Inward rage folks are like superheroes who absorb dangerous energy on the
battlefield. But unlike a Marvel superhero who can redirect the rage and
put it out there, inward rage folks, they just absorb it. Instead of shooting
the bad guys with what they just absorbed, you get stuck with it. Some of us can feel really defensive about
[snorts] being angry or having some rage, like you're not allowed to have it or you're bad for being angry or being
really upset in general. And who of you out there gets freaked out by someone's anger or their frustration? Like even
their a little bit of frustration makes you feel triggered or unsafe? And some of us actually don't have enough anger
or rage. And I'm not saying rage is a good thing. I'm just saying it's an emotion that comes with childhood
trauma, but it makes us feel unsafe because rage and rageful people was such
a consistent dangerous thing growing up. And some have too much of it and some really don't know how they impact others
about their anger. But have you ever noticed or had a loved one be completely
out of touch with their anger? Maybe if you had a parent and watching them being shut down around their anger and like,
"Hey, you were just rearended and the person was so about themselves and selfish. Why aren't you pissed off? Why
are you apologizing to the person who caused it?" Like, where is your upset? It's confusing, right? I think having
rage is the result of old situations that had to go underground in us. Rage
is just again, it's just an emotion. It's not who we are, but we tend to have some issues with it. Too much or too
little. But I think for childhood trauma, rage is just a byproduct from
childhood trauma situations. I'm going to walk you through four childhood trauma situations that can impact our
rage or lack thereof. One is the adults never doing the right thing, like
protecting their kids or doing the work and responsibility of being a parent. Number two is having a sense of deep
injustice or unfairness because of things that went on in your childhood where power wasn't shared about emotions
or decisions or you being included in decisions. The third example is having a volatile adult or even an adult who was
too passive. We swore we would never be like these people. And raise your hand out there if you had an extremely
passive parent. Might that be related to some rage or lack of rage that you have?
And most importantly, the fourth one is our rage can be about being erased like
your sense of self got erased. Your things got erased. Your feelings, feelings of abandonment or not being
taken seriously just gets completely wiped out. And as a side note, being erased as a kids means to never be
considered, to be invisible or not fully seen, where the parent is like, "We're moving next month. Get over it." or
don't bother me with your feelings. Or your sister's gonna have a sleepover tonight, so we'll celebrate your birthday next week. Or this is my new
girlfriend. I don't care if you miss your mother. Or your feelings, what about my feelings? These are all
examples from a toxic parent that will result in a child feeling erased. And
being erased ties into that massive sense of injustice, but you are aware of that kind of
connection going on. So let's pause here already and look over these four things. the adult not doing the right thing, a
big sense of injustice or unfairness, a volatile or passive adult, or you being
erased as a kid? And a big question here in childhood, were you ever allowed to be upset about any of those four things?
Take a minute right now to either make a note to yourself or maybe leave a comment in the video about a situation
that you had the right, the valid right to be angry about something as a child,
but you were never allowed to or it got ignored or you were overpowered about
it? Were you erased in that situation? Was it about the parent never doing the
right thing? Did someone else's big emotions not allow for you to have your
own emotions? that's going to cause some repressed rage issues. And I'm asking because living in these situations in
the day-to-day life of childhood causes these anger and rage issues or the
absence of anger and rage. The absence of anger is an anger issue actually. And if you don't know me, I'm Patrick. I'm
an educator on childhood trauma. I'm also an MSW and I create content and resources for adults who did not grow up
in safety. And you can check out my website in the video description below or you can give a thumbs up or subscribe
to the channel if you struggle with these topics and want to learn more. So the biggest takeaway from this video,
just going to get to it right now, is any of these four things in childhood, yes, there are other examples besides
the four, they're going to cause unprocessed rage or anger issues. And
yes, it sounds like a cliche, but there's going to be a reserve of unprocessed situations or as my mentor
Amanda Curtain calls it, a well of childhood that kind of runs us from within us from our families if you
weren't safe. That's going to fuel the rage issues or lack thereof and your triggers in the present. And another
revelation is the situations you went through as a child are more important to
me in when it comes to childhood trauma treatment than the feelings because the situations are the things that caused
the feelings. That's why and maybe annoyingly that I want to know your story. I'm more actually interested in
your story than your symptoms because your symptoms are probably just valid
experiences of the situations or byproducts of the situations. And from these situations, having too much rage
or not enough of it, which is really the same thing, same side of the same coin. Whether someone's rage is outward or
inward, it's the same emotional energy just in different directions. We're
going to look now at two versions of repressed rage. And by rage for our
purpose means just a big underground emotion that either comes out sideways when we don't expect it where you might
get road rage where you were feeling fine just a minute ago or you might get intense over really like a big nothing
kind of situation or your anger doesn't come out at all. It just is a big kind
of void and you might even not know what is anger kind of a thing. for those with inward rage where it never comes out.
