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Key points
- People who feel anger about their past often believe that it stays inside them unless they release it.
- In reality, we spark up the anger anew each time we "pattern match" to it.
- The solution is to uncouple the high emotion from old anger safely.
I don’t think I have ever met anyone quite as angry as Matthew. He was not angry in the sense of aggressive or rude, although he could be both at times, but in the sense of seething with almost constant resentment.
He harboured huge ill-feeling against both his parents, who, he said, had never encouraged or praised him and had, indeed, played down or belittled any small successes he did have. He wondered whether he had been "an accident," as it seemed that his parents took no joy in him whatsoever, although he did concede that they dressed him nicely and bought him lovely birthday gifts—“I think they just wanted to appear to be good parents,” he said.
He saw his young self as a highly sensitive child who had had all the confidence knocked out of him. When he arrived home from school one day, excited about having won an essay competition, he recalled his mother saying dismissively, “That’s nice. You have dirt on your face, so go and wash up before tea.”
He had no memory of his parents playing with him and said his father took him to his judo class and waited there for him only because he was pals with another father who also came and waited.
Particularly vivid in his mind was a time when he had a part in the school play and suddenly forgot his lines. As he stood there frozen with stage fright, all he could remember seeing was his mother and father’s shocked faces as they stared up at him from the front row.
“They were so ashamed of me, and they didn’t bother to hide it,” he said. I suggested that they might have been embarrassed for him. He wouldn’t countenance it.
And, indeed, it didn’t matter whether his parents truly were emotionally withholding or not. How we perceive our experience makes it real for us. Matthew was convinced that nothing he did made his parents proud, try as he might to gain their approval—and affection.
Pattern Matching
As a result of what in human givens parlance we call pattern matching, he continued to behave as an adult as if he was a powerless, resentful child. Although he did well in his career as a lecturer, when he experienced what he perceived as criticism from his head of department, he became angry and hostile. His first marriage broke up because he didn’t feel appreciated by his wife, and his second was now under strain.
Matthew knew he needed help—he had been signed off work because of anxiety and depression—and was convinced that the solution was to “get out all the anger,” as if he were a steaming pressure cooker.
He was surprised when I told him that there was no anger boiling inside him. He rekindled it anew every time he ruminated about or pattern matched back to situations with his parents, which he did continually. So it felt as if he were consumed with anger.
Rewind Detraumatisation Technique
The rewind detraumatisation technique, which every human givens practitioner is trained to carry out, detaches highly arousing emotions from painful, traumatic memories. I explained to Matthew that it would stop the pattern matching from happening so that he could deal with future challenges appropriately. Although he would still feel that he had been treated badly by his parents, the feelings would no longer blight his life.
But Matthew didn’t want to let his parents “off the hook.” (Whenever his mother rang, he would be curt and make her feel bad.) He wanted them “to pay.”
“You are paying a high price, too,” I pointed out, and said that the rewind would be useless unless he was willing to let the anger go. As we had done as much as we could to help him deal with the anxiety and depression, I left him to think about all this.
Three weeks passed before Matthew got back in touch to say that he had finally accepted that nothing more could change unless he gave up on his resentment.
The rewind was a powerful experience for him, and I also encouraged him mentally to express to his parents, with his adult understanding, what he had felt as a child, this time experiencing them in his imagination as receptive and apologetic.
I saw Matthew only once more, when he reported that he and his wife were getting on much better. His high blood pressure had dropped, and he was more relaxed about annoyances in his life; when he thought about his parents, it was only with mild irritation.
