PTSD & Anger, Part 6: How To Heal

I love this fable. I don't know where it comes from, I don't know who to credit, but I love the symbolism and imagery and how it sums up our PTSD struggle in really simple terms.

*Two Wolves*

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said:

"My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute, and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied: "The one you feed."



Go feed your good wolf today -- the stronger we make him/her, the sooner we leave PTSD behind.


(Photo: Laenulfean)

PTSD & Anger, Part 5: How To Make Anger Work For You

So, it's been a good week. I've learned a lot about anger I didn't know. More importantly, I've thought a lot about my own anger so that I understand how it hindered me, and also how it helped me to heal. When we can see ourselves, recognize what's going wrong and understand why, then we can find the path to changing behavior and moving forward. Not a bad way to make some daily progress!

Today’s post I’m going to turn over to the voice of Kellie Greene, rape survivor and now activist and founder of Speaking Out About Rape (SOAR). Kellie has been National Spokesperson for the Pfizer/YWCA "Moving Past Trauma PTSD Community Outreach Program". In 1999, she founded SOAR, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of victims of sexual assault. SOAR is committed to raising awareness about rape and its consequences, including PTSD. Kellie also coauthored Florida's "Sexual Predator Prosecution Act of 2000". The law mandates consecutive sentences, rather than simultaneous sentences, for any repeat sexual offenders. In addition, Kellie helped pass Florida legislation that prohibits hospitals from charging rape victims for forensic teams. As a result of her efforts, Kellie earned the Survivor Activist Award from the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence.

What I find so inspiring about Kellie is that she went through all of the phases of trauma – shock, grief, anger, healing – and came out swinging. Kellie’s ultimate reaction to a brutal attack shows just how we can survive and then define a new self that is more powerful and bigger and better than ever.

Here are a few excerpts from our interview, ones I found particularly interesting as they showed Kellie's psychological process in the aftermath of trauma, and then how she constructed a new, post-trauma identity that led her to healing and a new life.

What were your initial reactions to trauma?

I had all of the usual symptoms: nightmares, insomnia, flashbacks. This is all the brain’s way of processing what’s happened to you. Kind of like back in the days when we had vinyl records and you would get a scratch on it and the needle would get stuck and it wouldn’t come out of it and it would just keep playing that one word over and over again. When you get PTSD that’s kind of like what it is: you can’t move past the thought of the trauma. So even though within 6 weeks I had started therapy after 6 months I realized I wasn’t moving forward. I was stuck in the sense that I started to isolate myself from friends and family because it was easier to be alone because I was tired of hearing myself talk about the trauma over and over again. I was afraid to go outside, and afraid to be out in the dark. Just making simple decisions was difficult. It all started to prohibit me from functioning on a daily basis.

On another level though, my initial reaction to the trauma was that I was determined not to let the rapist ruin my life or change who I was. I was adamant about getting back to my daily routine. Not appearing to be frightened. Not giving him control and power beyond the 45 minutes of my life he had taken during the attack. But in doing that I didn’t accept at the beginning that I had changed. I was ignorant to the fact that something that impactful couldn’t not change my life, either good or bad. I had this sense that I had to appear strong because I wanted to bet it. But you have to validate that you have changed, and unless you incorporate both the strength and the change I think it takes a little bit longer to get to where we are today.

What did you do to cope with all of this, to bring yourself to such a place of proactive strength?

In the beginning I was a mess. It was very difficult for my mother and boyfriend to be around me. They had to walk on eggshells. And I became very manipulative. I used ‘victim’ to my advantage. Any time something wasn’t going my way I would say, ‘I was raped.’ I would play that victim role and then everyone was forced to give in. I could even do that with counselors until I found the right counselor that would call me on it and I was stuck in a room and had to sit there to the end. It was my mom and my boyfriend who got me into the counseling and it was the best thing that they did because I was so out of control with wanting to be in control that I was out of control.

What made you decide to go into counseling?