Your rage went underground as a kid. And that is kind of like an oil deposit
underneath the surface yet it impacts the surface like a sinkhole or something
or the oil impacts like the water table or the vegetation like maybe plants
don't grow there because the rage is hanging out underneath and impacting
some nourishment. We're going to get into the two now. Outward rage, which I call fire at will, or being wired to
anger or having that lingering influence. Outward rage will vary from
being too comfortable being loud and angry around others to rage coming out sideways unintentionally when you're
trying your best. There's a difference between inward rage and then feeling it and keeping intact. The inward rage
folks, they tend to not feel it at all. So, I know we tend to have a childhood perpetrator who used rage as a weapon,
but let's think about this as childhood trauma survivors having rage, not that you're the perpetrator. Try to pause our
judgment around these issues because these issues are just flatout triggering and more later on that around the
morality of it. And to humanize these, I've done all of these in my life. I've been wired to outward rage. I've had
some inward rage. It's all kind of appropriate if we didn't grow up in safety. But what if a childhood trauma
survivor's outward rage is about like protecting others? Maybe they get enraged at the abuse of the marginalized
or pets or just like really get enraged in a restaurant if someone is being
nasty to someone else who is seems vulnerable like that kind of a thing. Rage isn't exactly okay, but neither is
what we'll talk about when it comes to inward rage. You know, we tend to look at the outward rage folks as like the baddies when it's sort of it's just not
to judge it in that way unless the person has rage and kind of doesn't give a about their rage kind of a thing. So,
more about outward rage looks like being low threshold like it doesn't take much to piss you off or you're going too fast
or things are too important to you and you don't have an experience of being chill and you might have been told by
other people around you that you're kind of intense. It also looks like freaking out on people, being self-righteous. All
childhood trauma survivors can get self-righteous, having some misplaced anger, like you're angry that people
don't do their part in your child's kindergarten class, but you don't know you're triggered to neglect from your
childhood kind of a thing. Then there's sideways rage, some passive aggression, some sarcasm, expressions and feelings
coming out that may surprise you. And maybe you've been told you're overly negative, but that maybe doesn't line up
on the insides with you. That there's a disconnect between the outward you and the inside emotions, your history, and
how you see yourself. More examples of outward rage or bitterness, grudges, focus on fairness. Let me know in the
comments if you experience a pattern of disgust and disappointment in others.
And that could be fueled by rage about people not doing the right thing. And yes, to be blunt, people are wonderful,
but they're also kind of crappy. But we're not talking about the crappy ones. We're talking about how insides our rage
can make everybody a bit of a disappointment to us. So that's outward rage. Now, let's look at the inward
rage. It's kind of like a black hole where you're wired to be nice and really repressed. And about that morality that
I spoke of, the inward rage folks don't carry the baggage like the outward rage
folks do. But again, this is the same energy just going in a different direction. So, what inward rage looks
like is some codependency. You can check out a video I did here that I'll that I'll have up here or in the video
description where we're really submissive and serviceoriented where you
might skip the injustice done to you or that you're being put out or being taken
advantage of and you might always default to thinking the best of other people. It also looks like some embodied
physical issues like exhaustion, some autoimmune problems, chronic issues, migraines, tight jaw, like I said,
autoimmune diseases. Another example is control, some perfectionism, extreme
inner disappointment with yourself, and some depression. And a complex one here is that inward rage folks can have a
superiority, inferiority complex going on that we're not exactly real about.
