The Masculine and Feminine of Anger

The different ways we channel anger

 

 

What immediately comes to mind with that title is gender but the masculine and feminine are alive and well in all of us, what differs are our natural proclivities as humans towards it's expression.  Using somewhat stereotypical examples that can be given to these gender distinctions we will discuss some of the more hidden ways anger can manifest itself.  So often in our gender stereotypes we think of men raging and women crying.  When a man feels powerless he looks for something to make him feel powerful, anger can be tricky like that by making us feeling empowered, "rage" is strong, grief and loss are "weak". Often when a woman feels powerless she may withdraw or repress. In part this is how we are socialized, imprinted by our families and  geneticaly and chemical disposed.  In either case there are healthy and appropriate ways of expressing anger. 

For many more connected to the more "feminine" expressions we turn our anger inward. We may feel that It is unsafe to express,we might get hurt, someone might leave us, we are unsure how to express and we feel silly.  It is commonly excepted that many forms of depression are in their etimology based on unexpressed anger, repressed and turned inward toward ourselves "a safe target".  Another common expression of unexpressed anger is to reroute it in another way for example comfort eating, drinking, taking prescription drugs. The botom line is that no matter what stereotypical expression of anger we identify with we all need to express it and in a safe and healthy way.  Dr. Sandra Thomas, psychologist and editor of Women and Anger says "Anger is like a squeezed balloon.  If it does not come out in one way, it will in another."  Psychologists at the University of Wisconsin have come to believe that anger is the number-one trigger for substance abuse.  In light of this premise they have created a method termed "forgiveness therapy" which assists patients to find healthy outlest to release rage at the root of their issues.  In one study 14 patients with drug and alcohol dependence were randomly assigned either a twice-weekly forgiveness therapy session or routine drug/alcohol therapy treatment. The participants in the forgiveness group resulted in significantly higher improvement than their traditionally treated counterparts.

What we can learn from this is the importance and necessity of letting our anger out.  To accept that we all feel anger and that there are appropriate ways of expressing it. So get in touch with your anger, take note of when and how you may be sublimating it through food, passive aggression, or substances and find healthy ways to relieve it.  If you fall into the rager falsely empowered category, how can you feel the strenght of vulnerability?  The courage of expressing feeling strong and weak? The next step is forgiveness but before you can get there....

Go To: Healing Assignement- Healthy Outlets for Anger

The Enneagram Personality Type

How it can help you create the life you dream of

 

 

Learning how what your strengths and opportunities are as a person not only helps you designate the types of work your best suited to but also the types of partners.  Now that you are ready to move on, make sure you are being intentional about what you want to move on to!  The first step is to really know yourself and work to support your natural talents and opportunties.  Taking the Enneagram assessement also known as the Riso-Hudson Personality test will give you that framework in which to begin to intentionally create your best you and your best life!

 

 

Your Basic Personality Type

From one point of view, the Enneagram can be seen as a set of nine distinct personality types, with each number on the Enneagram denoting one type. It is common to find a little of yourself in all nine of the types, although one of them should stand out as being closest to yourself. This is your basic personality type.

Everyone emerges from childhood with one of the nine types dominating their personality, with inborn temperament and other pre-natal factors being the main determinants of our type. This is one area where most all of the major Enneagram authors agree—we are born with a dominant type. Subsequently, this inborn orientation largely determines the ways in which we learn to adapt to our early childhood environment. It also seems to lead to certain unconscious orientations toward our parental figures, but why this is so, we still do not know. In any case, by the time children are four or five years old, their consciousness has developed sufficiently to have a separate sense of self. Although their identity is still very fluid, at this age children begin to establish themselves and find ways of fitting into the world on their own.

Thus, the overall orientation of our personality reflects the totality of all childhood factors (including genetics) that influenced its development. (For more about the developmental patterns of each personality type, see the related section in the type descriptions in Personality Types and in the book: The Wisdom of the Enneagram. There is a discussion of the overall theory in Understanding The Enneagram (67-70).

