I have spent too much of my life being ‘nice’. When I was seven years old, I remember thinking that my mother’s threat to leave my younger brother outside the local orphanage applied to me as well. Staring at those huge black iron gates in the dead of night was incentive enough to do whatever I believed was required to be considered a ‘good girl’.

My mother wanted ‘good’ children whom she didn’t have to parent. But her efforts to control my behaviour sent the message that, unless I did what pleased her and made her happy, I was not only bad, but also unlovable. When we are little children and dependent on our parents to survive, we can’t block those messages out. We are immersed in the soup our parents create. Worthless soup. Useless soup. No-good soup. Shameful soup. Those messages were reinforced time and again until I complied because I believed they were true.

Years later, as an adult, when I want to say ‘no’ to someone, or express my emotions, I can go straight back to the 1970s and become that little girl again, who was terrified she was going to be left at the orphanage gates because she didn’t do what was expected of her.

Our body doesn’t have a sense of linear time. It’s always NOW. So, when I go back to the 1970s, it’s actually my present-time body taken there by the sensations of the past.

This is what can happen when trauma is trapped in the nervous system. We have no control over the sensations that keep coming up, over and over again.

Uncovering the trauma held in your body before you could speak or your brain could lay down memories, is a slow and sacred process of re-membering (reconnecting the pieces of yourself).

What your body really wants to repeat and have a chance to ‘do-over’, are all the missed opportunities to express healthy boundaries and say no. When your boundaries couldn’t be safely expressed, it certainly wasn’t safe to show anger. You were probably shamed, rejected, or abandoned for using a boundary – or maybe all three. In all those cases, connection (and therefore safety and survival) was taken away from you. If you were at a particularly young and/or vulnerable age or stage of development, this can be devastating to a child’s developing brain and body (and their future ability to meet their own needs and engage in interpersonal relationships).

Interpreting your body’s signals

You might be at the stage of wondering what’s happening when sensations take over your body and you have to stop everything to comfort yourself.

My body kept giving me signals that the path of trying to please others was unsatisfactory, but it took a long time for me to listen.

My body was trying to get me to pay attention. There were so many physical signs (such as a paralysed arm as a teenager), but I had learned to block out my emotions and even my physical pain. There were so many disowned emotions in my family that I had to find a way to cope. The way I found was a common pathway – I moved my conscious awareness out of my body and fully into my head, then I dissociated my thoughts from my body and completely lost touch with whatever was happening in the present moment. My life became a blur. For a long while, I only felt safe when I was disembodied and disconnected from the feeling of what was happening. If ever I re-entered my body, I felt as if I was in a warzone and my body was the enemy.

Due to her own trauma, my mother felt deep shame if she thought she ‘owed’ anything to anybody; so, when she had a favour to repay her sisters, she sent me, the family garbage can, to give them massages. My gift of healing touch was recognised early, but it was disdained by my mother and ignored by my father, so I never learned to value it. I continued giving it away long after I left home. I had lost touch with my boundaries and needs from an early age, creating a pattern of spending energy trying to make others happy so I felt safe.

My body kept sending signals that the path of trying to please others was unsatisfactory, but it took a long time for me to listen.

In my early thirties, I severely injured my neck hyperextending as I reached forward. Subsequent trainings in developmental trauma have taught me about traumatic activation being trapped in an emotionally neglected child’s unrequited reach for support. Arms will create ways to stop being able to fully reach out when this pattern of neglect has been repeatedly activated throughout the lifespan.

Physical rehabilitation did not provide lasting improvement because repairing my body had to begin with the patterns creating my body’s distress signals. I didn’t know how to listen or respond to my body’s messages; so, ten years later, I herniated discs in my lumbar spine, and for 9 months I could hardly walk, wash, or dress myself. I was made homeless three times that year, barely functioning, and certainly unable to carry a box. When emergency accommodation fell through for the third time, I couldn’t bear to rely on anyone again (intergenerational trauma pattern repeating itself), so I started living out of my car. One night, when I was helping a friend, lending energy I didn’t have to spare, my car and my worldly possessions were illegally towed.

After I got my car back, someone suggested that I would feel less pain if I let out my inner tiger and expressed my feelings.

When catharsis doesn’t work

I spent four years beating pillows and bashing a foam cube twice a week, yelling, "F*ck you!". In spite of supreme effort, I never contacted my primal urge to kill off anyone, so I pushed myself more. I seemingly had a huge capacity for cathartic work, despite being physically weakened by my back injury. Typical signs of reaching threshold (overwhelm, spacing out, numbness) didn’t present, so it appeared I hadn’t reached my threshold. If my cathartic therapist had been trauma qualified, they would have been looking out for signs of a false window. But like many therapists and counseling courses in Brisbane , they weren’t trained to look for signs of overriding one’s window of capacity, so they thought I needed to push further and go harder.

Pushing didn't help.

Instead, it slowly frayed the edges of my dysregulated nervous system, just like a frayed electrical cord, slowly splitting one fibre at a time. The damage wasn’t visible until the final fibre split, and the cord severed and spun out of control. The problem was that I was working too quickly for my nervous system (my mind was fine with the pace), trying to process my trauma too rapidly, and was layering more trauma over my existing trauma.

One of the physiological characteristics of trauma is ‘something that moves too quickly for the individual to process’.

In contrast, there is embodied safety in slowing down. Pushing into wild, frenzied movement can feel similar to the original trauma and cause the nervous system to contract and close tightly around the energy to protect from feeling anything. By moving too quickly for my nervous system to process, I was actually recapitulating my past trauma and compressing both layers of trauma further into my nervous system and numbing myself to my experience.

