Working With Anger And A Fight Response Part One

Anger is a powerful emotion—one that often overwhelms us or gets buried deep. In this guided practice, we explore how to meet anger with mindful presence and compassion. Through somatic inquiry, grounding breathwork, and visualization, we learn to feel anger in the body without collapsing into shame or exploding in rage. We uncover the difference between anger and the fight response, and practice expressing ourselves in a way that supports connection and healing. This session helps you regulate your nervous system, develop self-awareness, and engage with anger in a grounded, embodied, and healing way. This is part one in a series.

Transcript

Anger is an emotion,

An experience,

An energy that's interesting to work with.

One of the most important things is to stay aware that we're doing the practice.

Notice that we have a body that has a lot of responses.

What's your response right now?

Just thinking about feeling into that.

What's going on with that?

There could be some trepidation.

There's all kinds of responses that we might be having to that.

As we're looking around the room,

Let your eyes bring in cues of safety.

And also notice if there's anything alarming.

Mostly there's not.

As you're getting engaged in this practice,

It's helpful to do some of those things that anchor us to allow ourselves to really be present,

Be here.

Take some deeper breaths.

Let your breath also be a support.

One of the ways that we can do that is just to bring our awareness and stop holding our breath if we are.

When we think about being really angry,

We might have a lot of hot energy in our body.

We have a lot of history with our own anger and with other people's anger.

And we have a lot of history with being in a fight response and other people being in a fight response.

So that's good to know.

And there's a big difference between being angry and expressing anger and being in a fight response.

If we go into the nervous system,

We experience some perception of threat.

There's something dangerous.

And it could be physical.

It could be social,

Relational.

It could be that look somebody gives us,

A look of contempt.

Then we go into shame.

Then we fight back.

We could hear the sounds around us,

Especially if we're out in an environment that we're not feeling all that safe in to begin with.

We have a lot of ways that this works.

Working through this,

We're going to start with a little bit of the fight response.

And then we're going to go into more of the anger.

How can we actually feel what's here?

What is my response?

And is it accurate in the moment?

Am I allowing myself to feel anger?

Can I process this without being completely overwhelmed?

The key to all of that is to be here in our bodies in this moment and to really let ourselves know,

Here I am looking around.

I might hold my own hands.

I have a body.

I'm here.

I could wiggle around a bit in my seat if you're in a chair.

Move your body around a little bit.

And that can be quite helpful.

If you feel like you need a bit of relief,

If things are getting too intense,

Then we pull back.

Ventilating,

We kind of move in and out of the intensity.

Titration,

We kind of move in,

Then we completely just step right back.

I'm just going to stop this for a moment.

I'm feeling too heated.

I'm going to get up and move around or shake some of that energy out.

So right now,

What's going on in your body?

What are the energies in your body?

And what are your thoughts?

You might be angry at the world.

You might be angry at someone in particular.

We might be angry at what's given us the conditions that we're living in right now,

Like a physical change.

Notice what are the thoughts in your mind when you think about anger.

Some of the things that we're angry about are things that just don't seem fair.

Angry at a situation.

I didn't do anything to deserve this.

Why am I being plagued with this?

Whatever it is,

Financial situation,

Physical health.

One of the things that we know is that there's a lot of systemic oppression,

And it is appropriate to be angry at injustice.

No judgment around all anger is bad.

We should never be angry.

A lot of people,

Especially women,

Are conditioned to never be angry.

We might go into a freeze instead.

A lot of times we direct it inward.

We have a mean inner critic,

Where we might be really critical of other people.

Paying attention to what's going on when we're driving can be a real awareness practice around anger.

What's the matter with that person that they are?

And a lot of that then has to do with fear.

We perceive that somebody is increasing our danger because of the way that they're driving.

I don't think any of us have any shortage of material to work with.

Let's settle on one.

Bring one to mind that you feel is kind of workable,

That you could pay attention to.

What is your conditioning around anger?