Several more points can be made about the basic type itself.

1. People do not change from one basic personality type to another.
2. The descriptions of the personality types are universal and apply equally to males and females, since no type is inherently masculine or feminine.
3. Not everything in the description of your basic type will apply to you all the time because you fluctuate constantly among the healthy, average, and unhealthy traits that make up your personality type.
4. The Enneagram uses numbers to designate each of the types because numbers are value neutral— they imply the whole range of attitudes and behaviors of each type without specifying anything either positive or negative. Unlike the labels used in psychiatry, numbers provide an unbiased, shorthand way of indicating a lot about a person without being pejorative.
5. The numerical ranking of the types is not significant. A larger number is no better than a smaller number; it is not better to be a Nine than a Two because nine is a bigger number.
6. No type is inherently better or worse than any other. While all the personality types have unique assets and liabilities, some types are often more desirable than others in any given culture or group. Furthermore, for one reason or another, you may not be happy being a particular type. You may feel that your type is "handicapped" in some way. As you learn more about all the types, you will see that just as each has unique capacities, each has different limitations. If some types are more esteemed in Western society than others, it is because of the qualities that society rewards, not because of any superior value of those types. The ideal is to become your best self, not to imitate the assets of another type.

Identifying Your Basic Personality Type

If taken properly, our questionnaire, the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI), will identify your basic personality type for you. This short section is included so that we can have a basic understanding of the types in our discussion without having to go to the longer descriptions in the next section.

As you think about your personality, which of the following nine roles fits you best most of the time? Or, to put it differently, if you were to describe yourself in a few words, which of the following word clusters would come closest?

The Enneagram with Riso-Hudson Type Names

These one-word descriptors can be expanded into four-word sets of traits. Keep in mind that these are merely highlights and do not represent the full spectrum of each type.

Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.

Type Two is demonstrative, generous, people-pleasing, and possessive.

Type Three is adaptive, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.

Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.

Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.

Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.

Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, distractible, and scattered.

Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.

Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, agreeable, and complacent.

Information from the http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/

 Learn more about The Enneagram Assessment: 

http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/begin.asp

Take the Enneagram Assessment:

http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/dis_sample_36.asp

 

Stage 3 Healing Assignment: Express Your Anger through Music

The best angry break up songs!

 

Turn it up! Put on your headphones or crank up your speakers and let it out.  Let yourself sing at the top of your lungs as if you were singing right at your ex. The best angry breakup songs express the true anger felt from a breakup. Through these songs we can relate to and express how we are feeling. The raw emotions of a lost love, betrayal and disrespect can bring out more angry feelings than ever imagined. Your heart is shattered, the security is gone, the love has vanished, and you are very mad.

Their are several different styles of angry breakup songs for you to choose from. You will see some from earlier times and others from more recent artist. They express the angry feelings experienced in different ways you can relate to. These songs clearly speak to you in words and melodies of pure rage. See the links at the bottom of the page to add these cathartic melodies to your library.  Have a favorite not listed?  Let me know and we will add it!

 

 

1. "Anything But Down" performed by Sheryl Crow
    
2. "Better Things To Do" performed by Terri Clark
3. “Black” performed by Pearl Jam                                                                                                                                                                                    
4.  "Call Me When You're Sober" performed by Evanescence
    
5. "Can't Stand Losing You" performed by The Police
   
   
6. "Cry Me a River" performed by Justin Timberlake
    
7. "Don't Think Twice It's All Right" performed by Bob Dylan
    
8. "Go Your Own Way" performed by Fleetwood Mac
   
   
9. "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" performed by Green Day
    

10. "Here's A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" performed by Travis Tritt

