Psychological Defense Class: Anger and Rage

How to effectively channel negative emotions.

Some anger burns as hot as a billion suns. The trick is to burn the cause of it with your rage without hurting yourself too.

Note: This previous analysis from January’s What is Anger For? has been slightly refined and is being republished because current global rage is calling for it.

Psychological Defense Class: Anger and Rage

It is a good moment in time to discuss anger by exploring the question, “What is anger for?” This concept was inspired by a poetic description and the current rage against a malignantly narcissistic government machine.

“Anger is frustration with something you cannot change.”

Current experiences in family health struggles have revealed there is a lot of truth in this definition. Through philosophical examination, this description has also become a surprisingly useful calming mantra when anger strikes an unchangeable situation.

Indeed, once I processed that my anger can be fueled by things I can’t change, I was able to recognize it as a complete waste of my time and energy, and the ability to logically vanquish this kind of rage became a new favorite in my CNI self-care toolbox.

The Process

Using this mental tool is simple. You ask yourself if the focus of your anger is something you can change or not. If it is unchangeable, recite the mantra. Ideally, pointless fires begin to dim once they are identified as wastes of your time (beyond one’s need to vent). Recognizing your own triggers will improve this process as well.

From a CNI perspective, it is highly recommended to give this technique a try because we will all be facing many frustrating situations we can’t change in the next few years, and there are two certainties in this inevitable outcome: We do not want to assist the sinister and shameless by self-gaslighting, nor do we want to waste any of our precious time and energy on draining emotions that serve no productive purpose.

Obviously, emotional self-control over what we can’t change is easier said than done, and even more so for some than others. However, it is definitely something to aspire to for both self-care and the effectiveness of your power because, “When everything is an outrage, outrage has no meaning.”

The Serenity Prayer

What is Anger For?

As I am sure many have already recognized, the above mantra can only be one definition because, as we all know from personal experience, anger causes changes in both positive and negative ways, and often both at the same time.

Of course, since it is a negative emotion, it is always important to keep in mind that activating one’s anger is far more likely to turn out negatively.

In a perfect world, we develop the skill to channel our rage into only fueling positive results and effecting positive change. This is what anger is for. Obviously, anger is least useful when uncontrollable rage just makes matters worse for everyone we care about, including ourselves.

A solid definition by Psychology Today that aligns with CNI.

The fact that “prolonged release of the stress hormones that accompany anger can destroy neurons in areas of the brain associated with judgment and short-term memory and weaken the immune system” makes perfect sense and explains a lot.

Anger revelations

As a fiery youth, I liked Mr. Spock’s advice on handling and suppressing most anger for logical reasons, but it took hearing something outside-the-box in my early 30s to inspire me to let perhaps 90% of my anger go.

While I was studying mental yoga to better understand myself and the mysteries of a genius friend’s beautiful mind, I came across yoga teachings that basically said,

“Your anger usually only hurts you” because it has a negative effect on almost everything you will say and do and those you care about. It essentially taints every interaction you have and that will have wider negative repercussions for you, and it rarely if ever hurts the focus of your anger so you are only hurting yourself, as you waste your valuable time and energy. 🤯 🎯

I saw the light.

Again, there are certainly times when righteous anger is called for, productive, and even positive in evolutionary and revolutionary senses, but a key to building up your own Counter-Narcissist defenses is to clearly be able to identify the circumstances when your rage is harming you, helping you, or can be used against you by a malignant-type narcissist to control you.

One must always remember there are a lot more of these pathological psychic vampires who trigger and feed off of everyone’s anger and pain than most people realize. It could be as high as 10-15% of every family, group, community, organization, nation, religion, or ethnicity.

With so much predisposed psychological cruelty and injustice in the world, it is just more reason we must all work to understand, control, and channel our anger in productive ways and learn to eliminate its negative effects.

Otherwise, we are just hurting ourselves and leaving a psychological backdoor that allows malignant types to hack, gaslight, and trigger our brains into doing things we would never do, such as foolishly going against decent and logical human interests.

Ergo, yes, you can still be a naturally intense and fiery person while controlling your anger with logic, but we are definitely in a time where you want to limit the opportunities for narcissistic predators to feed off your dark side by identifying any areas of anger that are personally and globally toxic and can be used against you.

As we have seen in recent political developments, narcissistic mind tricks distorting reality work best on those who have had their anger and rage hacked and gaslit with lies. To make matters so much worse, these types of emotional vampires are being aided and abetted by the corporate and mainstream media they have captured.

In fact, most major American media are now wittingly or unwittingly grooming their audience’s narcissism while simultaneously sanewashing all the malignant types of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths who pathologically trigger your anger for selfish advantage, amusement, or both.

Based on a Native proverb. Which do you feed?

A Buddhist teaching but not by Buddha. Buddhaghoṣa wrote it in the Visuddhimagga circa 5th Century, per Quote Investigator.

“Our diversity is our strength, our unity is our power.”