If you say,

I'm in touch with my anger.

I don't go into a fight response,

But I express myself.

I feel healthy.

That would be some people's experience.

And other people might be like,

Even feeling angry scares me.

I shut that down right away.

Good people don't get angry.

Good girls don't get angry.

There might be something like anger is powerful.

How am I going to back people off if I don't get angry?

So if you're looking at,

Maybe it's a specific person that you have history with.

Maybe it's yourself.

When you are expressing anger,

What's that experience like?

What is the energy?

Can you feel that in your back,

In your arms and hands,

In your chest,

Your gut?

Where do you feel anger?

Is there temperature?

Is it hot?

Is it cold?

What's your experience of anger?

And what is it pushing you towards?

Is the feeling tolerable or do you need to make something go away?

When we can't tolerate the feeling in our body,

Then often that leads to either an explosion.

We might go into a fight response.

We might feel really hot,

Hot headed.

We have a lot of expressions for that.

They're about to blow.

We know instinctively that someone who's angry and or in a fight response,

We often experience fear because if someone goes into a fight response,

That's a survival response.

We don't go into any kind of a fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Fawn response if we're feeling safe.

When somebody is in a fight response,

By definition,

They're not as safe to be around.

That could be me.

It could be other people.

It makes sense that we get alarmed around this,

That it doesn't feel comfortable.

Take a breath or two here.

Let ourselves absorb what's been happening so far.

Take a deep in-breath through your nose and breathe out.

I like to do cyclic sighing whenever I have the opportunity.

It's a really great reset.

A couple of deep inhales through your nose and a long slow exhale like you're breathing out through a thin straw.

Let yourself cool a bit.

Do that three or four times.

Deep double inhale.

Soften your body,

Face,

Mouth and jaw,

Neck and shoulders,

Arms and hands,

Down through your body.

And now let's come back into the inquiry if that feels comfortable for you.

We always have the option of hanging back a little.

We might do more of a general inquiry.

We might keep a step back.

When we're looking at images,

We might put them on the wall on the other side of the room.

If we have our eyes closed,

We're often looking at it out of our own eyes.

But if we can put it over there,

Maybe put ourself into the picture or the image.

We have a lot of history with anger.

So maybe what's coming up for you is somebody's face or you're hearing words or it's a tone of voice.

I've been in public places at times and I hear a loud angry voice.

It startles.

And we might go into some kind of a protective response.

What is your sense of I feel angry?

What's the difference between that and I am in a fight response?

When we feel like we're in a fight response,

It's a survival response.

We have a lot of cortisol,

Adrenaline.

Our whole system is gearing up to save our life.

We fight for survival.

Could be physical.

A lot of times it's social,

Financial,

Relational.

We're fighting for our survival.

Very mammal body response.

As you're feeling into that,

Most of us have probably had experiences of that.

Many people have also had more experience with shutting it down.

I can't afford to blow my top right now.

That's my boss.

Or I'm in a situation where I'm physically not safe if I get really angry.

So we shut it down.

We go into freeze.

That's a very common way that we manage this feeling of threat.

Notice if you could relax your shoulders.

I noticed a minor little ten.

Even though as I look around and as I'm talking,

I know there's no danger right now,

Right here.

And yet our body brings these memories forward.

One of the things that's helpful with coming out of a fight response and into being able to express our anger is to know that once the cortisol and adrenaline start to charge through our body,

It takes about 20-25 minutes for us to settle.

For the big release of chemical hormones to leave our body to settle back into a more steadier state before we come out of the fight response.

So if you're in a situation where you're arguing with somebody or somebody's angry,

You can tell by maybe your voice or their voice is starting to escalate,

Getting louder,

You're starting to feel uncomfortable.

Then one of the ways that we could work with that is to say,

I need to take a break for a few minutes.

I'm getting really activated here.

Let's take a break and come back in half an hour.

Sometimes even getting up and getting a drink of water or doing what we just did,

Doing three or four breaths of cyclic sign can make a big difference.