11. "Hit the Road Jack" performed by Ray Charles

12. "I Used to Love Him" performed by Lauryn Hill
 

13. "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor
   

14. "Love is a Battlefield" performed by Pat Benatar
 

15. "Love Lies Bleeding" performed by Elton John
   

16. "Love Stinks" performed by J Geils Band

17. "My Happy Ending" performed by Avril Lavigne
 

18. "Not Gon' Cry" performed by Mary J Blige
 

19. "Piece of My Heart" performed by Janis Joplin
   

20. "Precious Things" performed by Tori Amos
   

21. "Shoot Out the Lights" performed by Richard and Linda Thompson
 

22. "Shut Up" performed by Black Eyed Peas
 

23. "Song For the Dumped" performed by Ben Folds Five
   

24. "The Chain" performed by Fleetwood Mac
   

25. "The Warrior" performed by Scandal
   

26. "The One I Love" performed by R.E.M.
   

27. "These Boots are Made For Walkin'" performed by Jessica Simpson
   

28. "These Boots are Made For Walkin'" performed by Nancy Sinatra
 

29. "You Better Run" performed by the Rascals
   

30. "You Give Love a Bad Name" performed by Bon Jovi
   

31. "You Got Lucky" performed by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
   

32. "You Oughta Know" performed by Alanis Morisette

 Find it on:        Apple ITunes www.itunes.com

 

 

The Link Between Anger and Stress

How your subconscious plays a role

 

 

Have you ever looked at the role stress has in anger? Stress can certainly create a variety of problems. If you are prone to anger, then stress will likely increase your angry behaviors.  It's a fact that going through a breakup or divorce is one of the top 5 stressors that any of us can face.  So how does that affect what your going through now?  Let's talk a little about stress itself and how that effects our lives in general.

When Stress is Healthy:

Stress is healthy when controlled. Healthy stress (Eustress) is what motivates us and makes us accomplish things. The stress of a breakup and the resulting emotions will actually propel us to do what we have to do to survive and get through. This type of stress does not cause anger or irritability. For those who do not have enough stress in their lives, they are often referred to as “unmotivated.” A certain type of stress may have actually propelled you to get out of complacency and leave a

Distress, on the other hand, is a type of stress that causes many people to be irritable and sometimes downright angry. This happens when the stress is too much and is no longer a motivator. You can think of this as when there is a combination of stressors and things just keep piling up. One day, the person does not know how to handle this anymore and there is an anger outburst.

What feeling is behind stress?  The fuel behind most feelings of stress or anger is usually based in overwhelm, helplessness, fear and feelings of being disrespected. To help give context and a sense of control to our anger, we must understand what emotions are really causing it and to release it in a healthy and constructive way. Many things contribute to stess beyond our experiences, environment is an important aspect.  In a recent article in Elle magazine entitled Anger management, author Rachel Combe finds herself at a cross roads of god and science.  She shockingly finds her beloved manhattan to be the cause of her uncontrollable temper.  In her article she sites her environment as stimulating her constitution, translation: she doesn't have the biochemical makeup to live in that type of a city, the result: she was out of control and raging.  In her article she speaks to Srinivasan S. Pillay, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the former director of the Panic Disorders Research Program at McLean Hospital, and author of the recent book Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear. The diagnosis?  It's the way her primal brain and correspondingly her nervous system  is being stimulated.

According to Pillay; The unconscious mind has fallen out of favor in popular psychology, as Freudian analysis (an attempt to probe the subconscious) has given way to more modern practices like cognitive-behavioral therapy (a reworking of conscious thought patterns). Freud, for many years, began to seem a little out there. “For those who required hard evidence—for those who could not heal themselves with abstractions,” Pillay writes, “there remained a void and serious cynicism that Freud’s conjecture was not grounded in fact, and that it did not have any basis in reality.” But now in the age of brain scans, says Pillay, there is hard evidence of our unconscious minds at work.

