Multiple Voices

What is Conflict

Most people have a clear idea what conflict is. Most people don’t like conflict. In most cases conflict is difficult and hurtful for all parties involved.

Social theorist Axel Honneth explains the significant role conflict plays for a person’s healthy sense of identity and individualisation as follows: Individuals learn about who they are through interactions with others. Thus they derive a sense of self and identity through social processes of approval and recognition.

Any forms of disrespect, for example rudeness, insult, humiliation, the withholding of care or support, the withholding of rights that are enjoyed by other members of society, discrimination, marginalisation, the lack of appreciation or acceptance for one’s way of life, abuse, rape, or torture cause a threat to a person’s integrity and self-development and could bring the whole identity of a person to a collapse.

How To Deal With Anger

Anger is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a normal reaction to being abused, betrayed, hurt, or otherwise disrespected. The important question is how to deal with anger appropriately. It is really important to remember that:

for many (survivors of abuse) anger is associated with strong feelings of fear, anxiety, guilt, or shame because often abuse was accompanied with anger and survivors don’t want to be like their perpetrators. This is, according to my understanding, often the reason why survivors to repress or suppress anger. However, the refusal to be angry (or give your angry parts room to express anger in appropriate situations, is in many ways the source of many anger problems.

The number one rule for dealing with anger is to understand where your anger is coming from. How does the present situation trigger earlier experiences of being treated badly? Once that is understood, it is possible to accept one’s anger as legitimate and feel compassionate with one’s angry part/side. The anger my have to be expressed in some forms that are meaningful for the client. That could be through using creative media or through verbal expression of anger in the presence of the therapist. There will be other ways that clients can explore.

The second step is becoming compassionate with your self. Becoming aware of our own hurt and generating compassion for our younger self is the beginning of becoming more compassionate toward others. Only through self-compassion can you truly be compassionate towards others.

Next you will need to evaluate what kind of a person you want to be. Do you want to be the ranting and raving angry individual that goes through life bitter and twisted, or do you want to be the person who cares about others and wants to connect with caring supportive others? Once you have sorted your core values, you will be able to catch yourself when you are about to act in a way the goes against your deepest values. It is than that you can change your behaviour.

There is no easy shortcut when dealing with anger. No drugs, hypnosis, or cognitive restructuring will make your anger go away. But when you are ready to really deal with your anger and go through the steps mentioned before, you will be able to transform any destructive anger into a wonderful, much needed life-force.

How Multiples Can Show Therapists How To Deal With Anger

Not too long ago people involved in the business of therapy, counselling, self-growth, and change would universally claim that pent-up anger needs to be vented. Armed with sticks, bats, tennis-rackets, towels twisted to rock-hard batons, and telephone-directories clients were encouraged by their therapist to express their anger by bashing on chairs, tables, floors, or mattresses – with the occasional encouragement to “put some words” to it.

Although it might have been a great way of approaching anger issues in some cases, nowadays the agreed upon knowledge is that it only vents some energy but doesn’t deal with the underlying issue that caused the anger to be there in the first place.

I believe that people with Multiple Personalities can give the therapeutic community a precious gift. They can prove convincingly that anger is nothing bad, anger is her to stay, and anger has an important function in peoples’ lives.

What do I mean by that? Angry parts are always angry for a very, very good reason. Angry parts show that if past issues are not dealt with, the anger will continue smouldering and poisoning the person’s life. Angry parts are close to people’s core hurt, and often they are the protectors of younger parts. The process of embracing or integrate angry parts is a great lesson of how everyone best deals with anger!

What Is Passive Aggressive Behaviour

Conflict situations with an angry person are characterised by noticeable contact in the form of friction or even collision. The angry person’s point of view and wants are generally obvious whether they are unrealistic or not. This is very different when dealing with passive aggressive behaviours. Like pathological anger, passive aggressiveness is caused by a person’s inability to express anger healthily. 

The anger could be repressed or suppressed to such extend that the passive aggressive person is not even aware of his/her anger. When confronted with being called angry, the passive aggressive person may be convinced the other person has most certainly got the wrong end of the stick.

 Because passive aggressiveness is such an ‘underground movement’, it can easily drive others to the point of giving up. If a person has little or no insight into their feelings, needs, and causes for their behaviour, conflict resolution or negotiation of a more successful relationship style is very hard to achieve. How do you know you or a person you know is passive aggressive? Here are some pointers: 

They not following through with what they say they would, don’t meet deadlines, ‘forgetting’ important dates or arrangements, don’t take responsibility but blame others or circumstances, don’t take a stand about anything important, rarely express anger, agree with other people's wishes but don’t follow through with what they agree to, don’t like to be alone, strong need to control others, don’t trust others, are withdrawn in relationships, punish by withholding affection.

In conclusion, we can say that the passive aggressive person expresses his/her hostility in a covert way by withholding and not doing what others perceive he/she was prepared to do, while blaming the lack of his/her action on circumstances or third parties.  They seem to thrive on resisting the expectations of others. Most painful, however, is that the passive aggressive person is unable to initiate, establish, and maintain a loving, caring, intimate relationship.

What Is A Pathologically Angry Person?

How will you know whether you or a person close to you is a pathologically angry person? A sure sign is when you notice a pervasive behavioural pattern that can range from being negative, irritable, bitter, resentful, or having temper tantrums on one side to being hostile, aggressive, self-destructive, furious, or having regular rage attacks on the other end of the continuum of anger.