One of the most powerful mantras of CNI philosophy is “We are always stronger together.” We know this with certainty because narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths instinctively work to isolate anyone they prey on from their support network, because then they can groom and gaslight the innocent without interference in a controlled environment. No surprise that, like most others in nature, the human animal is much safer in groups, so that is more proof that “we are all in this together.”

Narcissists are the ultimate “virtue-signalers.”

One infuriating anger trigger that is currently important to identify is that malignant-type narcissists are the ultimate virtue-signalers. They do this to maintain false public personas and private lies they tell themselves and to gaslight good folks into rage, so they can fool others into thinking their victims “are the crazy ones.”

In fact, it is 100% predictable pathological behavior that narcissists will claim everyone who has empathy or is selflessly doing good deeds is a virtue-signaler. Obviously, they want to poison the well of kindness and empathy because they don’t grasp any self-interest in the former and are incapable of the latter.

This kind of dishonest negative labeling is a standard narcissist projection. It is used to poison any positivity or sincere efforts to do good. They do this by portraying kind people as fakes so others don’t realize who the real virtue signalers are. Ironically, a narcissist’s disdain is sincere because these dark pathologies see virtue, kindness, and good deeds as the weaknesses of suckers to be ridiculed and exploited.

Ask yourself, how would you react if you were trying to do good and someone accused you of only doing it to trick the public into thinking you are a good person? I know pre-psychological studies, I would have become very angry at the untrue insult, but after really understanding the psychology behind this narcissist’s trick to trigger us normies, it lost its power over me and is now a clear malignant tell.

It is so simple. Narcissists regularly try to trigger the innocent and their targets by throwing massively insulting and untrue accusations at them or by committing horrific acts, which of course causes a normal human to respond with anger and rage. Then the narcissist immediately points to the righteous indignation and says, “See, they are the crazy one, not me,” which then obviously becomes even more enraging.

I watched this dynamic play out over and over again with my friend caught in a sociopath’s web and then once I went down their PTSD rabbit hole, I realized that they had been traumatized this way via projection for a few years before I stepped in, and that gaslighting was a big part of what was driving them over the edge.

For those with emotional regulation struggles and/or narcissistic abuse PTSD, like my friend badly suffered from at the time, it is clear that recovering from having your rage and anger repeatedly triggered makes controlling and channeling them in the future a much steeper mountain to climb.

Getting to the point where you can inoculate yourself from other narcissists doing the same is always a worthy goal on the path towards recovery, but the truth is not everyone makes it back, so if building these defenses is “a bridge too far,” it’s more than ok, and it happens to many, so you are far from alone. You just had your limits exceeded by a psychic vampire, which can happen to anyone. Here’s to hopefully getting there in the future.

“Hope is a gift you give yourself.”

Predator camouflage

Logic and empirical psychology tell us that faux good deeds trick their prey into not running away. Indeed, pretending to care about others through “charity” is a key part of the camouflage they wear in society to appear like they are not shameless greed monsters completely out for themselves in their black heart of hearts.

Clearly anyone who has a malignant antisocial disorder has learned over time that if it is revealed that they only see other people as purely transactional tools to use, the vast majority of good folks will cut them off, shun them, expose them, or hold them accountable, which are all bad results and a massive ego blow for any malignant narcissist who needs to think of themselves as a “stable genius.”

Remember, Wall Street con man Bernie Madoff was a big supporter of charities as he was running a pyramid scheme. In turn, many charities were tricked into trusting him with their money because they thought he was virtuous due to all his support. “It was all a lie.”

Then there is Big Oil’s manipulative pattern of spending $1 million to do something good for the environment and then spending $100 million to advertise their “good deed.” This manipulative behavior is perhaps the ultimate virtue signaling used by psychopathic, polluting predator types to obscure their true nature from the public.

In fact, it is standard and predictable that every malignant type pretends they care and have virtue so we “suckers” keep treating them as normal and trusting them to be honorable or at least competent, when their obviously selfish primal compulsions and tells keep screaming at us, “It’s all a lie.”

Anger and frustration will lead to the dark side if used wrong.

Conclusions

We are currently in an era where narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths have hacked far too many minds with grooming and lies. Certainly the dishonest and unearned political power they have gained from such manipulations has now triggered millions into a righteous anger that is coming for them.

Hopefully, this exploration will help more good people understand or realize those we are up against are shameless liars always trying to use our anger against us, and that we all need to be more aware of how these and other predatory dynamics are utilized. Then, we can consciously send our rage and other negative emotions to where they can do the most good, instead of the most damage to those we care about and ourselves.

A solid start is by asking:

What parts of my anger are wasted on things I cannot change?

Is there any value in it?

Are these long-held feelings things I can let go of in the name of self-care?

Where can I focus my anger for positive change?

The Thinker - Rodin - Paris

This introspective review is also here to start conversations on such emotional questions supporters of CNI may have and wish to share in the comment section. No tldr or overtly negative comments, please! Those just make people angry ; )