It's like it brings us back into this moment.

If you're in a fight response or if another person is,

A half hour break will give everybody a chance to calm down,

To cool.

Here we are now half an hour later and we're still feeling really angry.

What does that feel like?

When we're angry,

We're still present in the moment.

We know that we feel anger and we're not going into a freeze or if we are,

Then we're coming back out of it.

When we're feeling that,

We know that there's something going on.

As we're working with anger,

We might work with our conditioning.

Okay,

Here comes the anger.

I'm not letting it go into a fight response this time.

I'm really using my breath.

I'm relaxing.

I'm staying steady and aware and yet here I feel anger.

What am I going to do now?

What comes to mind for you as you think about,

Well,

What am I going to do now?

I'm still angry.

I've brought myself up out of freeze.

I'm allowing myself to feel that in my body.

What I'd like to do is blast the person,

But I know that's not actually what I want to do.

What I actually want to do is express myself.

Let's do a little walkthrough of that.

Pick somebody specific.

It might be somebody you know.

It might be someone at work or at home.

It might be a driver in front of you.

What might you say?

If you're in a fight response,

You're going to go blah,

But if your anger is more steady,

If you're aware that you're angry and you want to express it,

How might that go?

And as you're doing that,

You might have your eyes open visualizing it over on the other side of the room.

See it like a little video clip.

You might hear yourself or you could say it out loud unless you're in a public place where that would be disturbing.

Sometimes it's very helpful.

Imagine that you're looking that person in the eye and what would you say to them?

And we'll give this a few minutes so that we really have time to look into that.

What would you like to say?

How would you like to express this feeling of anger?

One thing we might be doing is holding our own hands as we're working with this,

Being very mindful of our breath,

Taking a deep breath.

When I was a kid,

My mother would say count to 10.

Another way to give ourselves a little break.

If we need time to calm down,

Then that might be the first thing we do.

Say,

I need some time here.

Let's circle back in half an hour or tomorrow or whenever that might be.

I'm not going to engage in this conversation right now and that can be very difficult to do because the other person might want to keep fighting.

The other person is in a fight response.

It's like we kind of lose ourselves and we're in any kind of a survival response.

We forget the other person is a human being.

We lose contact with compassion,

With our desire to connect with other people.

We're just in a fight response.

It might be for you that you're really standing up for yourself and say,

I'm not going to engage.

I can feel the level of escalation is rising.

Our voices are getting louder.

I'm pulling back.

I'm not going to engage in this right now.

Be aware of your breath.

Take a few breaths.

Look around again.

Establish in your experience that you're here.

We know the people who are around us when they are angry or we are.

We know what might set them off.

For some people,

We might not say,

You're angry.

I'm not doing that.

I'm not talking to you until you calm down because that might just make them more angry.

Sometimes we're going to be placating or just say,

You know,

For me right now,

I'm feeling uncomfortable with this.

I don't feel like I can have a productive conversation.

But we can kind of bring it to ourselves.

The benefit is that they also get to cool off.

What are some of the cues or statements that you might use?

And if you're working with an ongoing relationship,

You could also have some statements that alert the other person to what's going on.

I was in a relationship for a long time with someone who would get angry.

And usually I would just go into freeze.

And as I got a little bit healthier and more able to say something,

I would say things like,

When you're ranting and raving,

I'm disengaging.

Let's do something different here.

I'm going to go for a walk.

Maybe what I felt like was,

Why don't you go for a walk?

Remember,

We have a lot of different options.

We have a lot of different actions that we can take.

We're not actually stuck.

A lot of the time we have the option to leave the room.

Whether we're the one feeling like we're losing control,

Going into a fight response,

Or someone else is.

A lot of the time we can leave the situation until things calm down.

But notice what you might be feeling.

Again,

Notice in your body.

And visualize yourself saying what it is you'd like to say.

Let that kind of form as a visual.

You're in the room.

You're looking at them.

