Anger: the Family-Destroying Demon of PTSD

First Lap

1. Event: Something happens—maybe something small, like a comment from your partner.
2. Snap Judgment: Your brain quickly interprets this event, often jumping to the worst possible conclusion.
3. Emotion: That judgment triggers a strong emotion—anger, frustration, which gets adrenaline going.
4. Physical Symptoms: Your body responds to the adrenaline—your heart races, your muscles tense up, your fists and jaw clench.
5. Emotion overwhelm: The adrenaline on top of the emotions leads to an intensification of the anger. Anger can intensify to rage (anger to rage, fear to terror, sadness to despair).
6. Urge to act: You feel an overwhelming urge to act on the emotion. Anger/rage causes an attack urge. It’s like a demon is on the verge of possessing you.
7. Regrettable Action: You act on that urge; it’s something you wish you hadn’t done—a verbal attack is common, but it might be worse. It’s like you were possessed for that moment.

It's not over yet.

Second Lap

1. Event: That verbal attack you just did is the new event. You’ve just yelled about something trivial, and now your evening has gone from bad to much worse.
2. Snap Judgment: Often self-recrimination—“I’m broken, I’m deeply flawed.”
3. Emotion: Sadness. If intense, then there’s adrenaline and despair, isolation, or even suicidal ideation because the suffering seems inescapable.
4. etc

Understanding this cycle is crucial because it gives you a chance to interrupt it before it spirals out of control. It helps you learn how to tame the demon (we’ll show you the way below). I don't know a more effective way out of the trap of anger than to use the Distress Cycle as the scaffold to stop being possessed by anger.

Approaches to Addressing Anger

Medications May Help for a While

SSRIs (antidepressants) can reduce sensitivity and irritability, but tolerance to them means that this effect is usually temporary. Chasing higher doses isn’t a sustainable solution. Tolerance usually means a break is needed, but rebound worsening of irritability can be an issue. So don’t count on it as the enduring solution. But they might help you do the work to achieve the real solution: metacognition.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy 

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is  a talking therapy approaches that is helpful for many. CBT needs a psychologist who is skilled at working with PTSD and anger. Supportive therapy, the most common way CBT is employed (in Australia) is not very helpful for anger. 

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is excellent for anger, but the difficulty with mindfulness approaches in PTSD is that when one attempts to still the mind, one can be flooded with trauma memories. This interferes with mindfulness practice making it impossible for many.

Metacognition: The warning that anger is about to possess you.

The Power to Stop the Demon from Possessing You. 

The Distress Cycle is the best tool you can master to take control of yourself. By performing an “anger autopsy” after any episode of anger, you will get much better at recognizing anger before you act on it regrettably. Metacognition is the real-time insight into what’s happening in your head. It can help you keep the demon from coming out in that critical moment. It functions as a warning system that anger and regrettable action is immanent.

Dedicate yourself to understanding and embodying the Distress Cycle if you want to stop the demon from coming out. Memorize the Distress Cycle and do an anger autopsy using a Distress Cycle worksheet after any anger. The more you do this, the more capacity you will have to prevent the demon from coming out. Doing it once will accomplish nothing. You may need dozens of reps before it starts to impact metacognition. The install takes work to stick. Are you committed to change or just paying lip service to change? The anger autopsy that is the Distress Cycle work sheet will turn anger episodes into growth opportunities: anger becomes a means of change, rather than just a means of destruction. You will develop the capacity to gracefully exit the situation rather than letting the demon destroy your family.

There are many skills you can overlay on the Distress Cycle to lessen sensitivity and improve your predicament. If you want to do a deep dive on how all this works, you can check out our online course, Surviving Distress. It's wise to do this with your partner so you learn a common language, which will help with communication about this. This will help you both understand the processes and the skills so you can approach the issue of anger as a unified team. Such a united approach is the remedy the toxic default of "apologetic aggressor" versus "aggrieved victim". No one wants to be either of those positions, better to be a partnership: united to solve a problem.

Install the Distress Cycle into your brain by memorising the Distress Cycle and by doing the Distress Cycle worksheets.

I wish you well on this journey to subdue the demon of regrettable anger.