Finding the sources of our fears doesn’t take daily analysis of our oral fixations and Electra complexes, however. Pillay recommends meditation, therapy, and simple attention to our fears to try to suss out their sources. He gives the example of a woman who fell asleep every night to the cops-and-robbers shows her husband watched. She wasn’t conscious that the simulated gun battles were activating her amygdala; she just felt like she was losing her mind. Even though her conscious brain knew the TV wasn’t dangerous—she told Pillay his ¬theory was “a load of BS”—when she asked her husband to turn off the set, her anxiety levels plummeted.

Fear and anger are very related he says, "they’re both a response to a threat, and we know that they have a lot of overlapping features, in terms of the physiology”—racing heart, increased stress hormones—“and they share overlapping brain substrates.” Further, scientists have recently discovered cells in our brain called mirror neurons. These pick up on the emotions of those around us and play out some of the same feelings in our own brain. This is the basis of empathy, but also of angry mobs and bar fights. “When other people express emotions, we reflect their emotions,” he says. “They may not even be acting overtly angry or fearful.” Pillay and a friend came up with the term yoga rage to describe people who have an outward appearance of zen but who are actually seething with anger. “If you have a more sophisticated empathic mirror, you could still be responding to their feelings, even if they’re not showing them. And if you’re fearful or angry, you could be presenting to people as a form of threat.” Pillay writes that in studies in which the parts of the brain that deal with fear are stimulated by “non-meaningful electrical currents,”  people come up with stories to explain their fear. Once a fearful story is created, further electrical stimulus is like a double-click, opening up the story again and again. 

• What conscious or subconcious stories might you be telling yourself that stoke the flames of your anxiety fear and anger? 

 

Stress and Major Life Changes

Take this interactive test to find out where you're at

 

 Although everyone responds differently, major life changes are some of the biggest causes of stress, both positive and negative. This interactive tool gauges your stress level based on the number of life changes you have had recently. Your score shows a rough estimate of your current stress level and the likelihood that you will have health problems due to stress in the next 12 to 18 months.

Short-term (acute) stress can keep you awake at night and make you feel irritable and edgy. High stress levels over a long period of time (chronic stress) can cause serious health problems such as high blood pressure. And high stress can weaken your immune system and make it difficult for your body to fight disease. Stress is linked to health conditions such as depression, heart disease, and asthma.¹

Find out where you are on the stress-o-meter, click the link below:

http://health.msn.com/PopUp.aspx?cp-documentid=100105352

 

 

 

 

The Big Five: The five factor personality test

Learn more about who you are!

 

 

The Big Five factors and their constituent traits can be summarized as:

These five over-arching domains have been found to contain and subsume most known personality traits and are assumed to represent the basic structure behind all personality traits. These five factors provide a rich conceptual framework for integrating all the research findings and theory in personality psychology. The Big Five traits are also referred to as the "Five Factor Model" or FFM (Costa & McCrae, 1992),^[5] and as the Global Factors of personality (Russell & Karol, 1994).^[6]

• Openness – (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
• Conscientiousness – (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
• Extraversion – (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
• Agreeableness – (friendly/compassionate vs. cold/unkind). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
• Neuroticism – (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.

The Big Five model is a comprehensive, empirical, data-driven research finding. Identifying the traits and structure of human personality has been one of the most fundamental goals in all of psychology. The five broad factors were discovered and defined by several independent sets of researchers (Digman, 1990).^[2] These researchers began by studying known personality traits and then factor-analyzing hundreds of measures of these traits (in self-report and questionnaire data, peer ratings, and objective measures from experimental settings) in order to find the underlying factors of personality.  Curious to learn more?  The more we know about ourselves the more we understand how we relate to the world and others.  Take your test now, the results may surprise you!

 Take your test now:  http://www.personalitytest.org.uk/

Healing Assignment: Trauma and Denial

In this healing Assignment you will be asked to simply implement some guidelines and strategies for self-care.  Review the following and decide how you can follow through with each item in your life.

Remember, be patient with yourself. 