You're saying,

I'm not engaging until we're both calmer.

If it's somebody that you've been working with around this,

You might say,

I'm out.

We've talked about this.

When I'm starting to feel really activated,

Or I'm starting to feel like you are,

We've agreed we're going to take a timeout.

I'm calling a timeout.

So it might be something that you've already agreed on that you could do.

And even so,

You might not get a good response from the other person.

They might escalate.

Someone that we're with that's bullying us with their anger,

There's a longer term work to do and a longer term decision.

Anger in a fight response,

Many of us are more okay with someone who's angry than we are with someone who's in a fight response because they are by definition out of control.

They've lost connection with their higher humanity,

With their heart.

They'll say things in a fight response that they don't even mean.

Our world gets very narrow when we're in a fight response.

All we're trying to do is get this out.

We might rage or rant.

And sometimes we get into this with other people.

I've noticed that with politics,

We're mad about something and we kindle off of each other.

We build the fire together.

And at the end,

We might feel a relief of getting some of that out,

But we might also feel kind of singed.

Actually,

That wasn't that great of an experience to just be ranting like that,

Even though I was being supported by that other person.

Come back now and just come back out of the practice.

Take a few deep cyclic sighs.

So deep double inhale through the nose,

Long exhale like breathing out through a thin straw.

One of the really important things here to know is that a fight response is a survival response.

We feel it.

We go into those responses when we feel there's a threat.

Working with this and looking to see what is my assessment of what's going on and how much is that influenced by what's happened in the past.

We all have these signals that we're paying attention to.

It's very much influenced by our experience and we're not trying to ignore the signals.

We are trying to be more accurate in our assessment of the danger in this moment.

If you have a lot of experience of someone raging at you in a certain tone of voice,

Then when you hear that tone of voice,

All of your past experience is going to come in.

We don't want to have our whole history come in.

It will come in to alert us,

But then we can work with it.

Go,

Actually right now I can hear that loud voice over there if you're in a store or something.

I can actually put my things down and leave the store if I'm feeling like there's a threat there.

When we come back into our body,

Into our breath,

We have more options.

We have more agency.

And the other thing is that when we go into any kind of a response,

We could stop shaming ourselves for that.

We need to take responsibility for it.

Okay,

Here I am.

I'm feeling like I'm going to blow my top.

I'm getting nasty.

I've got that nasty tone of voice,

Whatever that might be.

And I recognize this is my nervous system generating that.

And I can come back into my breath.

I can move my body.

I can do some shaking.

I can take responsibility so that I'm not spewing that out onto the people around me.

And I'm not covering myself in shame either.

It's usually after the response is over,

Then we don't feel that good about ourselves.

And with a fight response,

We often have a big impact on our relationships.

If we're trying to be in relationship with someone who's scared of us and who goes into a freeze or also goes into a flight or an anger,

A fight response or fawning,

That's not a healthy basis for a relationship.

How can we work with that?

How can we do our best to stay steady enough that we can have a really good relationship with people?

That it's not sidetracked or really affected as much by going into an anger response,

Into a fight response in particular.

Lots of juicy material.

It's really interesting to work with this.

Right now in this moment,

Let's come back into awareness that here I am.

I've had a lot of different things going through my mind,

Through my body.

I'm going to take a couple of breaths.

Long exhale,

Release tension out of your body.

You might stand up and shake or do something like that to bring that out of your body.

What came up for you?

What insights did you have that you might work with more?

We will do more sessions on this.

Do it weekly for a while to really get into some of the dynamics of how this works and to have more time to practice it would also be a really good idea.

Reviews

Thank you ❤️
Excellent way of exploring and working with this topic. The applied regulation tools throughout were a teaching moment in and of themselves; the mindful, quiet return to how we can hold and nurture ourselves through challenging emotions and interactions.
Took away much learning and am looking forward to the next exploration on this topic. I came to the live and very greatful for this opportunity to relisten and digest further.
Thank you 🌱🌿