You might know that you're the best person for the new position at work, like a th000%, like I could totally rock
that job, but you won't go for it cuz maybe you don't feel worthy enough or
you don't really want to upset anybody. So, there's a lot of unfulfilled qualities to the inward rage folks, but
they also know that they can really rock things. They just can't bring themselves to go do that. So, about some more
morality with this. It looks bad to be outward rageful. And yes, some people
are just dangerous when they're disregulated. There are some baddies when it comes to that. Of course, there is. Especially the ones who don't care
or they're not aware, like I said earlier. But like with shame, some of us are just outward with our shame and some
of us are disconnected with it. The same with rage. Some of us are just outward with rage and some of us are just disconnected from it. So, some more
about some inward rage, folks. This is more subtle and tricky to get. Those who have some inward rage, you might be
surprised that you have rage at all since it manifest as things like self-destruction, self- sabotage, inward
pressure. Your strategy may have been modeled to you was never to put anger out there. So inward rage folks are like
superheroes who absorb dangerous energy on the battlefield. But unlike a Marvel
superhero who can redirect the rage [laughter] and put it out there, inward rage folks,
they just absorb it instead of shooting the bad guys with what they just absorbed. You get stuck with it. And
that's an old strategy. You don't redirect it as a weapon outward. You keep absorbing it at your own expense.
Probably going to affect you physically and it's just kind of hanging out there. And as an interesting side note, there
are some kids who feel everything in a family that the rest refuse and don't
feel. Some survivors are usually highly sensitive that took on all those feelings as a self-sacrifice strategy.
Outward rage folks can be highly sensitive, too. But I'm just kind of saying, did you maybe feel everything
from the family and absorbed everything? And for those of you with outward rage, a lot of it is confusing since it might
be misplaced. Might come out at the wrong time or more commonly when you're angry and upset, you might be defensive
about that. Or you might be reactive when people are like whoa. It might feel like your family is again telling you
you're wrong and you're selfish to be mad. Like the kid that feels everything.
Those with outward rage might have felt the injustice when no one else was
making any action on the injustice because they were so shut down. And the outward rage folks as a kid might have
been sort of telling the truth. But then you get abused for telling the truth. also a kind of a thing that falls into
the outward rage kind of a thing or worse being told that you're out of control with your anger when it's
actually appropriate and you're having an appropriate reaction to the childhood situation like betrayal or chaos or
adults not telling the truth kind of a thing. And does that feel familiar to you? Because that's a thing being told
that your emotions are wrong when they're actually appropriate about a chaotic or crazym situation in your
family. both outward and inward rage people may have heard that they're the
problem and made to feel crazy about that. Okay, I think we got that covered and I hope it makes sense about outward
rage is the same as folks who do the inward rage thing. Let's plug this
outward rage thing and this inward rage thing into a quick case study of two sisters. Let's start with the older
sister, Jane. These are adults. So Jane is a manager of an art supply store downtown. Jane grew up in an in a
chaotic alcohol home and was the oldest of four children. Jane is sometimes fun-loving, but mostly intense and
irritable and burned out a lot of the time. The people working for Jane know her to be likable, but moody, yet tricky
to kind of gauge what mood she'll be in in the day-to-day or even in the hour to
hour, what that's going to look like. Jane's very reactive. She has a reputation that other employees agree to
kind of warn each other about about Jane's moods. Jane can actually be heard swearing into her cell phone from the
back room at her partner on the phone and she'll throw things. She hates stupid questions if she's in a mood.
