn't want to eat them. And although I've worked on that in my adulthood, it's still not my favorite thing to do.
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Yeah, so there's a lot of variety in the kinds of difficulties that people might have with the fight response. Some people need more access to it. They need more access to that kind of vital energy that's associated with it. Some people need to regulate it a lot better. They're just blasting away without regard to themselves or other people. And then some people are trapped in the messy middle. They're in that world of unexpressed resentment.
maybe expressed resentment, resentment that's slipping out of the cracks in different kinds of ways into their relationships, but hasn't been excavated enough to actually be worked with. So there's a range here, and we can understand that there's a range here. But to ask you a broad question, for this kind of family of issues, are there key strengths that you think are important for people to develop or things that you've done with people that have been particularly helpful for them?
The first thing that comes up is that I think that anger is particularly hard for people to own or claim inside themselves. It's fairly straightforward for someone to say, I'm really sad about this or I worry about that or I feel hurt or less than others with regard to this. But to be forthright in a talk about I'm angry about it.
Or more broadly, I want to go back in part to the whole fight response, of which anger is a subset. The whole fight response. And if you're engaging the fight response, you're declared. That's one reason why animals tend not to fight, because they're out in the open and it's really clear. You've taken a position, you've taken a stance, and everybody knows you did it. So it can be really kind of scary to say that...
this is wrong, I'm against it, or I'm not going to do that. Anger can be really scary. So I think part of what I do with people early on, and it's so important to do with ourselves, is to be okay with the experience of anger. Find ways to feel it, to let yourself have it, to appreciate how inhibited often we are at the real experience of it and the experience of related things, not just anger, but being big, being potent.
being declared, being forthright, being unmistakable, being loud in the room, especially if you've been really inhibited from those kinds of things, as I certainly was as a kid, to be very nice and invisible, seen and not heard. And so I think that's one of the very first things. A second that I see with a lot of people is to beware the seductions of anger, to be really alert.
to the ways in which that it can be alluring, you like it, you can get caught up in it, righteous cases, self-righteousness, grievances. I think we're biologically vulnerable. to feeling aggrieved at challenges to the in-group, much like we're biologically vulnerable to the appeals of sweets and carbohydrates, you know, going back to our evolution in small hunter-gatherer bands, you know, in the Stone Age.
And so being aware of that, people can get very caught up in anger, very identified with it. It tends to really promote the sense of self. The good news is that it can organize the sense of self when you're feeling kind of fragmented. or beleaguered. But on the other hand, it can really get caught up in me, me, me, me, I, I, I. Those two things I find really central in a therapeutic process or for people in general. On the one hand,
claiming your anger, being okay with it. And second, staring hard at the cost. And then third, finding a better way. Yeah. the more repression side of the coin that we've kind of focused on here so far. It feels like it's kind of a two-step process maybe for people. The first is recognizing that there's something that's being repressed. The whole point with repression is that at first it is not necessarily aware of the process that's going on as it's going on. But then the second half of it…
when you get to the world of expression people often struggle with it because it's so fraught for us for the reasons that you were describing like you're very exposed it feels very vulnerable it feels very complicated to to actually expressing a desire at all is extremely complicated for people. Those thwarted desires, again, are often associated with anger. So to be thwarted in something, you need to be real about having a desire in the first place, which, man, that's tough.
And I'm wondering in the development of that feeling of bigness, if there's something that you've seen be helpful for people broadly. And this kind of connects to a question that we've now has come up a couple of times. several episodes in a row, which is sort of this idea of how can we increasingly develop the sense that I'm safe because I'm me?
or I'm powerful because I'm me as opposed to because I'm in a certain kind of relationship or with a different kind of person or in this situation over here. Just that fundamental sense of self-strength, maybe you could call it. So I want to call out two things related to what you said. One is the way in which fighting and anger is often occurring in a frame of power, different kinds of people's power.
And I'm thinking about different couples I'd seen in which the position in these heterosexual couples, frankly, of the woman as subordinate in those couples. was maintained by the threat of her partner's anger. And so as long as she stayed inside those lines, those bounds, everything was fine. It was nice to her. Things worked okay.
