Anger is a form of life energy, whose purpose is to influence the environment and establish balance in a relationship that angers us, or to change it. If in the past we were unable to affect what we wanted—despite expressing everything we could through emotions—we were forced to suppress those emotions or express them ineffectively.
Initially, children can only direct their emotions clearly toward their mother or father when they do something that angers them. The parent should feel these aggressive emotions, as they are direct and strong enough to be perceived and to make the parent uncomfortable. A child should be important enough to the parent that even relatively weak emotions are noticed and given enough significance for an appropriate response. Although a child cannot physically harm or endanger a parent, the child should be given sufficient recognition and influence to address what is bothering, obstructing, or threatening them.
The problem arises when a parent has a subconscious “thick skin” (a significant level of chronic SMA), because then the child’s impulses and influences are too blocked to reach the parent’s conscious level and allow them to perceive the child’s actual state. If we add to this a mother who, due to a disconnection between her body and consciousness, perceives the world predominantly through the left hemisphere, she is unable to give the child the necessary importance. This further hinders the child’s ability to influence the parent and their environment. As a result, the likelihood of negative and aggressive parental reactions to the child’s calls for environmental change increases.
Typically, due to a lack of awareness of the actual situation and subconsciously triggered dependent responses rooted in their own childhood, the parent tries to deter the child from feeling anger. The child soon realizes that this emotion, meant to restore balance, provokes a negative response from the environment and is thus forced to dilute the anger. The child responds by holding in the emotion and adapting it to the demands of the environment. One common reaction is to redirect the anger meant for the parent and the family environment onto the entire world. Some express it outwardly, others inwardly. Some project it toward the whole world, some toward specific parts of it—some chronically try to change the world, while others chronically despise it and retreat into isolation. There are many ways to project rage and resentment onto the surroundings.
When this pattern develops and the person becomes angry at everything, they no longer want to see the world as it is—with both good and bad parts—but instead see only the bad. This enables them to intensify their projection of rage and resentment onto the environment, since sensory amnesia prevents them from recognizing home and parents as the origin of this hatred. Without this recognition, they cannot change the state at its source, which only worsens the situation and leads to growing hatred toward the world and increasingly dark, selective perception of their environment, past, present, and future. As Madonna once said in an interview: the longer you’re in the world and the more you get to know it, the more things you see that make you angry.
Repressed anger, which the child created and then internalized, causes imbalance in the body throughout life. Even though the person may not be aware of the suppressed anger, they feel compelled to spread it indiscriminately. This requires time and energy, as they must work hard to prevent the anger from erupting and becoming dangerous to themselves or others. Such wasteful use of energy through subconscious emotional expression also exhausts them, leaving them with even fewer opportunities to recognize the actual state and its causes. They typically oscillate between mania and paranoia on one end, and depression, despair, and pessimism on the other.
Imagine someone scaring you intensely ten times a day. You would no longer have the strength to think consciously and direct your emotions toward the environment, as you would be expending huge amounts of energy on reflexive fear responses. That’s why we often say: “Stop exhausting me with this,” or “You’re getting on my nerves.” If we are chronically exhausted from fear, we cannot do anything constructive to change ourselves or the way others treat us. This eventually brings about a sense of guilt. At first, guilt is a conscious emotion, but if we remain in this state for long enough and are unable to do anything to make things better, the guilt turns into a chronic and increasingly subconscious form.
If this kind of dynamic is repeated often enough, it becomes subconscious and automatic. This results in a chronically contracted chest due to suppressed guilt, for example, from not having played enough with your children during their childhood. And what happens when a grandchild arrives? Because of the guilt, we want a second chance and become overly attached to the grandchild. The grandchild then has too many “parents,” which leads to various problems because a child cannot bear that much pressure.
Aleš Ernst, author of the AEQ Method