My boyfriend actually had to track me down and take me there, and he did that for the first 2-3 months because otherwise I wouldn’t go. I was really frightened of counseling. I thought it meant I was weak. I thought I was better than this, I wasn’t going to let it affect me, I could deal with it until I thought if I had to go to counseling and ask for help it meant I wasn’t beating it, which was the wrong way of looking at it. Plus, I’m such a perfectionist. I don’t want to fail. I want to excel at everything I do and I didn’t want to fail at counseling. So, all of those things were really making it difficult for me to let go and say that I needed help to help me process what was going on in my head to actually start making sense of it.

I went through a handful of therapists before I began working with one who was calling me on the manipulation and was forcing me to talk about why I was actually there. Once I was working with her I started getting a little better, but then I reached that plateau where I wasn’t and that’s when things got really difficult and I knew that I needed more help and it was 6 months after the attack. I’d been working with this counselor for 3 months and I felt myself getting worse and worse with flashbacks and nightmares, not being able to make decisions – simple decisions, like in the morning not being able to figure out what to wear. It kept snowballing and everything was getting worse and I thought I was going crazy because I’d never heard or read about anyone being raped experiencing those types of problems, like also, crying all the time, or trying to read – at that point I couldn’t even get past one page. Maybe ½ an hour had gone by and I’d read 2 paragraphs, but I hadn’t understood what I’d just read. So, I thought I was going crazy, losing my mind. I didn’t tell anybody because I was really afraid of that. About six months afterward I was in the shower and broke through in these terrible, terrible sobs. I sat on the bottom of the tub in the fetal position rocking back and forth.

Finally I found a counselor and he read back to me from a book everything that I told him and he said. “You have PTSD”; he gave it a name. And he said, “This is what we’re going to do…” And at that point I could just let out this exhale. I had some hope because, one: I’m not alone. It’s in a book. Other people have had it, too, and they’ve studied it. And obviously there’s some sort of treatment for it because it’s in the book. And he laid out the treatment with me and I worked with him for about 6 months and I was able to recover from the PTSD pretty quickly and then go back to the rape crisis counselor and begin working on the aftereffects of the rape. All in all I was in counseling for about 3 years.

What in your PTSD process worked for you?

He got me to look at everything in a different way. To really examine everything that had happened in a different way. To get out of that mindset that I wasn’t going to let it change me to… One of the greatest things he said to me was that we all change. Every day we are changed by things we come in contact with. And to say that we don’t change kind of cuts us short of evolving as people. So, once I realized that it was okay to change, that it was okay that this affected me, that it didn’t necessarily have to affect who I was going to become, or who I was going to be in a negative way, I was able to look at it and say, ‘Yeah, that was a bad thing that happened, but it’s okay that it’s changed me because I can decide how it’s going to change me now. I am the one who has control over whether or not I’m going to let it control me for the rest of my life.”

Mostly we did talk therapy. The breathing exercises were great because they would keep my mind focused on breathing and not on what I was remembering, so it really quieted the mind for me so that I could actually work the counseling. And then he also said I was discovering some really great things about myself, because I had discovered that I was able to get up and speak in front of groups, which was always something I had feared. That I had a voice, and that I was pretty powerful with that voice and making positive changes for others and I should celebrate that, and I should embrace the counseling experience because I could go in and examine everything about my life from the beginning to where I was at that point, and it was an opportunity for me to keep pieces that I really liked, discard the ones I don’t like, and work on the ones that I could improve. So, it was an opportunity and once he presented it to me as an opportunity, then it was a little bit easier to swallow, as opposed to the rapist forced me into counseling.

When did you get to the point that you realized you could channel your anger into something positive?

That was from the very beginning. I owe that to my mom because my mom realized at the very beginning that if I were to fall into self-pity I would never have gotten out of it, or it would have taken a long, long time to get out of it. So, she wanted to keep me mad, as ticked off at the rapist as she possibly could. And that’s what she did! Whenever she would hear me feeling sorry for myself she would say, “Do you think the rapist is sitting around feeling sorry for you right now?” And I answered, ‘Hell no! Why should I? He’s probably not even thinking about me!” So, by helping me stay angry I was able to find different channels for that anger. One of them was I joined the Raped Abused and Incest National Center, which is RAIN. I joined their speakers bureau and started doing presentations for universities. I worked with the Attorney General in the state of Florida in passing new legislation. I also worked with the Attorney General in training law enforcement in dealing with victims of sexual crime.

