Anger

Let’s take a look at what happens when anger is suppressed or carried down transgenerationally through a family system.

Sources of Anger

Anger may be the result of feelings of injustice, unfairness, wrongdoing, betrayal, embarrassment, or resentment.  Anger that originates in frustration may simmer on the back burner over weeks, months, and years.  Frequently, some event will trigger an explosion of emotion to occur. You may feel angry because your efforts are not appreciated or because someone has caused you harm. Someone may have said something to you or others that hurt you, whether it was true or not. You may be angry because you feel misunderstood or overlooked. As you look to your greater family system, perhaps one family member was favoured over another. Perhaps someone in your family feels that a division of property or an inheritance was unfair. Perhaps violence or abuse was part of the past family history. Perhaps someone is waiting around for an apology. Perhaps someone is waiting for compensation, retribution, or reconciliation. Sometimes anger is masked within a family system.  Individuals may take on laughter and humour as a way to escape the heavy emotions felt inside. We frequently hear of stories about comedians who carry heavy emotional burdens.  I am not suggesting that all laughter or humour is problematic, however, it can be.  Humour can help many suppress their deeper wounds or get them through difficult times. Addictions of any sort, including drugs; alcohol; work; extreme exercise, eating, or shopping; gambling; or over use of computers, TVs, cellphones, or other technological devices, may mask the inner feels and pain of the heavy body-felt emotions of anger, resentment, grief, guilt, jealousy, regret, embarrassment, or shame.

Recognizing Anger that is Carried Within

Anger may be silently carried within or it may be openly revealed to the world during actions taken in daily life. Anger is often projected out to those we love including our parents, our siblings, our partner, or our children. Anger may bounce from person to person in a family system. The important thing to consider is how your family system addressed anger. Was anger processed in a healthy way or not?  If you carry anger toward your mom and/or dad, it may be significantly impacting your life in some way. We are considered to be 50% mom and 50% dad and what we reject in them we also reject within ourselves. Rejection of some aspect of yourself may contribute to unwellness.  If you have something unresolved with your mom or dad, then it is time for you to take action.

Have you considered that your side of the story, or your perception of your family system, does not describe the whole big picture?  How well do you really understand the emotional journey of your parents or grandparents? Do you understand what emotional resources they had or didn’t have?  As children we rarely understand the big picture.  We are mostly consciously concerned with our own affairs and wellbeing, although at the unconscious level, we may be sacrificing ourselves out of love and loyalty to our family system. I am learning that many individuals have not sorted through the transgenerational emotional patterning in their family system. We cannot fully understand our own emotional journey unless we take the time to understand the unresolved transgenerational trauma of our family system. You can’t change others and you can’t change the past, however, you can change the way you respond to others and you can do some emotional healing work to find compassion for the other. This is essential if your ongoing life issues are blamed on your mother and father. Your wellbeing as an adult may depend on your actions to make peace with your mother and/or father, whether they are alive or already deceased.

Alternatively, maybe your anger is with a sibling. Some siblings fight their whole lives and they really have no idea why that is.  In these situations, anger between siblings or other feelings such as indifference is often discovered in prior generations as well.  Perhaps mom and one of her siblings fought with one another over their lifetime, or it might have been grandmother and her sibling. What is unresolved in one generation will frequently travel down to the descendants until it is resolved and healed.

If you feel you were betrayed in some way and you are waiting around for someone else to do something, like make amends or apologize, you might find you end up waiting forever. You can carry this heavy emotional burden within you, allowing it to make you sick in some way, or letting it continually impact the wellbeing of your many life relationships, or you can do something to shift this heavy energy from your body.  The longer you hold suppressed feelings of betrayal the more likely you are to become unwell in some way. I recommend you take the time to figure out how you contributed to an unpleasant situation or relationship, consciously or unconsciously, and how you are betraying yourself by holding toxic heavy emotions in your body.  You might find the compassion to forgive yourself for your contribution to any situation, or to realize that you did the best you could. Remember to take yourself to a deeper level of consciousness, perhaps through a ritual, to do this emotional healing work.

Unexplained Anger

If you feel that you are always angry and you have no idea why, you might want to consider that you are carrying unresolved transgenerational anger or resentment for your family system. What event from the past desires to be heard or seen or acknowledged?  Anger can be carried in relation to current life events or any member of the family system can be carrying unresolved transgenerational anger that is not acknowledged or understood.  Transgenerational anger may or may not be linked to anger that you feel today.  Revealing your anger does not mean you have processed it in a healthy way, however, it can be a first step toward wellness. It requires an emotional journey to shift anger from deep within you, which often involves shifting an unhealthy relationship into a healthy relationship, even with yourself.  Anger is held in the cells of the body until the origins of it are acknowledged, expressed, and processed. Anger is a heavy emotional energy to carry in your body and it creates a toxic soup around your cells  that can contribute to unwellness in a variety of ways. Suppressed anger can affect you physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially, and relationally. Consider what heavy suppressed emotions you or your loved ones are carrying inside?  Anger carried to the extreme is often referred to as rage, and rage can be carried from generation to generation.

