Forrest and associate therapist Elizabeth Ferreira talk about healthy (and unhealthy) anger. They challenge the common framing of anger as a “secondary emotion,” and explore why anger matters, how it relates to trauma, and what it can tell us about our wants and needs. They discuss how to access healthy protest and work with less healthy forms of anger like explosive rage, repression, defensiveness, passive aggression, and righteousness. Elizabeth shares insights from both her personal experience as someone with CPTSD and her clinical practice.
Key Topics:
0:00: Introduction: Why anger matters, and why it’s misunderstood
3:32: How trauma shapes our relationship to anger
5:40: Bypassing anger in therapy
9:04: What happens when anger is suppressed
12:29: Reclaiming anger: submit, explode, or something else
15:45: Anger as a signal of wants and needs
16:20: Boundaries, protest, and complex trauma
25:01: When CPTSD makes it hard to know what you want
30:06: Dissociation, structural trauma, and accessing anger
35:04: Why we need others to co-regulate big emotions
43:20: Emotional responsibility, self-awareness, and repair
53:26: Reconnecting with wants and needs through play
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