Did the outreach help lessen your feelings of anger, or help you deal with them better?

As time went on I lost the anger toward the rapist because I started to be thankful for the direction that my life had gone in. Before the rape I really didn’t have any goals in life, I didn’t really have any direction. I was happy, I loved my life and I was living it very well and I was doing very well, but I didn’t really have a sense of purpose and I would say within 6 months to a year after the rape I knew what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to educate the world about the aftermath of rape. Of what it’s really like. It’s not like in the movies, it’s not like in the soap operas… And that was what I wanted to do. So, I just started to channel all of that anger, that energy that I had from the anger into making this the reality and I honestly think that it was my chosen path and that it was my true chosen path because I remained true to it. I try not to question the direction I’m going in now because somehow these opportunities, these amazing opportunities keep presenting themselves to me, so I know that I’m on the right path and I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing and that this is my purpose in life. And I wouldn’t go back and change anything that happened in my life, including the rape, because it’s brought me to who I am and what I’m doing today and I love both.

(Photo: Glenn Loos-Austin)

PTSD & Anger, Part 4: The Psychology of Anger

In my own experience I've found two dominant sides to the psychology of anger coin: Fear, and motivation.

First, I have to apologize to my mother. I do apologize to my mother, often now that I’m healed, for all of the abuse she absorbed during my PTSD years. She is an amazing, strong and wonderful woman; if it weren’t for her love, patience and understanding we would have stopped speaking 20 years ago because there were many days, weeks, months I couldn’t be around her without snickering, snarling and sneering.

If you’ve scrolled down and viewed the ‘Faces of Joy’ you’ve seen that my mother looks eminently fun, happy and approachable. But that’s not how I saw her when I was PTSD suffering. Instead, she was the villain and I the victim of her ‘Let’s get you some help’ anthem. She saw me struggling and wanted to talk – all the time. She saw me hurting and wanted to reach out – endlessly. She was tireless in her desire to find some way to lead me to peace. And for that I hated her. For that altruistic goal I unleashed upon her all my fury.

Why? Because the pain in which I lived was intense, and I only wanted to be left alone in it. I did not want to share, explore or study it. I was afraid doing any of those things would tip the delicate balance I had constructed and everything would fall to pieces. I was afraid going into those dark places, ideas and moments would suck me in and I’d be lost forever. I was afraid I’d be overwhelmed by the pain and the memories. I was afraid the process of healing would make me weak. I was afraid the trauma would win if I lifted it up and exposed it to light. (I was wrong about each of these things, by the way.) In order to insulate and preserve myself, I lashed out at anyone who tried to get into the trenches and help me. Most often, that was Mom.

When we research the psychology of anger, however, this behavior becomes completely understandable. Our good friend Dr. Harry Mills in his article ‘Psychology of Anger’explains that one of the functions of anger (after its use to respond to perceived pain) is as a substitute emotion. He writes, “By this we mean that sometimes people make themselves angry so that they don't have to feel pain. People change their feelings of pain into anger because it feels better to be angry than it does to be in pain. This changing of pain into anger may be done consciously or unconsciously.”

Perfect. Because of course, I didn’t sit down one day and decide to be angry at Eileen. But all of her wanting to help and suggestions of things to do threatened the security of how I felt I was coping, and so, rather than become vulnerable, I became enraged. It makes so much sense when Mills explains, “Being angry rather than simply in pain has a number of advantages, primarily among them distraction…Part of the transmutation of pain into anger involves an attention shift – from self-focus to other-focus. Anger thus temporarily protects people from having to recognize and deal with their painful real feelings; you get to worry about getting back at the people you're angry with instead. Making yourself angry can help you to hide the reality that you find a situation frightening or that you feel vulnerable.” Ahhhh, Yes.

The flip side of this negative anger perspective, however, is quite positive. In his article ‘Motivational Effects of Anger’ Mills writes, “On the positive side, anger creates a sense of power and control in a situation where prior to anger these positive, motivating feelings did not exist.” Bingo! That’s exactly how we can use the anger we feel. That is, ultimately, how I used my anger.