But if she dared to step outside of them and to challenge his power by asserting herself in ways that he opposed, boom, then the anger was implemented. So it's interesting to think about the framing there because, of course, Fighting is a form of domination, or we're breaking free from their domination, which they don't like. So that's kind of the backstory often to think about it.
and obviously that's a backstory that's very relevant when you have parents and kids and both during you know the childhood of those kids and then later on as they're adults how is there a shifting of power and breaking out of old frames of power. So that's there for me. The second thing is that the fighting, we can get trapped in what we oppose and something really interesting happens.
isn't it for us when we take the energy in which we start out by being opposed to what we're against we know what we're against but what are we for yeah more of a pursuit orientation Yeah, and if we can shift the energy, we start with what we're against, but then hopefully we don't get trapped there. And then hopefully we start to identify in our marriage, in our family, in our work, in our country.
in our world? What are we for? And then interesting thing happens when we shift from fighting with what we're against, often with anger, to pursuing. what we're for, we keep all the passion and all the energy and all the focus and the organizational aspects with it, or anger organizes the psyche. We maintain that, but we drop the negative affect of anger itself.
There may well still be intensity in what we're for, in what we're pursuing. We can still be fiery about it. We're really for it. But we're not paying the price. We're not paying the toll of the affect of anger. I think that's great. And I wonder if... that's in some ways a key difference for people in relationships between interactions that go well and interactions that go poorly. That's so good. Yeah, like how much of that energy?
that anger energy, you know, whatever you want to call it, is directed toward here are the ways in which you have messed up. Versus it being directed toward an aspirational view of what the person actually wants. Yeah. Toward pursuit. That is really deep for us, right on. It makes me think about the shift from... basically complaint to request yeah right yeah or you know critique to problem solving
I do want to maybe give a little mini shout out here to nonviolent communication, Marshall Rosenberg, all of that stuff. I just know that there are people who are listening who are probably shouting into their faux nonviolent communication right now. But okay, so name again. Go ahead, Dad.
Yeah, basically fantastic. So starting with sharing our experience that occurs in certain situations. So when X happens... you know i feel y because i need z so it's in the context of our values that which then can become so from now on our request you know, such and such. That's my highly simplistic summary of the formula, essentially, of nonviolent communication, which is bigger and broader, et cetera, than that. But it's so interesting to get in touch with, what does that feel like?
to shift from what you're against to what you're for? And what does it feel like for the initial energy of anger to shift into an intensity, certainly, but without anger? for what you're trying to create with another person. Yeah, I think so much of this gets back to issues related to self-expression. You don't have to express yourself.
But just like you were talking about at the very beginning of the conversation, Dad, it's really important that you feel like you could express yourself. You have the option. Exactly. Yeah. The presence of the option, I think, is a huge part of this. Feeling like you have the option often takes the charge away from whatever it is that you're actually feeling in the moment, right? Like from whatever...
The feeling of repression, the feeling of the powder keg that I think some people have, that I've certainly experienced at various moments in my life, if I felt like I could express it, then I wonder how different that would have been for me. back then in different kinds of ways. But I just didn't feel at choice about it, not because somebody was stopping me, but because my own self-concept was stopping me. I did not feel free inside of myself in that way.
And that notion of feeling at choice about it, I just think is such a huge thing. And it's a huge thing to explore in our relationships, too. Like you were describing fairly early on, the notion of creating a relationship where there's the space, the possibility of having that kind of expression inside of it, I think is really important. Love is coming up for me.
both as an experience and also as a topic. In terms of the felt sense, again, what's it like as an experience in an embodied way to move from what you're against to what you're for and to shift out of the anger? into maybe an intensity of what you're trying to create, what you're trying to bring into being in the world. And somehow in that can be, I think sometimes, in what can be almost counterintuitive.
of an arising of love as a current. It's a current in the fieriness, in the moral outrage, in the desire to make something better. That's tied to that pursuit orientation you were talking about. What's it being driven by? Maybe it's being driven by love. Yeah, totally. Can be woven a current of love. Something that we basically haven't talked about.
at all during this episode, Dad, is unregulated, inappropriate expression of anger. Which I think is really, really funny, because if you clicked on this episode, you were probably expecting us to really highlight the the costs of anger the ways to regulate it better how to not explode in other people and we've essentially spent the better part of like 40 or so minutes here talking about issues with repression which i don't know if that's like do you
psychoanalytic for the two of us or what that says about what we think is important for our audience or what else. But I do want to ask a little bit about the regulation aspect of it because we do get questions from people pretty frequently along the lines of, I just... feel like I'm about to blow up at somebody and I have a very difficult time regulating that.
