ABSTRACT
Familial and social influences are so potent and pervasive in constraining anger that the immediate expression of it in its pure form, in service of the self for any of the positive purposes outlined in Chapter 4, is rare. As a consequence, an individual may not have fully individuated (see Chapter 4), so they do not trust their ability to survive alone; consequently, consciously or unconsciously, they fear that the effective expression of anger will result in the loss of important relationships. This chapter considers the relentlessly creative, often elaborate and convoluted ways in which individuals avoid expressing their anger helpfully and make situations worse for themselves. I introduce the ‘how anger gets distorted’ model which organises these distortions around the categories of ‘fight and flight’ (Cannon, 1914) borrowed from psychology, and a third classification of mine, that of ‘freeze’. Case vignettes demonstrate how anger is unacknowledged in the freeze category, turned against others in the fight category and against the self in the flight category.