Two years ago I was so sick of myself, my memories, my PTSD, my trauma – EVERYTHING. I got angry at all of that, instead of the usual suspects. I got angry my life was passing by in this horrible fog of pain. I got angry the trauma was winning. And so I took all of that angry energy and unleashed it on the trauma and PTSD themselves. I took all of that ferocious focus and channeled it into a vengeful pursuit of joy, and healing. We all know how powerful anger feels; imagine using it to create a new future instead of to lash out at the past or destroy the present.

I’m not the only one who used my anger to good effect. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to another survivor, Kellie Greene, founder of Speaking Out About Rape (SOAR). Kellie has a strong and dynamic perspective. In our interview earlier this week we discussed anger and its uses, and also, the importance of self-perception. I’ll leave you with this one idea, which includes not only Kellie’s self-empowering thought process, but also a very good reason not to let the negative side of anger – its supposed protecting us from vulnerability – to be our guiding light:

I prefer to be called a victim and not a survivor because it all has to do with when you say it. ‘I am a survivor’ means you’re still there, you haven’t moved on. But to say ‘I was a victim’, past tense, you’ve moved on from it. There’s nothing wrong with being a victim and I think we shouldn’t be so ashamed to say, ‘I was a victim’, because in the cases of violent crimes, criminals are looking for the most vulnerable opportunity and there are people who have been through extensive self-defense training that are victimized as well. Criminals are looking for the opportunity to prey on someone who is vulnerable and you can’t live life without being vulnerable. You miss out on a lot of joy, a lot of happiness, relationships. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable, there’s nothing wrong with that.

(Photo: dem vadda sen john)

PTSD & Anger, Part 3: The Physiological Side of Anger

Yesterday, a man wrote me how much he enjoys the blog, even though anger is not his problem, even though he's only depressed. So let’s pause for a moment to remember: Depression is anger turned inward. And since anger can be a positive survival mechanism, let’s not be so quick to dismiss it or want to deny we feel it. Yesterday’s post made the point that anger can be helpful to survivors, so come with me over the next couple of days. Building on the first anger post I’m going someplace we all can go, regardless of how your anger manifests itself.

Today I want to continue the exploration of anger in physiological terms and here’s why: Anger has many physical effects, so if we don’t find a way to deal, diffuse and direct it we’re only adding to the problems we already have. Let’s begin with more from Dr. Harry Mills who writes in his article ‘Physiology of Anger’, “Like other emotions, anger is experienced in our bodies as well as in our minds. In fact, there is a complex series of physiological (body) events that occurs as we become angry.”

In her excellent and informative article on the physiology of anger Christina Boerma builds on Mills’ statement with an important reminder when she writes, “Anger hurts the angry person more than the object of its anger.” How does it do that, you ask? Let me count the ways in this partial list of how anger physically manifests:

1 - Muscles that are needed to fight or flee become very tight, causing an “uptight” feeling.

2 - Chemicals known as catecholamines are released causing us to experience a burst of energy (which causes a sugar deficiency, so that an angry person may “shake from anger”).

3 - Heart rate accelerates: Because of our anger, the usual (average) heart rate of 80 climbs to 180 beats per minute.

4 - Blood pressure rises: An average blood pressure of 120 over 80 suddenly soars to 220 over 130, sometimes even higher.

5 - As the body prepares for survival, it safeguards itself against injury and bleeding. Likewise, an angry person's body releases chemicals to coagulate (clot) the blood, creating a situation that's potentially dangerous. Although there is no physical injury, the clot is formed, which can travel through the blood vessels to the brain or heart.

6 - Rate of breathing increases to get more oxygen into the body.

7 - Increased blood flow enters our limbs and extremities.

8 - Attention narrows.

9 - Hormones (adrenaline and noradrenaline) are released which trigger a lasting state of arousal.