For people who need to develop better emotional regulation skills around the expression of anger, it's causing problems for them, it's blowing up their relationships. How would you kind of walk somebody through that process? I love the topic and it's definitely one I've worked with because I would say that just about every mistake I've ever made interpersonally involved my anger. Yeah.
I'm basically right there with you, yeah. Maybe every one of them, actually. Okay, so a couple things, a few things here. First off, the structure of anger. The expression of anger, research shows, is typically a two-stage process. There's the priming stage, and then there's a trigger. So we build up issues, undelivered communications, thwarted expectations, hurts, disappointments.
broken agreements etc we set them aside we set them aside we set them aside and then something happens it's the last straw boom i don't know if this is an original rickism but one of my all-time favorite examples that you've given of an idea is it's like tossing matches into the corner of the room
each time that you get pissed about something or each time that that thing builds up, the person does that thing that you don't like, you're just tossing a match, tossing a match. Sometimes it takes only a very small spark to ignite the whole pile of matches. And then the person looks at you like, wait, all I did
was not use my blinker when I merged that one time, and there was nobody else around anyways. What is happening right now? But the truth is, it's the accumulation of all of those things. Yeah. Anyways, keep going, Dad. I just love that expression. Oh, thank you for that. Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. So deal with little things early on before they become big ones. And I think about anger and issues that we have with people, either find your way to really addressing them.
or find your way to really disengaging from them. But being caught in the middle where you're sputtering, you're bickering, even finding your way into bickering and sputtering as a mode of relating. In a long-term relationship with siblings, family, aging parents, or spouses, or maids, really problematic. So one or the other, that to me has been really useful.
In terms of the body of it, it's important to appreciate as well that if people are dealing with chronic pain, that's going to make them more irritable. So dealing with health issues or ongoing things you're struggling with, like... you're losing your eyesight or it's harder to hear other people. Then it becomes kind of annoying in particular when they don't speak up or speak clearly. So that's important to take into account as well. I find that certain
Feelings are strong antidotes to anger. Compassion is a strong antidote. Compassion for those who have wronged you doesn't mean you agree with them, but... You can see their suffering, including sometimes how their suffering was a factor in what they did that wronged you. Compassion. It's really helpful also to appreciate that anger, as the proverb puts it, with its honeyed tip and poisoned barb, poisons you. And a shift for me occurred when I...
began to reframe anger as an affliction upon me. It was not that I wanted to repress it, it was that I became very aware of its price. So that's something also helpful for people who have issues with regulation. Certainly becoming more regulated broadly, you know, the cultivation of mindfulness, being able in also real time to...
kind of manage your emotions and talk yourself down, these are certainly really effective things too. Last thing I'll say, and I've mentioned this before, sometimes I imagine that a video recorder is up in the corner of the room. and it's monitoring me, and the recording is going to be played at your wedding, Forrest, or my funeral.
Or for the APA, you know, depending on the situation, you know, on CNN. No, no, not that. So that could be kind of helpful too. Again, not to muzzle yourself. The last thing I'll say. is that I think often people get angry or they move into problematic forms of fighting when they don't think there's another way or they don't know about another way. And to find your way into... dignified firiness, wholehearted, confident, grave, serious communication.
For many people, that's a very unusual and uncomfortable way of being. And so listening here, you can imagine finding your way into that form of really... claiming your power and claiming your authority and being really grounded. When you're centered there, you don't need to be angry. I think that's all great advice for starters.
to layer maybe a couple of other things on top of it here. I wonder about the aspect of it where you listen to it so you don't have to act from it, if that makes sense, if we think about things in almost a kind of IFSE model.
Sometimes our parts tend to calm down a little bit if they feel like we have given them a little bit of time and space to be the main player on the stage. And I wonder about that sometimes, particularly actually for people who can act from anger very habitually, how much time have they actually spent not paying attention to the anger, but paying attention to the feelings the anger is arising out of? the often softer, more vulnerable, sometimes younger
feelings and experiences that we have inside of us that form the basis, the foundation, for whatever's going on when we're actually expressive with others out in the world. So I wonder about that a little bit, and exploring that, exploring that material, that could be a very fruitful process for people.