• Minimize unnecessary change.  Enough changes are already happening.  Some of you, especially if you were married or cohabitating will need to change most everything from the place your living, possibly your friends and even your economic life-style.  With all the change already taking place this may not be the time to pile on additional stress.   This choice can be individual, some of us thrive on change where others are paralyzed by it.  The important thing is to acknowledge your truth.  What will best serve you in feeling grounded, supported and spacious to allow healing?                 
•  Embrace Routine if your feeling disoriented, overwhelmed and disconnected from life around you.  You will know your responding this way if you do things like, lose your keys constantly when you never have in the past, or find that you are forgetting to do things that are part of your ordinary routine such as take your child to piano lessons or make your personal training appointment that you have had every week for the last 6 months.  You get the idea, if you are finding that you are not really functioning at your normal engagement level these are some ideas to embrace until you are feeling back to yourself:

1.  
   1. Use a scheduling tool, a pda, journal, calendar anything that you can have with you constantly and religiously use to record everything from what you need at the store to your regularly scheduled and random appointments.  This way you can rely on this centralized data base to look to when your not sure what to do next.  Give your already emotionally overwhelmed brain a break.
   2. Don’t over schedule yourself.  Do as much as feels good.  Again we all respond differently so the key here is to be aware.  It may feel good to surround yourself with friends and busyness until it doesn’t.  Don’t let busyness to the point of distraction, distract you from the healing work you need to do, namely running away from dealing with your sadness, pain or discomfort with change.

• EAT!!  Even if you aren’t hungry try and keep your blood sugar stable with light snacks throughout the day.  I know it’s tempting to use this anxiety and upset as a catalyst for weight loss however low blood sugar can amplify your feelings of anxiety and emotional instability as well as hamper even further your inability to focus. You will have plenty of time to work on feeling fit and healthy later, now is not the time to pile on punishment and judgement to your already stressed body and mind.
•  REST!  Just like low blood sugar lack of sleep will make a bad situation worse.  Lack of sleep compiles stress upon stress.  Sleep is our bodies time to rewire, integrate emotionally and psychologically; to refresh our limbic systems our basic bodily functions.  Without sleep even the most healthy and unstressed person can literally go into a psychosis (any severe mental disorder in which contact with reality is lost or highly distorted). If you are finding it difficult to sleep:
• Use the meditations provided to help calm the mind and ground yourself.
• Refer to the nutrition section for Stage 1 to find natural remedies for sleep and anxiety.
• Take a hot shower or bath. 
• Create a sleep routine that sets off your bodies routine for sleep.   Start by going to sleep at the same time every night.
• If you are having trouble staying asleep, have in place music, radio programs, online books, or meditations to listen to in order to lull your spinning thoughts back  to sleep.
• Avoid alcohol.  If you really feel the need limit yourself to no more than one small glass (refer to: the bodies reaction to alcohol and sleep in your RE nutrition section).

Be gentle and compassionate with yourself. 

Let yourself BE with all of your emotions without judgment or resistance.

 

return to Stage One Page

 Healing Assignment: How to avoid the pitfalls of past mistakes

Knowing our past patterns to make new choices

 

 

The moral of the story is indeed to recognize old negative patterns and how they may have contributed to bad relationship outcomes. It's time to write a new chapter in your life. Once your responsibility for your choices is seen, you have an opportunity to make a change. You can begin avoiding the holes on that street of life. You are now able to see the pitfalls ahead, because you know your pattern. This knowledge gives you control and you can intentionally respond to life in a different manner. A different response gives new possibilities. When someone triggers you to jump into a familiar hole, you can decide with eyes wide open where you want to go.

This is an opportunity to exam your beliefs.  Do you believe that life is hard?  Or that anything worth having is worth fighting for or struggling over? Do you believe you can choose your own path or are you a victim born under a bad sign?  Do you believe you are worthy of having what you want?  Is it even ok to want what you want?