The problem with all of this, as Dr. Mills points out is that:

"If anger has a physiological preparation phase during which our resources are mobilized for a fight, it also has a wind-down phase as well. We start to relax back towards our resting state when the target of our anger is no longer accessible or an immediate threat. However, it is difficult to relax from an angry state. The adrenaline-caused arousal that occurs during anger lasts a very long time (many hours, sometimes days), and lowers our anger threshold, making it easier for us to get angry again later on. Though we do calm down, it takes a very long time for us to return to our resting state. During this slow cool-down period we are more likely to get very angry in response to minor irritations that normally would not bother us…. High levels of arousal (such as are present when we are angry) significantly decrease your ability to concentrate."

Which means, the naturally hyperaroused, hypervigilant, brain fog state in which we already exist is only exacerbated by anger. We need to consider this. We need to see ourselves. We need to make a change.

Our bodies are already stressed, tensed and on edge any normal day. Why make it worse by not controlling our anger? It is, after all, an emotion that is within our capability to focus, modulate and contain. There are tons of anger management techniques. We can also begin easing anger's effects by learning simple relaxation techniques. Which, come to think of it, wouldn't be bad for any of us, even when we're not angry -- even when we're only depressed.

(Photo: Eva8*)

PTSD & Anger, Part 2: Why Are We So Angry?

( First off, let me say for those of you who have not scrolled down and found the picture of me, this picture here is NOT me!)

Getting to today's topic: This idea of anger has captivated my attention. Mostly, because I lived with it for so long and never thought twice about it. In my world… well, that’s the state I was so often in; it seemed normal to be frustrated and angry -- when I couldn’t control my environment, when others got in my head space, when someone would say, for example, “Can’t you just let go of the past?” To which I would reply (often inside my head but sometimes very outloud), "Um… NO!"


Feeling isolated in my symptoms and experience only made me more irritable. Anger became a general daily sensation.

And now I’m no longer angry and I’m amazed by what a different world it is when I’m not feeling like a combination of The Grinch, The Wicked Witch of the West and Darth Vader every day.

This morning I started looking around for anger info to better understand why it’s such a common PTSD symptom. You might find the reasons, and how anger functions on our behalf, pretty interesting:

What is Anger?

Well, we have to begin somewhere; may as well start with the source. In this great article by Harry Mills, Ph.D. he explains that

Anger is a basic human emotion that is experienced by all people. Typically triggered by an emotional hurt, anger is usually experienced as an unpleasant feeling that occurs when we think we have been injured, mistreated, opposed in our long-held views, or when we are faced with obstacles that keep us from attaining personal goals…. At its roots, anger is a signal to you that something in your environment isn’t right. It captures your attention and motivates you to take action to correct that wrong thing.

So this can potentially be a good thing! After trauma we are sensing something’s wrong and we should be motivated to take a corrective action. Unfortunately, the psychological unraveling after trauma gets in the way. We are overwhelmed, and so we don’t immediately take positive steps. But I mean, really, how could we when you consider the role of anger in trauma…:

Anger & Trauma

Initially, anger is a really useful tool for us. Theories suggest that high levels of anger are actually related to a natural survival instinct. Take heart, depending on how we use it and how we perceive it anger could be viewed as a healthy emotion: We survive and are bolstered in our efforts by this driving internal force. (Remember this for later: We have a healthy, instinctive driving internal source for survival.)

This great @health.com 'Anger and Trauma' article offers this explanation of the role of anger in trauma:

Anger is usually a central feature of a survivor's response to trauma because it is a core component of the survival response in humans. Anger helps people cope with life's adversities by providing us with increased energy to persist in the face of obstacles. However, uncontrolled anger can lead to a continued sense of being out of control of oneself and can create multiple problems in the personal lives of those who suffer from PTSD.

(This article also offers a guide to finding relief, so you may want to take some time reading through the entire page.)

Adding to the mix in explaining the post-trauma emotional environment, take a look at this article about ‘Common Reactions to Trauma’ on the National Center for PTSD web site.

As in everything with PTSD, anger is another one of those coping/survival mechanisms that gets out of control. What began as something to help us cope and keep us safe outlives its usefulness, but we’re so far gone emotionally we don’t stop to consider what’s happening or how we can stop it.