Also, frankly, listening to like, what's your anger telling you about your own behavior? And I don't mean your own behavior in like a critical way. I mean it in terms of, have you just stretched yourself out a little bit too much here? Is it time to take a step back from somebody who just chronically irritates you and is making you feel a way that you just don't want to feel anymore? Is there a practical solution that is suggested by how you're feeling?
And that sometimes can be a major source of frustration in relationships because we feel like the person who's frustrating us is our partner and we can't change them and we're just kind of trapped. And that feeling of entrapment and defeat is just like... a major painful experience for people that can be very very difficult to work with but often in our life there is an actual practical step that we could take to change our circumstances in a way where we would be less
less afflicted by this thing that is now starting to cause us a lot of pain. The last thing that I would say, just as a general piece of advice, is that anger practically is very focusing, makes us very one-pointed. narrowly trapped by whatever it is that we're thinking and feeling. To the extent possible, if you can find enough space, find enough of a pause to take a little bit of a step back and force yourself deliberately.
to take a slightly wider view. This isn't forgiving anyone for anything. This is not making excuses for other people. It's you going through an exercise inside of yourself where you're going, huh? Can I view this situation a slightly different way? Just as a mental exercise. If I were to do that, what would it be like? And then you can kind of go from there. And you get to decide for yourself. Is it fair for me to do that?
Does this person deserve me doing that? Is this a situation where it's appropriate for me to do that? Up to you. But I do think that the practice itself is incredibly helpful in stopping people from the costs that are often associated with anger.
That is so completely true. It's great. Just the slowdown is a big one. Because then you're at choice again. Self-expression. You get to choose. It's all about, do you get to choose? I'm thinking also, Forrest, about... our topic here of fight and the inhibitions people have acquired often growing up against challenging authority figures or the dominant paradigm, so-called.
And what is it in us that can help us claim a healthy fight? And part of it, I think, has to do with claiming to ourselves that we are not intimidated. And also that we don't actually grant the forces coming against us with our own approval. We don't sanction them. Now, outwardly... we may be outnumbered we may be outgunned it's we need to maintain the mask of compliance but inwardly inwardly we are not cowed or bowed we are not intimidated and we do not feel shamed
So that is a very important place, I think, for people to know what that feels like. It's been important for me over the years. And it's interesting that as we kind of claim that, then we don't need to resist. And we can then shift into being more focused on what we're for rather than being trapped in what we're against. As we get to the end here, Dad, is there this like all of...
the stress response episodes and many of the episodes that we do, I feel like we could just keep on digging into in a bunch of different ways here. But I'm wondering as we come to the end, is there anything that you want? that we maybe touched on for a minute that you want to focus on a little bit more here or remind people of or anything that you would just like to add to the conversation. One more thing is how do we handle being angry with ourselves? Sure, yeah.
No, I think that's a huge source of anger for people, totally, or frustration, definitely, man. Yeah, and how do we handle either side of that, speaking of parts work almost, you know, how do we handle the... The part that's yelling at us, and then how do we handle the part that feels yelled at? Inside ourselves. Inside ourselves. And that's really interesting.
On the one hand, I've gotten a fair amount of value in being a little disgusted with myself at certain points. And just, I think it's a kind of disenchantment. I think it's a version of hitting bottom around certain things.
where you're just you've just kind of had it with yourself you know kind of like you can as you said earlier i've lived that life i've lived that life for sure yeah you've just had it with a certain person or a situation like you're just kind of done there and It's like, wow, what is it like to, what's the distinction between the healthy parts of being disgusted with yourself or you've had it with yourself or you're really chagrined and you just...
You're mad. You're annoyed with yourself. And that's good. It's good fuel for never doing that again. What's the difference between that and toxic self-criticism? And I think the difference is, and it's parallel. to being irked with someone, just to go back, the reason in part where I feel very comfortable and even welcoming of you being mad at me. irked with me is because I always feel that you see the whole of me and appreciate me and you're for me. But now to do that to ourselves.
