The secret addictions no one talks about- part 2: the addiction to reactivity, fear and anger. Blog #26

Last week I covered the secret addiction to anxiety, stress and depression. This week I will address the sparkles that ignite those destructive fire of the soul. They are more specific addictions yet essentially a different label to the same problem.

Reactivity is the most common and disempowered state there is

A man goes to work in the morning. A pigeon defecates on his jacket. The man is upset. As he is upset he bumps into a lady, spills some of the coffee from the take away cup she is holding and walks away in a rush without apologising. She is upset. She arrives at the office still upset. She is your boss and you are next in line. A reaction is a continuous flow of energy from a person to another. Being reactive is us allowing free access to external flows with no personal input on those fluctuations. So we can choose to react to our boss's bad mood, just like everyone else so far. We can absorb the toxic energy. And since it is toxic, that implies that it is unhealthy and uncomfortable to hold, so we must then find someone to pass it on to and perpetrate the chain of negative reactions. Alternatively we can find a way to disrupt that dynamic and choose happiness, love, health and balance instead by not internalising that negative energy, by not taking it personally, by not reacting. We have a choice every moment but our emotional subconscious mind is addicted to the feelings of high we get when we react, so we just react...

We react out of fear

Fear is a family of emotions that encompasses: doubts, uncertainties, worries, stress, insecurity, mistrust, lack of confidence, self negative talks... Fear is the energy of survival and as long as we are still on a survival mode we can not live, let alone thrive... Any type of fear keeps on triggering those chemical rushes we are addicted to when we have been living with them for long enough. Just like an addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling or cigarettes, it is just another habit we can't get rid of as we believe that it has become a part of us and we wouldn't be the same person without them.

We react out of anger

Anger is one of the consequence of fear. The survival mode is called the fight, flight or freeze mode. When we choose fight over flight or freeze we activate the hormones of anger. Anger just like fear comes in various size and shapes. Anger is when we get offended by other people's opinions. Anger is when we get irritated, frustrated, annoyed, jealous or bothered by things, people, events and thoughts... Anger is another tone for the self negative talk. Anger is all those micro aggressions we are subjecting ourselves to every day, and just like fear, anger is a real and dangerous addiction.

I had some clients suffering from IED (Intermittent Explosive Disorder) which means a severe lack of anger management. I had clients suffering from suicidal depression, illness and pain inducing anxiety and life debilitating panic attacks. Those people were not born terrorised or angry, they started a cycle of fear and/or anger and then got addicted to it to the point of destruction.

Like people who suffer from physical self harm, we lacerate our soul daily with thousands of vicious little knives as we react to triggers and get high on fear and anger all the time, but regardless of the scale and form it develops into it is never a good place to be, and problems never disappear on their own for it was never because of the world, because of others, self or because of bad luck... it was always an addiction.

Every time we react we are on a sympathetic state

The fight, flight or freeze mode is called the sympathetic state. The opposite of it is the parasympathetic state, a state of growth, evolution, expansion, discovery, faith, health and well being... When we rest, recover, regenerate, learn and process all physical, mental and emotional informations from the day before, when we are curious, trustful, hopeful, positive, open, vulnerable and happy we operate on a parasympathetic state. There is not a single human or specie on the planet that can maintain a prolonged sympathetic state without triggering and feeding illness, disease, physical, mental and emotional imbalances... And that explains the state and the chaos of our life as we reinforce whatever we repeat, even when those habits do not serve our health, well being or mind clarity.

Reset your Sat Nav

When we look at our problems from the perspective of reactivity, fear and anger instead of internalising labels such as stress, anxiety and depression, it is easier to address the core of it. We react, we get frustrated, irritated and we feel helpless and powerless in the face of the future and society. All those things we do and feel. They do not define us and the sooner we learn how to disassociate ourselves from them, the quicker we can see that all we have to do is to let go of bad habits that have turned into addictions, and start new, better, constructive and empowering life habits instead.

RTT (Rapid Transformational Therapy) is the art and science of tidying up, resetting, reprogramming and upgrading our subconscious and emotional mind so it works for us as opposed to against us. An analogy I have been using and enjoying is that our mind is like a Sat Nav. We program it during childhood, we start our adulthood and we forget that the program has never been updated, so we are operating on obsolete templates. All problems in our life come from disempowering beliefs we have inherited from our upbringing and the resulting discrepancies between the conscious and the subconscious mind.