By ‘trauma’, I mean thousands of micro-moments in my life where I over-rode my impulse to protect myself – sometimes needing to fight or flee, but other times needing distance or differentiation from others. By working so quickly, and not in a way that was attuned to the sensitivity of my nervous system, I skated right over my frozen and stuck survival responses. I sought to be rewarded for overriding my ability to be present to my feelings and emotions.

In fairness, I thought I was present. But something happened each time I hit that foam cube that caused me to lose contact with myself. I couldn’t feel anything real, except the rush afterwards of being told I was a good girl because I hit the cube harder and better than anyone else.

So, I began to associate connection and belonging with suppressing my aliveness. I substituted authentic connection for the dopamine hit of acceptance/tolerance. I pretended I was satisfied with the table scraps from those in power (but without sharing their power), and I became a classic people-pleaser: I over-rode my natural defences, believing that would make other people feel safe. I suppressed my natural aggression when someone overstepped a boundary so as not to frighten anyone. I denied my authentic impulses and needs. I claimed I didn’t need anything, so I pretended I wasn’t different from anyone else, which I thought would earn ME the safety I wanted.

Because, at the core, all any people-pleaser wants, is to feel safe.

I often find myself reminding my clients that people-pleasing is not a character flaw, it is a coping strategy to compensate for lack of safety.

I was unable to continue a professional training in cathartic therapy techniques, which was fortuitous, and I discovered it was possible to work subtly with the sensorimotor and nervous systems of the body and make authentic contact with repressed anger.

Working at the level of my nervous system helped me discover that my anger can be a powerful force for good. Mindful contact with my anger, and feeling it fully WITHIN my capacity, released me from the stories that were holding me back from thriving.

Being the Tall Poppy

I no longer fear the consequence of being labelled ‘too ambitious’ and ‘too powerful’; labels which cut me to the bone in my corporate job. I no longer need to shy away from condescending voices when people call me ‘creative’ or point out my differences – I am proud to be different, and I don’t care if I am pushed outside of the popular group. I don’t subscribe to an unconscious fear that survival depends on being accepted. That allows me to be a thought leader in my field of specialization, to innovate and generate new ideas. To remain focused on growing my practice and how I serve others. My progress is not limited by the imagination of others. I won’t go willingly into a box.

Of course, it still means that I encounter situations and experiences that test the current capacity of my nervous system – I have to grow my capacity as I meet new challenges. Although it’s not instantaneous, it’s possible to increase capacity by not over-extending or stretching myself in the moment. I step back and away, focus on allowing a smaller cycle of activation, and then wait.

Expansion is inevitable because trauma isn’t hijacking my nervous system.

I recorded a free one-hour training on releasing anger (click the image below).

This information needs to get out there to counter the dominant narrative perpetuated by our social conditioning that claims resolving trauma can't be gentle and effective – more effective than thrashing about in a state of hyperarousal (and indeed doing that can undermine nervous system expansion). Shifting trauma isn't about moving it ‘through’ the body, rather ‘completing the circuit’ provides the body an opportunity for resolution, and therefore release. It's an important distinction that makes it easier to ‘be with what is’.

A somatic exercise to connect with anger

The push exercise is an opportunity to renegotiate developmental and attachment patterns and can be described as an attachment focused therapy. We are facilitating relational conditions for a client to feel their anger and be connected to another. This can be a huge and significant piece, especially if in their histories it wasn’t safe to feel angry let alone whilst in connection with another. Sometimes slow titration is very important. You could start with asking the client to gently squeeze a pool noodle and let go. This could be enough to start with, then once they connect safely to feeling sympathetic activation in their nervous system, they might feel okay about pushing against a wall. If there is enough safety in the relational field with the practitioner, there may be an opportunity for them to do something they have never been able to do – feel angry and safely connected to another.

When safety is present, the work is to let go of the story, establish safe boundaries and focus on eliciting a healthy ‘fight’ response in the client. The practitioner can help with identifying where they are feeling unsafe, what the unmet need is – and help the client discover how good it can feel to say no by inviting them to explore holding out their hand out like a stop sign, and express and feel healthy boundaries in their body.

When pushing/fight responses are allowed to arise organically, they resonate more deeply for the client. They can contribute to feelings of empowerment and strength. The client can feel motivated (and able) to reclaim their voice, their story, their experience, and to tell the story of their trauma. If the client leaves their window (zone of regulation), the amount of discharge was too much too fast, and their body started moving towards conservation/freeze.

Some teachers and gurus like to say that anger is an addiction. I’ve also heard others claim that anger is a ‘choice’. I’ve even heard some say it’s both! What we know from Gabor Mate’s deep exploration of addiction, is that addiction is the symptom of not enough connection in our lives. We might also posit that anger is a protest against insufficient connection. While the addict turns their anger on self, the rageaholic vents their spleen on those around them for not offering much-needed connection.

Some say underneath anger is grief, and that’s partly true – only partially, because underneath grief is anger also. Anger is not a secondary emotion. Like sadness and fear, self-protective anger is a core emotion of the human ego. Saying that there is something ‘underneath’ anger denies the ego’s impulse to protect our human existence. It’s a nice girl’s way of denying ugly feelings and sweeping them under the rug.

How can we grow our capacity to hold and renegotiate the energy of anger instead of dismissing it?

Read more about nervous system training here.

People-pleasing, Anger, and Sacred Rage