Transgenerational Anger

Transgenerational anger may be carried silently within or be outwardly expressed. Either way it will show up as a pattern in the life of the carrier. The individual may feel deeply frustrated with life without really understanding why. They may carry deep impatience for people and situations. The anger can be evident in childhood. The angry child may turn into an angry adult. The angry adult may lash out at those around them. We witness this inner anger in situations of road rage or impatience in line ups while running errands. We witness this anger as rudeness, meanness, or lack of consideration toward others.  When an individual carries transgenerational anger, they may suddenly burst into anger at even the slightest trigger or provocation and they may feel like they have taken on a different persona.  They may do things that seem out of character.  They may hit, yell, scream, shove, punch, push, slap, or throw things. Individuals who are angry inside may reveal their suppressed emotions in more subtle ways as sabotage or passive aggressive behaviour.

Have you ever come across someone who hates their neighbour because of something that occurred ten years earlier, or in some parts of the world, perhaps 150 years ago?  Perhaps there was a clash between families a long time ago and the wound still festers. Perhaps there was a greater community involvement in conflict or war, where neighbours fought on opposite sides of the skirmish, violently harming their neighbours. When no one takes the time to mend the wounds between the families or amongst community members, the anger festers like an open wound. In many nations today, truth commissions are held to reveal “the truth” about past trauma in the community. Many of these commissions stop short of doing anything about the emotional wounds of the individuals, families, and communities involved.  These old individual, family, or collective societal wounds travel down through family systems scattering in unusual ways.  If the carrier is emotionally sensitive, we may collectively benefit when they seek help to heal the wounds carried within them.  There is the potential for healing to occur if they reach out for help to shift this anger. We all have a choice as to whether we continue to live with this anger or decide to shift it out from within us. This may or may not be a long, ongoing journey.

Victimhood

When you feel that someone has harmed you in some way, you may take on the energy of victimhood.  If someone in your family system is harmed, the whole family may feel like victims.  If you have family members who hold onto their victimhood for months or years, you may also have family members who represent or take on the energy of the perpetrator. As I have mentioned in past blog posts (Radical Inclusion 1, 2, 3, and 4), the victim and perpetrator may become part of one another’s family systems at the time that the inappropriate behavior occurred or when the harm was done.  Victims and perpetrators can be individuals or groups of people.  The perpetrator has done something to harm the victim, and both carry an emotional response to the interaction within their body. The perpetrator may carry immense guilt and sorrow and the victim may carry anger or shame. On the other hand, the victim and/or the perpetrator may go numb inside. In many situations, the perpetrator(s) are also victims in their own family system or community and the victim may become the perpetrator.

Revenge

When someone has harmed us we may feel the desire for revenge.  There are individuals and groups that plot revenge for years and this toxic emotional energy is highly damaging to the body.  We may feel the desire to right a wrong or to balance an imbalance.  The problem with revenge is that the perceived satisfaction felt is short-lived, and the feelings of imbalance return even stronger because the deep emotional healing work has not occurred.  Revenge is a harmful response that does not return a healthy flow of love and balance.  Revenge is harmful to the one seeking it and their family system and it also harms the recipient and their family system. Rather than one party feeling harmed, there is now two or more injured parties, since whole family systems are involved. Revenge rarely harms only one.  As well, if you are the one who has enacted revenge, you have likely passed on the energy of the perpetrator to one of your own family members, since you have just harmed another.  There is a greater energy field that seeks balance and peaceful existence. The greater systemic field may seek atonement for wrongs committed. Healing comes for both parties when they see each other as human beings carrying emotional burdens. This is a process called humanization. When we turn the other into an object or objectify them, or de-humanize them, rather than treat them as a human being with humaneness and compassion, in our mind it is easier to harm them, malign their name, and to retain the anger.

Individuals interact with the world through their emotional response strategies that were learned early in life through the family system and the greater community. If your family system passed on anger, grief, resentment, hatred, guilt, and/or shame, then this may be your epigenetic inheritance. These emotional response strategies or patterns don’t often transfer well from childhood into adulthood. Our emotional response patterns learned as children are held in the body and are processed through well-used neuronal pathways. When you are angry as an adult, you may respond like an angry two year old.  An individual needs to make an intentional decision to shift these ways of being in the world.  Just because you were an angry child does not mean you have to be an angry adult.  It is time to take the angry child within by the hand and teach them mature, healthy emotional ways of being in the world.  The choice is yours to make.

