Anger and PA - how many people have found them linked?

[champagnesuppanova]

Hi All,

I have been noticing a pattern of behaviour with my BF that is making me wonder whether inability to deal with anger is perpetuating his addiction to P. My BF can work himself up into a state where he just sees red, literally. And when he is like that he loses all perception of a situation and is very volatile, so much so that he engages in some quite self-destructive behaviour.

So, how many PA's have had difficulty in anger mangement issues and how did you approach the anger management? What was it that eventually made you realise that you had a problem with anger management?

Thanks for your input in advance. CSN.

[FoolishMind]

Hi CSN,

In short IT IS LINKED, and has been mentioned many times, and stated in the signs to look out for.
Anger is a defence mechanism. A PA wants to protect there "special time" there "secret friend" and if anyone tries to take away that time, or stop them seeing there friend, there are several usual methods of attack...

1. Scream and shout and fill the attacker with fear
2. Turn it around and make the attacker feel guilty, as if perhaps the attacker should not be attacking
3. Cry, wallow and apologise. then after the storm be even more cunning and clever and hide your tracks better

Those are the most effective, and most widely used techniques, when confronted.

If someone actually had an anger management problem, it would effect other areas of Non p related situations in life.

If the anger is due to solely the confrontation of P, then the PA still is at square one, and has acknowledged they are a PA.

FM

[SOHope]

I found this article to be very interesting in reference to anger and it makes sense when thinking about this addiction and how it's gotten worse over the years:

Anger Problems: A Smokescreen for Fear-Shame Phobia[/h]
Are you afraid of fear and shame?
Published on January 9, 2009 by Steven Stosny in Anger in the Age of Entitlement
I was recently approached about participating in a documentary on anger and incivility in the land, which caused me to reflect on why things seem to be getting worse. In addition to survey evidencethat shows people reporting higher levels of anger, most professionals who work in the field know that the demand for their services has greatly increased over the past decade.(My own practice group, CompassionPower, has gone from serving some 20 new clients per month in 1998 to over 150 per month in 2008.) Whatever your job, the emotional state you are likely to observe most often in the course of a typical day is some form of low-grade anger (usually manifest as impatience, agitation, annoyance, irritability, sarcasm, resentment, frustration, or superiority), plus a sense of entitlement.The topic of this blog - anger in the age of entitlement - highlights one reason for what seems to be a steady increase in anger. Entitlement easily creates anger in today's "cult of feeling good," where feeling good seems to be the ultimate life goal. Today people feel entitled not just to the pursuit ofhappiness, not even just to happiness, but to feeling good most of the time. If they don't feel good most of the time, someone or something must be to blame. The blue ribbon recipe for anger is mixing blame with entitlement and vulnerability.

I believe this new sense of entitlement, along with the compulsion to blame and the vast contagion of defensive/aggressive emotions are largely responsible for the reported increase in anger. And yet, anger is not the real problem.
Anger protects us from the threat of vulnerability. Focusing treatment efforts on anger or attempting to manage it is like treating a fever. Fevers result from the immune system trying to protect the organism from infection. Treating a fever and ignoring the infection makes as much sense as trying to manage anger without reducing the need for protection, i.e., reducing the threat of vulnerability.
Confusing Emotion with Threat
The emotions we commonly identify with the threat of vulnerability are shame and fear. In many ways, anger problems are about systematic protection from the experience of shame and fear. And this is precisely why anger problems are self-destructive.
Shame and fear and not threats; they merely signal threat, albeit unpleasantly. (Too unpleasantly for those who need to feel good most of the time.) Hearing a fire alarm is certainly unpleasant, but we do not want to avoid it at all costs. In fact, we want to use it as a motivation to put out the fire. Similarly, the experience of shame and fear carry motivation to heal, correct, improve, connect, or appreciate. Acting on any of these motivations is likely to reduce fear and shame; failing to act on at least one is likely to increase fear and shame, and, indirectly, anger.
Insensitivity to fear and shame produces enormous relationship problems. Anxiety in one intimate partner is liable to produce shame in the other and vice versa. If these valuable emotions are masked with entitlement and anger, the true cause of couple conflict - the interaction of fear and shame - is confused with communication problems or incompatibility.
By numbing or avoiding shame and fear, our highly contagious anger problems strip those important emotional signals of their capacity to motivate healing, correcting, improving, connecting, and appreciating. They make life defensive rather than enriching. They make us manipulative, controlling, and self-righteous. They make us disown a part of our soul.

[widowgirl]

Hmmm... you have definitely hit a chord here. That was always one of the ways I could tell my H was back at it, even without confronting him. He'd be on edge and start picking fights over little things. Strange.

[Disillusioned]

I often remember mine being so closed off, and irritable if there was noise, commotion, or interruption in his quiet solitude of reading.
From what I have read in Love You, Hate the Porn, I am wondering if there was anger, depression, frustration, and many other things that were contributing to his irritability and quick flare to anger. I sometimes asked him, "Why are you so irritable?" Usually, he couldn't answer, and I perceived it as he doesn't want to talk about it with me. It might be he was still suffering from trying to numb it to himself. He doesn't talk, and I don't know, but I do know the anger. It's funny, that out of all the emotions human beings experience, anger is the one that is considered evidence of masculinity...think the self-righteous hero beating the tar out of the villan. Most of the other emotions are too girly for a man to be comfortable showing.

[burnedout]

I had a huge problem with anger. I've been reading about PTSD, and difficulties with anger management and aggression are supposed to be a big part of it. On a whim, I Googled "lust management" to see if anyone had researched that at all. Looks like it's an underexplored area.

[burnedout]

Anger Problems: A Smokescreen for Fear-Shame Phobia[/h]
Are you afraid of fear and shame?

This resonated with me today as I had a health scare that definitely filled me with fear, and as I was trying to process it, my wife wanted me to help her move some boxes into the closet. I did get a little snappy, but apologized right away. In the past, I could have been a raging lunatic and thrown the blame on the nearest innocent bystander.