Annoying customers are extremely difficult for her and she'll go into this weird customer service robotic role
with them. And everyone [clears throat] sees her brimming with rage and trying to quelch that rage to to not tell a
customer to f off. And she makes herself kind of robotic, like I said, around difficult people. And you kind of feel
like Jane feels like she's never going to win with tricky customers or a
customer having a problem. And watching her do customer service makes you wonder if Jane was really messed with as a
little girl. You actually kind of think that when you see her in action, she was. and other people see her anticipate
being messed with, especially from customers. And notice how customers have a lot of authority in retail situations
that the customer is always right. Kind of feels like our family. If any of you have worked in service jobs or retail
jobs like I've done, that's been a trigger honestly. So to Jane, the customers take her back to people in
authority who have unhinged demands. A person requesting a refund. To Jane, a
normal like return retail request feels like the person is selfish and unhinged
and will overpower her in unfair ways. And that's a lot going on in her head. It's a lot of projection. And yes,
customers can be a-holes, too. But Jane can't differentiate between normal customers and angry customers. Let me
know if you relate to that. And Jane struggles to not be a jerk, but it still kind of comes out sideways with
employees and customers. and she's been seen leaving work, screeching out of the
parking lot in her car and actually getting into verbal confrontations on the main drag with cars outside of work
after a day. Now she's in road rage instead of rage in her head. So the worst thing you can do with Jane is give
her feedback that she's angry or intense when she's being angry and intense. And
a customer did that once and it went so bad that upper management had to put Jane on leave for a couple days. So, it
went bad with upper management because Jane feels like she's being told that
she's overreacting. And remember that feeling of earlier when we talked about being erased that I mentioned earlier in
issues like justice or volatility or the adults not doing the right thing. Jane
knows she has rage issues, but a big part of her feels justified to have
them, which is an issue that she's not fully in tune with from childhood that
shapes and fuel her rage. And it has an impact on others, her employees, her own self, and her partner. But again, the
outward rage folks feel like they're being erased if you tell them that their
anger is too much. They have to own their anger. They have to work on their anger. I'm just kind of spelling out a
common like sort of childhood trigger again about being made to feel crazy about your anger. So that's Jane. And
what do you relate to about Jane? I would love for you to leave a comment like what is maybe triggering for you
about Jane or do you relate to Jane? Do you have an inside voice that's kind of like burn it all down, they're all after
me. I mean it's like I'm not saying you're crazy. That's kind of how I felt too. It's kind of common for this childhood trauma stuff. Now let's focus
on Jane's younger sister, Beth. She is a mother of two and she does some part-time event planning for income.
Beth struggles with inward rage. Beth also struggles with Crohn's disease that disrupts everything in her life. She
struggles with postpartum depression, but doesn't like talking about it because she feels like she doesn't have
the right to be exhausted, that she should be 100% a happy camper all the
time. According to her inner child, she has young children and a job, but she should be energized all the time. It's
an expectation that she has upon herself and she feels like she's a bad mom for
going through natural exhaustion and uncontrollable physical hormonal changes
on top of a physical ailment. Beth is known to be profoundly giving. She
doesn't like to even let her partner change diapers or be burdened by any of the parenting, which actually creates
tension because Beth will emotionally crash out from doing everything and then feel shame about that. When the partner
doesn't mind being a normal parent and changing diapers, that parent kind of feels controlled and put out or shut
out. Beth is known to be perfectionistic and controlling, but it's interesting. It's controlling about how people see
her, not controlling about how someone makes a PB&J or something like that. So,
Beth and Jane have a tricky relationship. Jane was the oldest. Then came Beth. Beth was Jane's helper as
well as her frustration sounding board since both of their parents were really MIA irresponsible and abandoning with
some substance abuse issues. So, Beth would support Jane as the oldest with the younger two kids. and she hated
seeing Jane get in trouble by the alcoholic parents. So, she tried to prevent that. These two girls were
burdened by maintaining the house and watching over the two youngest. Sometimes Jane would be frustrated with
Beth for not being Johnny on the spot enough because parentification rolls
downhill between siblings. Like, if the oldest is in charge of everything, the oldest is going to be kind of pissed off
at the other kids. It's all about the parental responsibility up top. So, back to Beth. Beth before her current
partner, she had a series of manipulative bad relationships. She could never say that her partners were
bad and she always talked herself into being not understanding enough that she
was the problem with a manipulative partner. And Beth is never angry. In
fact, she hates that feeling of anger and hates herself when it comes up. That's an old strategy. But Beth does
think that places like the daycare center who take care of her kids can do better for her kids. But Beth has a
strategy that is to help the daycare center be better versus confronting them. She never confronts anybody. She
can never bring up a valid frustration. So she goes around the situation and
takes care of it without the person at daycare doing anything. She loses sight
that she can advocate for herself given how much money that she gives to the daycare center. It's a lot. But Beth
also fixes and absorbs things around embarrassment. In her past relationship,
she has saved extremely dysfunctional partners from looking bad. Beth is does
a good job at covering up situations. Beth can't tolerate messy or embarrassing situations. She's even gone
out of her way to return a big appliance item instead of having the big
corporation come to her house rouse and pick it up because the person on the phone with Beth seemed irritated at her.
