Rage
Rage is a bodily response. Emotional states arise at the neural level. Without this bodily response, there is no rage. We don’t think and become enraged. We experience rage in an ancient subcortical brain we have in common with other mammals. Rage is one of the primary affects (that arise from genetically encoded emotional circuits) that anticipate key survival needs. We automatically fight, run or freeze.Rage can be triggered by most any event in the external and internal environment. Triggers send the emotional brain time-traveling back to the initial trauma. Never fully here and alive in the present, the brain is in constant battle — zapping life energy to keep the emotional brain suppressed.
Before taking Prozac, I had absolutely no control. Prozac lowered the trigger point dramatically. This opened the possibility for self-therapies: Ki Breathing Meditation, Open Focus Training, Attention Therapy, and Insight Meditation, and Cognitive Therapy.
Rage
Heaven or Hell (RAGE)
A samurai demands the Zen Master tell him the nature of heaven and hell. The Master replies, “Why should I respond to a shabby, disgusting, idiot like you.” Enraged the samurai draws his sword to sever the Master’s head. But the Master gently says, “That is hell!” The enlightened sage responds, “And this, Master, is heaven.”
Now we no longer have the same survival needs. No wild creature is likely to leap out at us. But we still have the same autonomic nervous system response, so we do our best to hold back our inbred reaction.
Sometimes we don’t hold back, especially those of us who have suffered developmental trauma and now suffer from PTSD. We live in constant fear of reacting from anger. For us, relief from anger is a heavenly blessing.
The brain is built from the bottom up. At the bottom is the reptilian brain and surrounding the top of the brain is the neocortex or as Jack Panksepp would put it, our “thinking cap.” In between is the limbic brain.
Talk therapy alone that focuses on insight and understanding to manage behavior is seldom effective. The problem originates deep in the emotional brain. When the emotional brain signals danger, cognitive talk therapy cannot counter.
The relief from rage for those of us who have suffered from trauma and now suffer from PTSD is heaven. When you recover from suffering and you will, life takes on new meaning. Suffering opens worlds of understanding. I attempt to share this in my blog posts and books.
Affective neuroscience developed by Jaak Panksepp in the 1990s deals with raw affective feelings and instinctual emotional responses deep inside our brains below the thinking-cap neocortex. Clinical psychologists rarely deal with these affective feelings and psychiatrists attempt to counter them with drugs.
Panksepp divides emotional experiences into three basic categories: primary process, secondary process, and higher mental processes. Primary-process are the psychological experiences, the evolutionary “givens.” Secondary processes are built upon the primary processes and include conditioned responses like fear conditioning. Conscious thought resides in the thin neocortex of the frontal brain.
The first two categories of processing are unconscious to us. As Panksepp puts it, many of our basic emotional feelings emanate from “the basement of the mind.” Though unconscious, these bottom-basement emotional feelings have powerful psychological effects on the mind.
You cannot analyze feelings away. They mix with higher neocortical processes opening the flow of repetitive patterns of worry, rumination, and fixation on threat. In turn, these thought patterns act back on lower emotional feelings, feeding the monster and keeping the hellish fires burning.
Rather than losing yourself in an endless maze, you can shift the focus of attention to Ki Breathing Meditation, Open Focus, and Insight Meditation. You can seek out an activity that magnifies your spirit. This might be reading, writing, music, sports, art, education or any activity that elevates your spirit rather than enveloping your mind in paradoxical ruminations.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
