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Jun 19, 2009, 12:28 AM
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Member Since: Mar 2009
Location: So Cal
Posts: 3,342
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Hey Hawk....
Anger and rage are functional, necessary emotions.
In my past therapy and therapeutic education, I have been taught that anger/rage are often secondary emotions. Happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, guilt/shame, surprise, and interest are known as primary emotions. Primary emotions are typically adaptive, whereas the secondary emotion is typically mal-adaptive. It is also said that the secondary emotion usually trumps the primary.
What tends to happen with people in general, is that a person feels fear, sadness, guilt, and/or surprise and has difficulty coping with the intensity of these emotions, so anger steps in to cover for the other emotions because it is easier to be angry and focus the blame of our anger on something external than it is to focus on and sit with the more difficult internal feelings and emotions. It's kind of an emotional coping mechanism.
It also sounds like you are judging your anger/rage as bad or wrong when really, they are neither. These are healthy emotions. These emotions alone cannot hurt you or anyone else. True, they are not pleasant to sit with, but it is our actions and responses to these emotions that can be mal-adaptive and damaging to others, not the emotions themselves.
It is OKAY to feel angry and to have rage inside. There are very good reasons for these feelings to be there. They are protecting you from the more painful uncomfortable emotions.
It does not seem too strange to me to see how you would experience a physical expression of emotions while only feeling them as anger/rage. Even though you are not internally allowing yourself to feel these other emotions, they are still there and your body still responds to them physically. They are just buried underneath all that anger. Just my opinion from what I've learned.
If you have a T, I would suggest speaking with them about this. If you don't have a T, I would suggest finding one to help you find more adaptive ways to cope. I hope this offers a little bit of understanding.
Keep posting here. We'll be here for you. 
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