It is very important to be aware of what you’re feeling from moment-to-moment. Otherwise, your feelings can get easily brushed under your emotional rug, which turns you into a ticking time bomb that can explode at any moment. Instead of being in charge, you become a loose cannon on deck that fires off ammunition without warning.
Lack of awareness starts in childhood when we learn to swallow our feelings in order to avoid our parents’ anger and punishments.
As we bury our feelings, we develop unconscious defense mechanisms to help us keep our unwanted feelings, especially our angry feelings, under wraps.
Two common defense mechanisms are avoidance and denial. When we deny and avoid our feelings of anger, many problems including depression, anxiety and panic attacks, as well as physical ailments, like ulcers, headaches and colitis can result.
Displacement is yet another defense that we develop to handle anger. With displacement, we temporarily bury our anger, which we later dump or displace onto someone else. For example, if you’re angry with the boss, you might come home and kick the dog. In the case of Paula Deen, there’s a good chance that her hostile, anti racial comment was a way to vent anger that had built-up inside her from another, unrelated source. In fact, racism can be a form of displacement in which a person misdirects his/her anger onto an entire group of people.
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