And Beth at those times is a mix of guilt and secret frustration. She can
get frustrated with people and have triggered narratives in her head about why people aren't more like her. You
know, I would never show that I'm frustrated with someone who was a customer. And what do you think about that? There's some evidence in Beth that
she has some anger, but it gets absorbed into her moral code about how people
should be treated. She might kind of say, "I would never treat somebody like that." But she can never say, "F that
person at the appliance store." That would be like a later treatment goal for Beth to reclaim her inner her outer f
you to other people who are being inappropriate around her. for her to turn her rage, which is inward, aimed at
herself 180 degrees, and go outward to start putting the burden onto others who
are burdening her. The biggest quality about Beth that drives her sister Jane
and Beth's partner crazy is that Beth skips upset when she has been legitely
wrong and put out. So that's the sisters, outward rage of Jane, inward
rage of Beth. So with these two sisters, how is Jane's abundance of rage and
Beth's deficit of rage related to each other? Jane's rage is like a shield. And
Jane's relational style, which was formed by her abusive parents, is like Jane is sort of saying, "You'll never
fully get me." That's what her employers see when she deals with customer service. Her disgust and hatred of
people can be dramatic and go outward, like, "Can you believe they wanted a refund?" and she gets triggered to rage
about people's requests and expectations, but she's actually projecting her parents onto people. And
notice how Jane's rage can be really attached to old issues around unfairness
and some disgust around the unfairness. But Beth is totally different. Beth is like a container. Because of her abusive
parents, because of what she saw Jane go through, Beth figured out she could sacrifice herself and hold it all in
inside to help Jane and to tame the situation. Like that was her strategy
inward. Beth will bypass the disappointment and disgust in others. We actually really need that in life to
gauge about who is safe and who's a good partner, who's a good friend. And she aims it at herself, wondering if she did
anything wrong or how she could have done better in the situation. Beth really struggles to see that the other
person is kind of off. And remember at the beginning of the video when we mentioned situations versus the
feelings, every child will come up with their own strategy for dealing with these situations like these two sisters
have. And here are the situations that Jane and Beth grew up in. These two sisters grew up in domestic violence.
They saw one parent physically abuse the other. And these two little girls were powerless. There's the injustice.
There's the parents not doing the right thing. There's the volatile adults. They also saw their parents abuse the
siblings. More injustice. More not doing the right thing. More seeing other people get erased. And both Beth and
Jane had to console their younger siblings, the two babies. And by doing so, they had to bury their own feelings
of fear and terror, whatever, to protect the younger children. There's more injustice there. There's more parents
not doing the right thing. There's more volatile adults is also being erased
kind of from a self-sacrificing place. Beth watched one of her parents berate
Jane for not being adult enough as the eldest. And when Jane was only like 11,
there's more injustice, parents not doing the right thing, volatile adults, and being erased. Jane watched Beth be
bered for getting home late from high school band only because the parent berating her was drunk and forgot to
pick Beth up. More being erased. More parents not doing the right thing. More volatile adults. And like many childhood
trauma survivors, these two sisters grew up in profound unfair and crazymaking
daily life. Leave a comment if you relate to that and how might it impacted your sense of anger. keep thinking
volatile adults being erased, unfairness, that kind of stuff. So those are the situations. But these two
sisters came up with very different strategies, right? Jane went outward maybe because she was the only child in
that household who was like the truth teller or she had to force herself to talk back at her own expense with an
unhinged adult. Beth went inward. Maybe she witnessed her sister's abuse and
wanted to take it away for her. and also by never being like the volatile parent
that she was seeing her abuse her sister. So, here's what is wild. If both
sisters were in a childhood trauma group when I was running them at the time, they would both be encouraged to do the
same kind of truthtelling rage work, hitting a karate bag and visually stopping the abusive parent and speaking
the truth about what it was like and who we are from a place of sense of self. I know I said a lot there, but by doing
the same work, Jane would release the pressure or the story and the narrative
of her outward rage. And Beth would kind of be having to dig for it and have a
different kind of reaction to it. Incidentally, Beth and Jane could learn from each other about their strategies.