Often times in life we find that we are in the same situation with a slightly different cast of characters. The one constant that runs through all of our stories is us. How do your choices, beliefs and actions contribute to your past experiences? 

• Write about your ideal future and brainstorm on some roads not taken, how will you get to this future and what are the holes in your road?  What steps can you take to find a new path?   Who can help?  Write down 3 steps you can take TODAY to take a new path.
• Use an affirmation whenever you find yourself looking into the same old hole.

1) The decisions i make help create my life

2) I can create new habits

3) I can make another choice

4) I have the power to decide

Finally, when you do decide to walk down another street, the old pattern no longer occurs. This new street will undoubtedly have its own holes but they will be different holes. What you will now know is, how it is that your in a hole and that you know how to get out!  It may be that you are not responsible, but the sooner you ask the question, "how did i contribute to this?" the sooner you can take charge of your life.

This process is like a spiral that leads us upward towards psychological and spiritual wholeness. The sidewalks of life do not go in a straight line, they may be like a trail that winds round and round a mountain until it reaches the top. Each time you break out of an old pattern of thinking and living, you begin a new switchback that leads you ever upwards and out of the holes.

As we have seen life is an education, through the lessons of the holes of life, all your potentialities are explored. You know what you do, and why you do it. Choices are made, and you are responsible for these choices. The holes in the sidewalk are actually invitations to grow.

Are you open to the invitation?

GO TO STAGE 4

There is a hole in my sidewalk: Deja Vu...Is that you? 

How to avoid the pitfalls of our past relationship mistakes

 

For many of us when we really examine our love autobiography we see an unmistakable pattern.  Whether it be in choosing a certain type of man or situation, we are always working on what in psychological terms we call developmental relationships.  A strong component in every person we choose in our lives is how they can play a role in our lives to allow us to re-enact old patterns of our families or our roles in our families.  This can be positive or negative but in every case within each relationship there is an opportunity to grow.  Often what brings a relationship to an end is that we can no longer grow together, the lesson is complete. When we begin to see in ourselves the inability to learn the lessons that is when we keep getting stuck in our inability to grow beyond patterns that no longer serve us.  Sometimes it is simply that we are unaware of the patterns, sometimes we simply don't know how else to be.

A woman named Portia Nelson wrote a wonderful poem called "There's a hole in my sidewalk -Autobiography in Five Short Chapters."  It is an allegory of someone who needs to make some changes in the way they live their lives but doesn't realize how or that there is another way. 

The story goes like this:

Act 1

I walk down the street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I fall in

I am lost...I am helpless

It isn't my fault

It takes forever to find a way out

Act 2:

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I pretend I don't see it

I fall in again

I can't believe I am in the same place

But it isn't my fault

It still takes a long time to get out

Act 3:

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I see it is there

I still fall in...it's a habbit

My eyes are open

I know where I am

It is my fault

I get out immediately

Act 4:

I walk down the same street

There's a hole in the sidewalk

I walk around it

Act 5:

I walk down another street

 

Go to Healing Assignment: How to avoid the pitfalls of past mistakes

Healing Assignement: Positive Psycology

How helping others helps you

 

Healing Assignement:

• How can you offer your service? 
• How can you make a contribution today? 
• On a daily basis what can you do to help others in need?
• Choose one thing you will do everyday and write it down.  Afterward write about how you felt following through.  Challenge yourself to step outside of what's convenient and safe.  For example: actually go to the homeless shelter and serve food.  or any other opportunity to actually go somewhere and have face to face interaction with others doing the same thing and those who you can assist.


What are your passions, what touches you?  There are a million ways to give back.  Here are some ideas to get you started:

• volunteer at a breast cancer race for the cure
• serve food at a soup kitchen
• read to the blind
• deliver meals
• foster a pet or volunteer at an animal shelter petting cats or walking dogs
• volunteer at a hospice
• volunteer at a childrens hospital or for make a wish foundation

return to Stage 2