Hard exercise, destroying something?

Hope you get some good feedback because I deal with the dame thing. I talked with a peer counselor today about it feels like I go from 0-60 like that over things that might have only been a 0-10 in the past. I have prayed and talked about it to my husband. I do think it is ptsd related. I am in hypervigelience over my life and my kids dont have a sense of safety and support I once enjoyed. Lots of deep breathes and self care and love. I have little resources so trying to do what I can :)

thank you Bluedragon41 never thought of destroying something will have to give it a try... only most of the time when I go to that point there are people around causing the issue, and dont stop when I tell them to, before it gets to the point of anger...

I promised myself I wouldn't respond to idiot racist/prejudice comments on things like youtube. It doesn't change anything and ends up making me mad.
If I work through the anger by ranting about it in writing or talking to someone it helps me but some days I'm just angry.

My anger is never going to g away. I lived very horrific things and I never had any justice......So I just don't know how we're supposed to "put it all behind us" and "let go"............

As long as there was no justice there is no closure.

I was able to release/process all my anger and move beyond it without even remembering the man how hurt me. I have never remembered his face or his name and it is unlikely that I ever will at this point. So no justice was served for me either. But I did process all my anger.

Even without a face I knew what he did to me. I knew the terror I felt and I knew I would die at his hands if I didn't obey. There was a tremendous amount of anger that I felt towards this faceless man and I processed that anger by punching a punching bag. Screaming and swearing. Crying oceans of tears. Strangling a pillow that I had drawn a face and neck on. Writing in a journal. Ripping up phone books. I got it all out by directing the anger towards the man who hurt me and now I have no anger towards him any more.

It is possible to process the anger for yourself without the justice of seeing the person pay for their crime. And I've heard stories from others here who have seen their abuser pay for their crime and even die...yet their anger never goes away. This is because your anger is within you and you must release it.

It is nice to see justice served and I would love to remember who did this to me so I can see him go to jail - but him being in jail does not heal me. I heal me.

It's constant work in progress for me. My PTSD came from being molested but also from getting knocked around when my parents exploded in rage toward each other. Then more came from growing up overseas in a war zone from seeing adults literally kill each other in my neighborhood's streets.

Everybody justified their rage, almost made it sacred, as you can imagine with each side touting its cause in the civil war. They had songs, and slogans. A line from one of the songs one side sang during the war actually said "rage is my vocation." Because hating the enemy was like some kind of holy calling.

It was malarkey. Most of the violence in the war wasn't any holy calling, it was brutal. Just like the fistfights between my parents inside my house.

So I guess the hardest thing for me now is to be angry and feel justified about it. For some people anger is an entitlement. For me it brings back memories of people being full of it, lying to themselves and to everybody else so they could act like animals.

Not all anger is like that. It plays an important function. My therapist spent a lot of time with me talking about how anger has to be expressed, but that it can be expressed constructively. It makes sense, but given when I've seen people do angrily that's always been a hard thing for me to put faith in. Too often I'll just go numb and dissociate.

Oddly, Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief help me be angry. The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. If I put my anger in that context, even when I'm not dealing with grief, it seems like I can get to accepting it more.

Muji - I agree with you. I was also surrounded by anger and rage and I was (and still a little) terrified of it. I saw rage do the ultimate damage - take a life. After that I prevented myself from feeling anger because I was so afraid I would also take a life and that my life would be taken.

It took my therapist a long time to get me to be OK with feeling it - just a little. But even though I didn't feel the anger my body did show me it was there in the form of heat, heart palpitations, shaking and several other things. Now I know the signs of anger within myself and I take the necessary steps to process it.

Anger is so hard to deal with. Exercise is good for that. But in the moment I would try controlled breathing so you don't explode.