Yeah. Right? That's the difference. You know, the voice that just is shaming and scorning and vitriolic and corrosive, it just is trying to tear us down. It's absolutist. It's absolutist. It's like, you're just bad. But that other voice, the one that is, in a healthy way, disgusted with ourselves or just...
mad at ourselves, annoyed. It's really a lot in the frame of, you could do better, bro. Yeah, I don't want to cut you off here, Dad, but I do wonder if it actually kind of gets back to that more like pursuit orientation versus like pushing away orientation. Does that kind of make sense?
the better person you could be. Yeah. Aspirational. It's in the service of that better person you can be. Totally. And I think that people often think that they're being aspirational when they're really just being self-critical. And maybe a useful question to ask is, what is it that you're moving toward with this? Even if it's just an inquiry, like, what do I really care about? Which is a really useful inquiry for people. Well, here's the framing.
on what we're talking about coming from the Buddha himself and that tradition, which frames the hindrances. These are things that... hinder us. Yeah. They hinder us or they cover over the goodness that's within us. And so... The process is about removing that which hinders us, like the thing that you're mad at yourself about in a healthy sense. The frame of that is basically you're saying to yourself, look, this is really getting in your way.
You know, what you're drinking, what you're eating, what you're saying, what you're watching, what you're doing, something. It's hindering you. It's hindering the goodness that is wanting to move forward here. And so what I'm trying to help you do here. and you're talking to yourself now, is removing the hindrances to the goodness that is looking for ways to be expressed. Well, I think that's fantastic and is in some ways a good summary of what we've talked about today.
which I think is a great way to think about the distinction between the more problematic forms of anger and the more useful forms of anger. Like, what is really oriented toward that aspirational stance? What are you pursuing by being in that fight stance, if we want to call it that? Versus are you just in pure protection? Sometimes there's a place for that.
Pure avoidance, sometimes there's a place for that, but still, like clearly the more aspirational side of it tends to lead to better outcomes for people. I really enjoyed today's conversation with Rick focused on the fight response to stress. And I've just been a fan of these conversations about the stress responses in general. As a quick note, as I said during the introduction, we...
took the self-abandonment episode as our informal fun response episode. But if you would like us to do a full-on episode on the fun response, please, if you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment down below letting me know. or you can leave a rating and a positive review wherever you're listening to this podcast right now. It would be really helpful for people to give us some feedback about that because we're open to it. I just thought that we might end up exploring a lot of similar ideas.
We started by talking about what's in the fight response. One of the things that can be a little challenging when it comes to talking about stress responses is it's pretty apparent what a zebra is doing. when it's stressed, if it's running away, if it's fighting with another animal, if it's freezing in place. But it's often a lot harder for us to tell what we're doing and how we're responding in a given moment. Both that level of self-awareness in general is just quite challenging.
And then also, all of the stress responses are spectrums of behaviors. They include a lot of different things in them that aren't just in the case of the fight response, for example, hitting somebody physically. There are lots of ways to fight. that don't rise to that level or that level, frankly, of obviousness. And so it can be really helpful to understand what goes into a given stress response. And this is maybe particularly important to do with the fight response because anger...
is a very socially stigmatized emotion. For some understandable reasons, fighting comes with a lot of costs. And we know that there's a good chance that if we express that anger, we could really come to regret it later. But what this means is that repression is a problem with anger in a way where it's often not so much a problem with the other three stress responses. And so we spent a good chunk of the episode talking about repression.
There are many different reasons that somebody might repress their anger. Anger is very socially situated. What this means is that some people are permitted to express it socially and other people are not. And it's closely associated with power. the more powerful a person perceives themselves as being, or you could argue, the more powerful they want to become, the more free that they are in their expression of anger most of the time.
Now, anger is a normal human emotion, but it's historically been much more accepted when it's expressed by men than when it's expressed by women. And so women tend to, broadly speaking, a lot of generalities here. have a little bit more of a problem with repression and repressing their anger in the form of resentment than men, again, broadly speaking, tend to. Whereas men tend to have more of a problem with the unregulated expression of anger.
Working with repressed anger can be a very long process for people, but the first step of it is often acknowledging that it exists in the first place. A lot of the time when we're repressing our emotions, we are not doing it as this very conscious process. It can start that way.