You know what I mean? Like Jane could learn how to be more chill. Beth could learn to be more aggressive. Another
piece of really good group work. And as their therapist, my gentle feedback for Jane would be, you know, of course
everyone seems like they don't get it, but you're kind of overpowering people, which doesn't maybe belong to them. And
for Beth, I would be gently kind of saying, "Where did your upset go? You were just rearended by a jerk or the
daycare was neglectful or they didn't care about the peanut allergy." Of course, rage wasn't upset, but where is
the upset now? Let's help you get back to that upset. Here are some final thoughts. Let's recap. We covered how
childhood trauma situations cause rage when they are stuck and not processed, like the parent not doing the right
thing. The injustice, the being erased or being around an emotionally volatile
or passive parent, that's also very important when it comes to rage. And we covered outward rage and inward rage
being the same energy. And we talked through a case study of these two sisters of being different strategies
about anger and rage. And we also talked a little bit about the morality where yeah, Jane is tough to deal with, but so
is Beth. And we can understand people's rage from their childhood trauma, but like anything else, these two women
would have to take a look at how they impact others around them. Why? Because rage can make us self- consumed or lack
of rage can also make us like self-consumed where we're not in touch with how our childhood stuff can run
these emotions as well as our understanding of how our rage or lack thereof can impact those around us. Like
Jane's partner, she needs to understand like sort of whoo, I might be destroying this relationship. but also with Beth's
partner and her children. Her children need to see her advocate and sort of have some healthy anger that's gone
completely underground. And I would love to hear from you in the comment section about rage issues or the lack thereof.
Absence of rage is almost like numbness or you might even be confused like shouldn't I be angry right now? Do you
identify about that with Beth? Did that something stick out for you in that story? Uh, if anything, I hope you feel
validated that our emotions which are natural and are are they're fueled by
those old situations if you grew up in trauma. And a funny question is who might you be more triggered by? Would
you be triggered by Jane or would you be triggered by Beth? I would be more triggered as a therapist by Beth
personally because it would be really tricky to get Beth to be more real about her anger. might take a really long
time, a lot of safety for her to kind of cultivate some of it. Or maybe Jane would make you feel disregulated, which
is very understandable as well. Think about that. And if you feel open, maybe leave a comment that connects your
present rage triggers to an old situation like we saw with Jane and Beth. Like, do thoughtless people incite
rage in you that might be like a bit over the top for you? Like your inner child is focused on people not doing the
right thing? That's very true in life. People don't do the right thing, but is it more for you kind of a thing? Do
angry people around you make you go into fix it mode instead of having a healthy like, dude, chill, f off, you know, and
do you overly kind of appease an angry person? Do you absorb other people's discomfort around you like Beth might
have done as a container? And also, there's an important note here. We're not always wired solely for inward or
solely for outward. Sometimes that's true. You can be kind of both, though, depending on different situations. You
might feel more comfortable being visibly angry with a partner but not with anybody else. And our recovery
trajectory or our path might make these things shift. Like those with outward anger, they might get a little bit more
angry before they chill out. Or in the case of Beth, wouldn't it be amazing if you kind of saw Beth go through a period
of like 2 or 3 years where she actually gets pissed off at things before she kind of settles into a middle ground
kind of a thing? And speaking to that, many of us also have this kind of bottle up kind of rage where you don't know how
to communicate because you weren't taught that to express your emotions. So it might just kind of bottle up and it's
just kind of you're repressing, repressing, repressing, don't say it, boom. That's in a case where this
absorption stuff hits critical mass. And if you really resonate with this anger stuff, whether it's too much or too
little, and you want to learn more and work on it, there is a master class follow-up part two to this video over in
my circle community. It's a video of journal prompts, additional examples, and info on rage and how to work on it
and how to react differently. My masterclass videos are designed to be affordable, adree, and within a private
community. You can check it out right up here in the bubble here or check out the link in the description. And lastly, as
a human, it's impossible to not feel anger. And anger is such a it's actually weirdly my favorite emotion because it's
like a compass for me. Too much is destructive, but too little is also destructive. So, I hope this video is
helpful to you. Thank you so much for staying with me. Hit the like button, subscribe button if you want to know more on childhood trauma. And as always,
may you be filled with loving kindness. May you be well, may you be peaceful and at ease. And may you be joyous. and I
will see you next time.