Forgiveness and Betrayal

Victims may feel angry toward their perpetrator(s), carrying blame and judgement that stays in the body. If you are angry with someone, whether they are alive or dead, or angry about something, you likely feel that someone else was wrong and you were right.  If the someone is a close family member such as your mother or father, and you are standing in judgement of them, or you feel superior to them; that blame, judgement, or sense of superiority may be blocking the flow of love in the family system. Perhaps you feel that you didn’t get enough of something from your parents – be that love, time, material items, emotional support and so on.  When we stand in judgement we often unconsciously or consciously feel innocent.  We may have a blindspot for recognizing our own contribution to any event or relationship that did not go well.

Many who feel wronged sit waiting for an apology. Apologies carry with them an inequality of power.  I am better than you because I am right and I feel you owe me an apology.  It seems that the flow of apologies in a family system can go either up the generations or down as long as they are not expected. When the child expects an apology from the parent, the waiting child will likely suffer in some way.  The flow of forgiveness seems to be downward from parent to child for greatest effectiveness. The one who forgives is in a greater energetic position or superior position to the one receiving forgiveness. The one who forgives carries the power if you will.  When a child attempts to forgive a parent, rather than acknowledge and accept what was, the child holds him or herself above the parent energetically and this doesn’t usually go well for the child.  In this situation the child will likely suffer in life in some way until the family system is once again returned to balance.  Self forgiveness is more appropriate for the child.  The most beneficial way of approaching forgiveness is to forgive oneself for how you have betrayed yourself.  Holding resentment or anger for years or decades is a form of self betrayal.  You have contributed to your own unwellness. You have abandoned yourself.  Perhaps your parents have died and you are still angry with them, expecting something to change.  We know the past cannot be changed so you are only harming yourself.  It is important to do some self reflection to understand how you might be causing yourself harm and find ways to process any anger you carry.

The Perpetrator

Sometimes the family member carries the anger of the perpetrator.  This may be a perpetrator from the past within your own family system or it could be the perpetrator of harms done to past generations of your family system. It is important to remember that over a long time period, perhaps centuries, family systems may have been the victim sometimes and at other times they played the role of perpetrator in order to ensure survival of the family system. The voices of family victims and family perpetrators can sometimes be felt and heard within the body of a family member as psychosis, schizophrenia, or other mental health issues. Does the individual feel someone is out to harm them?  That may be the voices of the victims.  Does the individual feel that they might harm others?  That may be the voices of the perpetrators. What are the voices wanting to say to the family system?  What wants to be heard? What secrets desire to be acknowledged? What transgenerational wounds are unhealed? Who is missing or shunned by the family system? When the victim shuns the perpetrator, whether they are family members by blood or energetic event, an unhealthy relationship may be established. Someone in the family system may carry this unresolved trauma and anger may be one of the heavy emotions felt.

The Bystander

Sometimes the energy of the bystander is carried in the family system by a family member. The inaction of the bystander is in fact an intentional action. For example, consider how your family system responded to the extreme violence and atrocities of World War II.  Did they turn their back and pretend they didn’t know what was going on?  This is relevant whether your family system was in Europe at the time, in North America, or anywhere else in the world. If the millions of bystanders had taken compassionate action, who knows how World War II would have evolved? As I have mentioned before, we cannot change the past, however we can learn from it to shift the present and influence the future. The inaction of the bystander, the sense of innocence that is generated, the possible regret or feelings of guilt, may be carried down the family system like the energy of the perpetrator. When victims need help and our backs are firmly turned away, pretending that we don’t know what is going on, the unresolved transgenerational trauma may be set in place. I know that in North America we turned away shiploads of Jewish people seeking asylum on our shores during World War II. How did your family system respond? The heavy energy of the bystander turns into the guilt of the perpetrator when the victim needs help and it is not offered. For an example closer to home, this help could be needed at a traffic accident, an assault that is taking place, or in response to a child being bullied.  What guilt or regret is carried in your family system, community, or nation around turning your back to those being harmed? The victim and the bystander may become part of the family system of the other, just as the perpetrator does. What anger seeks to be resolved in your family system?

I would suggest that systemic constellations are an effective way to reveal anger in a family system, a heavy emotion that is sometimes hidden or not even experienced as anger. The healing of anger comes in finding peace within yourself and finding compassion for the perpetrator you feel has wronged you or those you love.

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