The fear of loss of control and how to give up control in coming to terms with feelings such as anger.

Many of us learn to control our feelings or try to control the feelings of others due to being raised in dysfunctional families. Often in these families needs are not being met and so we learn surreptitious ways to try and be seen or get what we want from others, but often this involves the collapse of our own healthy ego or emotional needs or the bullying or manipulating of others into trying to fulfill them (the two extreme ends of the unhealthy narcissist/taker – codependant/fawn/ collapse spectrum.)

Healing from dysfunctional patterns involves developing what is labelled ‘rigorous honesty’ in the AA Big Book and 12 step therapy circles.. We inherit these patterns and they become ours, the hurts and injuries or splits we developed happened a long time ago and often got supressed only to be played out in each new relationship this is why blaming someone for being narcissistic and ‘making us’ act a certain way or feel a certain way will not wash as we begin to explore our true feelings and needs and values and try to finally take full responsibility for them, most especially our powerful buried feelings of both anger and grief.

In his book Facing the Fire : Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately John Lee talks of his mother’s journey along this path.. John’s Dad was an active alcoholic and this was distressing for his Mum and so she tried to change him by making threats, in the end John’s mother did end up leaving his Dad but in order to do so she had to begin to acknowledge her feelings and do something to take care of herself in the midst of them, this involved her doing her own emotional release work while setting healthy boundaries. Continuing to give him the benefit of the doubt (and meanwhile suppressing her own anger over her inability to change him when he was not ready to change) was, in the end, counterproductive.. So it can be for us when we try to control the uncontrollable, to get people to change to fit our needs and expectations when that is not their way, longing for them to see and validate us when they cannot. It is only by beginning to learn from and take our own feelings seriously that we can find the way out, that may in the end require a tough choice and finding out what is our bottom line.

Lee has this to say about the fear of loss of control that may affect so many of us who learned to develop deep prohibitions around feeling our feelings in Chapter 4 of his book : Expressing Anger: Why We Should Do It and Why We Don’t.

Those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families – which is to say, nearly all of us – have never dared to lose control. Our world has always been too dangerous for us to let ourselves be spontaneous or who we really are.

Emotional release work frightens us, then, because it goes against everything life has taught us.. Emotional release work says, “Let go. Let Loose.” Our life has taught us, “Hold in. Hold on. Hold back.”

Many of us are so constrained that if we are told to do something as safe as make an ugly face we can’t do it.. We can’t let go of control of the face that our parents and our society and our own aspirations have made us wear., not even for a few minutes among people we trust. We need too much to be in control and show ourselves as the person we want to be ; good, happy, upbeat, well-adjusted, trustworthy, loyal, faithful, friendly, the 100 percent Scout.

When I asked Walter, a mid thirtyish account executive for a major Dallas corporation to make an ugly face, he refused.. He said my request was silly, and he’d be even sillier if he went along with it, and he didn’t care to look silly. I pointed out to Walter that he had come to see me because his wives (there had been two) had left him, complaining that he insisted on managing every aspect of their lives. He still wouldn’t make a face.

Emotional release work encourages us to lose control for a number of healthy reasons. If we can’t give up control, we’re going to spend our lives managing everything, trying to maintain the illusion that we can control other people, our environment, and ourselves.

If we are always “in control”, life can not happen to us. We can’t let ourselves go. We can’t learn to swim because we won’t give ourselves over to the water. We can’ t ride a bike because we fear falling. We’ll have trouble getting to sleep because we fear helplessness. We can’t let ourselves have an orgasm. We can’t dance with the wind. We can’t cry. We can’t feel. We can’t die (to be reborn anew in the Now!!)

Emotional release work encourages us to lose control – but in a safe and approriate circumstances.

Which means, under control.

One time I was doing anger work at an outdoor men’s retreat. I asked Roger, a two hundred pound construction worker, to pound a stick on the ground as hard as he was angry with his mother. Roger yelled, “I’m totally mad, Ma!” as loudly as he could, and on the word “Ma” or just after, the stick hit the ground with a termendous tyuds. Yell, thud. Yell, thud. Yell, thud.

(he) kept this up for several minutes – he had lots of anger in him, and he was strong and in great shae. Those of us looking on were getting a bit hypnotised by when he turned to me and said in a whsiper. “John would you move back a step?”

I was standing a little close. He was afraid he might hit me!

Even in the middle of his anger, while he was apparently a raging lunatic, Roger knew just what was going on.

He was out of control but in control. Just as I had been when I was screaming in my car.

He and I were safely out of control. And that is what emotional release work makes possible.

Once you learn – not only in your head but in your body – that emotional release work is safe, you’ll be on your way to knowinf that appropriately expressed anger, yours or other people’s, is nothing to be afraid of.

Once you are comfortable with your own anger, you’ll stop shutting down when other people are angry in an appropriate- even a semi appropriate – way. You will know that their anger is just a feeling in them and the sooner they get it out the better.

If you are afraid that your anger or sadness is too enormous to be released safely, don’t worry. Hundreds of peoe have told me things like, “John, I can’t let my anger out because if I ever did, I might tear the building down.” Most of these people did the emotional release exercises I suggested, and far from destroying a building, never so much as made a makre on a wall. (The walls that we should worry about, incidentally, are those our anger has build in us that separate us from he people we love.)

End of quotes.

Some people could not do the exercises John suggested and he respected their feelings of fear, and he honored their right to feel that fear. The point he makes is that

no anger is too big to be released safely, so long as the person releasing it isn’t already out of control from an emotional disorder, drink, or drugs..

And as I will share in another post I am currently writing getting in touch with this level of anger is not unspiritual, as so many claim, in fact the expression of who we really are as it is found in anger is also part of owning the truth of our spirit. While preparing to work on this post I continued to read some chapters in Anita Moorjani’s book Sensitive Is The New Strong. Anita died from terminal lymphoma and came back again with many insights into why she actually became sick and nearly died, most of them revolving around the way forces blocked the true expression of her full spiritual being. As she says in Chaptehr 5 of that book

Being spiritual means being yourself

Alternatively not being able to fully be ourselves will, in the end, end up having toxic impacts on our body which is a vessel of our true, authentic spiritual essence.. For Moorjani what she had to suppress was her healthy ego as well as high level spiritual and empathic attunement.. It is my belief that to be in full possession of our feelings is HIGHLY SPIRITUAL. As we learn to love, embrace, express, as well as honor that then our need to control others lessens, our fear of our own suppressed truth and spiritual self also lessens and we then begin to find a positive channel for expressing the whole of ourselves (unsplit and undivided) in the world.