Or, as I did, the aberration of who we are becomes so familiar and recognizable – and who we were before trauma becomes so far away and unfamiliar – we don’t even realize we’re living in an altered state. We accept this is who we are now. After my trauma I knew I had been changed and I accepted that. But that was wrong! Yes, of course, we are changed, but those effects do not have to mean negatively and dysfunctionally forever. We can be changed in good ways: we can have experienced something that taught us things about ourselves those who don’t suffer never know. Things like 1) our large capacity for inner strength, 2) our survival tools, 3) our deep reserve of will, 4) our incredible amount of courage, 5) our ability to face fear and transcend.

When we get lost in anger we fail to appreciate our survival. We see only the bad that happened to us, and we lose sight of the fact that WE ARE SURVIVORS, and surviving means more than just struggling through the trauma and the aftermath. Literally, surviving means we ‘outlive’ an event. But in feeding our anger what part of us lives? Not all the good, the possible, the amazing. In feeding anger we keep the trauma alive, which means the trauma wins. Now that’s something to be angry about!

(Photo: Jeneyepher)

PTSD & Anger, Part 1: When We Hate Happy People

There’s been a big debate in one of the PTSD online support groups in which I participate. It all started around the Thanksgiving holiday. It began like this: S. asked,

Has anyone been through this? I mean, seeing everyone happier than ever (of course, it doesn't mean they are) while you are struggling at ground zero.
I've been through minor but several traumatic life events which accumulated to a greater sum and my coping mechanisms failed after the last event. It's been now more than a year and my soul is still not at rest.

It just seems to me like everyone around me is achieving everything they want and ask for contrary to me who lost almost everything. Is this jealousy normal? It is extremely painful and instead of concentrating on myself I examine other's lives and can't take myself out of it. And seeing people happy makes me misarable and leaves me with the unanswerable question, "Why?" I believe maybe it is a way of keeping myself out of the original problems, I don't know.

There ensued a lot of agreement from the group that, yes, they do feel jealous of people who do not have PTSD, and they are angry at others for not suffering, and angry for the things others have achieved and angry for… the list went on and on and on. The discussion became heated as people vented their frustration in increasingly vehement @$&%! terms.

And it got me thinking, what if everyone took that angry energy and used it for something positive? What if, instead of railing against those ‘happy’ people (or, as I used to do, the unfairness of fate), we harnassed that energy and used it for our own good? When we manifest pure anger all we do is drain ourselves of good energy, literally.

I started researching this whole idea of anger and found an interesting article by Kathy Wilson. Entitled, ‘Anger: The Greatest Motivator of All’ she talks about ways to channel angry energy. Actually, what she says is,

When you experience the emotion of anger, you create one of the most extremely powerful energies that we humans have been given to work with.

Although powerful, the energy of anger isn't bad or good. It simply exists as energy. What you choose to do with it determines if it's bad or good. As with any energy, you can choose to use it in harmful ways or in beneficial ways.

This idea perfectly illustrates the point I made in the group, which was this:

What about looking at the whole topic another way? Instead of being angry, how about thinking about how much we deserve to be as happy as they are? How about getting angry that we aren't happy and deciding to fight as hard as we need to in order to achieve a happier, healthier life?

I used to be angry at my own PTSD suffering. I used to be angry my trauma happened in the first place; no one shielded me from harm; no one could stop the horrific event from continuing over a period of weeks.

On a bad day, I could add to my already deep depression with a powerful dose of anger and then -- watch out! I was really a sight to behold. That depressive anger I usually turned inward came out with a ferocity that flayed anyone around me. I feel sorry for the people I directed it at, particularly my family.

But two years ago this new year's eve I decided to take that angry energy and use it in a positive way: I decided to pursue joy and ... it worked! All of that antsy angry energy spilled onto the dance floor and out of me. I became more peaceful, more tolerant; less angry, more... well... happy.

Being jealous of others is useless. Being angry at them is a total waste of time and energy - time and energy that we really need to be channeling toward healing. Using that energy on ourselves can bring relief, so we shouldn't so easily give it away. Don't you agree?

(Photo: Amir el Mayordomo)