But often it just becomes a habit where we move into other coping strategies rather than expressing how we actually feel. And so self-awareness is a big part of this. Why is it that we're doing what we're doing and not just on a superficial level? But what are the deeper emotions, often the more vulnerable emotions, that lie underneath how we're feeling? Sometimes that's sadness. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it's some repressed anger boiling down there.
From there, a therapist might work with somebody to help them feel a little bit more comfortable when they're expressing their feelings. Maybe this could be helping them feel stronger and more vital in general. It might be about giving them permission inside of their personal narrative to express those kinds of emotions. It could be helping them listen to those feelings. Anger is often extremely instructive for people.
If we want to fight with somebody else, there is a reason for that most of the time. And one of the problems with repression is that it often causes people to ignore the signals that their frustration, their anger, that fight response is telling them about the world around them.
So you've taken on all of these costs, all the costs of repression, without any of the actual benefits that can be associated with anger or the fight response more broadly. From there, we moved into a really interesting conversation that actually got quite personal for me.
where we were exploring, and Rick made kind of a comment about how for a very long time, I was not somebody who expressed a lot of anger. And I sort of unpacked that in real time, and it was interesting to think about, and I think that he's really right. I've definitely had issues in my own life with the comfortable and safe expression of anger, with reclaiming that as an emotion that I'm permitted. And also maybe more importantly for me, and maybe more importantly for some people listening,
I tend to get frustrated and resentful about things I have not properly expressed to other people. About expectations that I have, desires that I have, wants and needs that I have, that I haven't actually, truly, clearly expressed. to the people around me. And then you get frustrated that you aren't being met in those needs. This got to some material from Dr. K that I found pretty interesting, talking about how unhealthy anger is associated with thwarted expectations.
And those expectations can be thwarted for a whole bunch of different reasons. Maybe they're thwarted because you didn't express yourself. Maybe they're thwarted because you did express yourself perfectly clearly and other people just didn't respect you. But if it's in that first category, there's something that you can do about that. You can actually communicate that to other people. And it is so much easier most of the time to get pissed or resentful or frustrated at somebody else.
for not doing what we think they should have done or what we wanted them to do, than it is to face the fear of clearly communicating that to the other person. and therefore to have to stand openly in your principle, to actually have to be committed to a view with that. And man, for a lot of people, that is really tough. For me, it is really tough, and it has been a very long process.
to even begin to get to a point where I'm comfortable doing that with others. Then, toward the end of the conversation, we talked about the other side of the coin, improving self-regulation. Rick gave some advice, I gave some.
And what Rick highlighted is that anger tends to happen in two stages. There's the priming and there's the trigger. The priming is all of the stuff that builds up over time. The trigger is the spark that lights all of the matches that have been thrown into the corner of the room. And often what happens, particularly in our relationships, is we build up this big pile of matches. And then it only takes a tiny spark to ignite all of them. And then the other person that we just blew up at...
is sitting there understandably going, wait, what just happened? That seems a little disproportional to whatever the trigger for it was. And the complexity of this is that A, they're right. And B, your feelings might be understandable anyways. And that can be a very treacherous balance beam for people to walk in their relationships. Another key point here is all the useful advice people would normally give about taking a step back, creating some space.
buying some time, whatever it is that helps you slow down and use that time spent slowing down to take a slightly wider view. Anchor is extremely one-pointed. It is all-consuming. we get sucked in to a very narrow perception of what is going on around us and what is important to us right now. That's why it's a great survival tool. And it's also why it's a really bad relational tool.
So to whatever extent you can, can you shift into a slightly wider perspective about what's going on right now? Can you see things through a slightly different lens? Can you take a little bit of that step back? Can you try to view the whole situation from a little bit of a higher vantage point? Whatever helps you broaden out a little bit, and then you're at choice. Because ultimately, this is about self-expression. You can express anger.
You can't express the fight response. You can do all of these things. And it's really important for you to feel like you can do it if you need to. And that at choiceness about it. often helps diffuse the problematic aspects of anger itself. One of the things that we found toward the end of the conversation was this idea of pursuing something with that kind of energy.
that fight response energy, that vital energy in the body, as opposed to pushing things away. And that being a clear way to distinguish between the more problematic aspects of anger and the more useful aspects of anger. What are you trying to pursue by using this energy? What are you for, not just what are you against? I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I thought this one was really interesting.
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