Many of the above signs are core symptoms to mental health disorders such as bi-polar, borderline personality, anti social, or narcissistic personality disorders. People with these diagnoses are known to react to perceiving being insulted, rejected, ignored, or not cared for enough with an explosion of anger or even violence either towards the ‘offender’ or towards themselves.

While some experts opt for a pharmaceutical treatment path in the hope to sedate the angry person that inconveniently acts out their inner rage, other experts see these so-called mental illnesses as being rooted in the unprocessed, un-understood, and un-acknowledged anger and resentment that has been suppressed or repressed since the early years of the angry person’s life.

Pathological anger that festers unacknowledged within a person can easily be expressed in very uncontrolled ways either hurting the angry person him/herself, or hurting other people around them.  Left unattended, this anger can accelerate to the point of exploding with tragic consequences.

How Does Anger Become Pathological?

Anger becomes pathological when a person has over a long time mismanaged their anger. This starts in most cases already in childhood when children are raised within a family and/or society in which children's expression of affect and especially of anger is discouraged or even punished. These are families in which children are maybe see, but certainly not heard. These are families in which usually only parents are entitled to express anger and they often do so to punish or discipline their kids.

Of course, predicting what kind of person someone will become due to the suppression of anger is very difficult. The habitual and chronic repression of anger leads to a personality of a person that is quiet, passive, polite, maybe even over the top helpful until he or she snaps and acts surprisingly ‘out of character’, goes wild, goes on a rampage, or becomes very violent towards him/herself.

Someone who has learned from very early on to suppress anger is rather a time-bomb waiting to go off. Anger chronically suppressed or repressed seems to create a pressure-cooker dynamic that is very difficult to keep under control. Totally legitimate anger pent up over years tends to grow and earn interest like a bank account leading to a person struggling to cope with their resentment, bitterness, hatred, rage, and overall intolerance towards other people’s minor transgressions. Hence we notice aggressive, violent, or self-destructive behaviours that often have horrific consequences.

Some people think that pathological anger can also be a result of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, mental or neurological impairment, which seem to lower a person’s threshold for being able to regulate, manage, and express anger or frustration appropriately. My hunch is, however, that those impairments are also mediated or at least influenced by adverse childhood circumstances and chronically unexpressed anger.

As long as we as society are unable to appreciate anger as a natural feeling that informs us about a perceived ‘disrespect’, we will probably continue to have to deal with anger problems later on in life.

Is Your Anger Appropriate or Inappropriate?

What is appropriate anger – and is there such a thing as inappropriate anger? Anger is one of the eight basic emotions (they are joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation) we observe universally in people all over the world. Anger is a valid, necessary, and appropriate human emotion.  I consider anger, like all other emotions, as data, or better: emotional information about the quality of an experience we have. Whereas in the distant past anger has informed humans about immanent threat to their lives, nowadays anger rather informs us about a trespassing, injustice, disrespect, or pending  physical or emotional harm.

Does that mean that all anger is appropriate? Far from it! Inappropriate anger is based on irrational beliefs; unrealistic expectations of other people and of life in general, wrong perceptions, wrong interpretations of other people’s behaviours, and generalisations. More often than not, inappropriate anger has its roots in childhood experiences that caused anger or even rage which the child was at the time unable to express and has since suppressed. 

Having feelings of anger based on cognitive distortions, irrational beliefs, wrong perceptions, or suppressed childhood experiences will be damaging because they will cause frictions in relationships and ultimately work against the best interests of the angry person him/herself.

More important for making a distinction about appropriate or inappropriate anger is how anger is expressed. Inappropriate anger usually shows a degree of aggressiveness that is completely out of proportion to the infringement or provocation.  Thus, how anger is expressed is key to making the distinction about appropriateness. Knowing whether anger is justified or based on cognitive distortions or irrational beliefs , knowing where your anger comes from, is crucial for having successful and meaningful relationships and a good life.

How To Build Trust

How can you go about building trust? When you don’t trust anybody at all, it might seem like an unachievable task. I want to look at building trust from a practical, pragmatic point in the hope that it might give you some hands-one ideas how to go about it. Trust will develop in any group or team when

•    The team is successful and reaches the goals they set themselves
The most important pointer for people in recovery is that they achieve progress. Without having a sense that things improve it will be difficult to keep being motivated. When everyone becomes aware that progress is achieved, they will not only trust the process, but also trust each other and the ‘team-leader’.

Trust and be Trusted

As some of you may know, I am in the process of putting all my material about DID and recovery into a book form, so that ideas explored in this blog, from my practice, and from research (my own and others) can be integrated to form a functional whole. As I was working on that project over the weekend, I started thinking about trust and the meaning of trust for Multiples.

Stripped of all it’s bells and frills, trusting another person means that we believe they will act according to the positive expectation we have of him or her. To some degree, trust seems always to be linked to making a leap of faith. And if people have been hurt, when they feel their reasonable expectation of care, respect, support, or appreciation has not been met, trust becomes more shake. In most cases it’ll take some time and some doing for trust to be re-establish.

Love Is In The Air

Love is a particular difficult emotion for survivors of sexual abuse, because most of the time love becomes contaminated by the abuse. When trust has been broken, often people find it very very difficult to open themselves up to being vulnerable and let another person become important in their lives.

My latest newsletter focuses on love and some of the articles can be found here! If you want to be on my mailing list for my newsletter, sign up using the box in the side panel.