Life is difficult in between the happy times. Sometimes we feel angry and it scares us when the feeling is overwhelming or too powerful. This emotion lies within each of us, and yet is badly misunderstood. The cause of anger is fear, frustration, jealousy, impatience, judgment, intolerance, to name just a few, and is antithetical to love and compassion. Rage is a way of controlling others when you cannot control yourself. Though it is not healthy to to let anger fester, as it can be the root of suffering, sometimes it shows up on our radar screen, and we have to find ways to manage it, make wise choices, we can melt it away. Anger can be a healthy feeling that gives us information, just like any other emotion that finds itself into our mind/body, we let awareness be aware.

     The Rules of Anger are useful to keep in mind:
1. don't hurt others
2. don't hurt yourself
3. don't hurt property
4. DO talk about it or write about it. 
     Begin by allowing yourself to become aware of the anger as you are sitting in a safe place. Notice how you feel inside? Head? Tummy? Hands? 
     Anger, like fear, is a survival mechanism which helps the body to ready into the fight or flight response when a threat is perceived. The body releases hormones into the blood stream as preparation. The brain gets  messages that make our body aware of our emotional state, that trigger certain thoughts, that effect how we feel, and helps us to decide how to react.
     When anger happens:
1. The good old-fashioned trick of counting to ten still works best.
2. Think of a phrase that helps to calm you and lets you think through what the anger data is offering, and what are some choices of behavior open to you.
3. A mantra I like is to label the anger "feeling" and to label the thoughts "thinking" and to anchor yourself in the sound around you and/or the breath. This often has the effect of melting the anger without actually TRYING to get rid of it, which doesn't work anyway.

    Dirty anger is: kicking doors, punching others, pushing people, screaming
    Clean anger is: pushing wall, door frame, pillow, jogging, writing, crying, tearing old newspaper, walking, talking about it, telling what you'd really like, asking for support.
    TOOL: Imagine a thermometer that begins in your groin at 0 and ends in your mouth at 10 when you are completely out of control and yelling, cursing, crying, vomiting rage on others. Take a deep breath and locate the number of your anger in your body. Ideally, notice when the anger first starts to visit you at 1 or 2, but that takes practice. When anger reaches 8, 9 or 10, you are completely out of control. In the beginning, locate the anger at 4,5 or 6. Notice where you experience the heat of your anger, what your thoughts are, and using the anger as data ask yourself:

What I need to help myself...    
I feel ....
when...
because...
I would like...

     Healing, cooling words that your friends and family can offer you are:
sounds like or you seem angry...
tell me more...
let's talk about it...
let me help you solve the problem.

     Life offers us countless opportunities to be human. Awareness is the key, it opens the door to a myriad of choices in behavior.

All the best,
Dr. Rita

      The purpose of my skill as a clinician is to avoid unnecessary pain. Pain comes from within or is inflicted externally. All pain is an assault, it is violent. Whether physical or emotional it affects the mind/body and needs to be defended against - either frozen and repressed or, preferably of course, released, cleared, absorbed and healed. If left unchecked, pain causes a variety of symptoms that interfere with the flow of life.
       Physical pain is as much a part of life as is emotional pain. Neither can be avoided. Some believe that pain serves the purpose of making us more keenly aware of pleasure – that we can’t have one without the other. Perhaps that is true. It is also true that physical pain is affected by emotions. In other words, how we relate to pain, how we think about pain, how we react to pain, how we subjectively experience pain, how we release pain, has an enormous bearing on how much pain we experience. The same is true in reverse, how we hold emotional pain affects our body, because emotionally driven physical pain is just as real as any other.
       I teach my patients to rate their pain level. For example, on a scale of 0-10 with 10 standing for incredible pain, and 1 the opposite of no pain, how much pain do you currently experience? When we  rate our pain, we begin by paying attention to our body. In and of itself that helps ameliorate the subjective experience of pain which accounts for about 50% of pain. The next step allows us to compare the intensity of the pain from one time to the next, so that the perception of pain doesn’t automatically lead to the same experience each time. For most, it is helpful to know that one’s pain is a 5 right now, and not a 10 as it was an hour ago. It is more bearable to have a 5 than a 10, isn’t it? Since awareness reduces pain, these are all steps that help in that effort.
     There is also the aspect of Secondary Gain. Sometimes, although the pain can be untenable, there are hidden and even unconscious advantages to living with pain, that outweigh being pain-free. Uncovering those gains can be a useful bridge to becoming pain-free.
      Let me give you an example. I worked with Peter, a man who loved women but could never find one he loved enough to marry, yet he was riddled with the pain of loneliness, and the frustration of watching his friends marry and have children, while he couldn’t get on with his life. By the time he was fifty, he came to therapy and discovered that his uneasy crazy-glue connection with his mother stood in the way of his freedom to love another woman. Basically, his fear of displeasing his mother, who could never be pleased by any woman he chose because she selfishly wanted him to herself alone - not because she was bad but because of her neediness. When we rated his fear of displeasing his mother, and compared it to the pain of not having a family of his own, Peter was shocked to note that his fear of his mother was a 10, compared with the 5 of being committed to his own needs and the pleasure of having a wife and children. This shocked him into a new level of commitment in therapy which would finally separate from him mother, something he hadn't been able to do before.
     We enjoy a vast pallet of emotional knowledge that is particularly precious, as compared to other mammals who are bereft of that brain function, some of which is pain and some of which is pleasure, and lots of gradations in between. To be human is to avail ourselves of the full menu of emotional feelings, occasionally that is based in pain.
Pain is a warning. It is the body/mind’s SOS that something is wrong. It is crucial to listen to what our mind/body is trying to tell us. Therein lie the answers to our challenges.
All the best,
Dr. Rita

     As an expert in EMDR Trauma Therapy for over 13 years, a practicing psychotherapist for nearly 30 years, with the experience of more than 2,000 EMDR hours, I would like to suggest that EMDR is not really a cookie cutter approach. In the hands of the right therapist it is a creative, personal therpeutic model that has the capacity to yield impressive healing results.

     Every therapist brings their own special personal touch to their work based on their years of experience, as well as their general level of expertise in the healing arts. The most important thing to keep in mind, as with every other type of therapy, is that the RELATIONSHIP, between therapist and patient becomes the safe container that allows healing and change to begin.

     When trauma happens it interrupts the life force, and creates a log jam in the flow of life within the individual. We are designed, as are all other mammals, to flow within the river of our nervous system, our energy, with the excitement of the sympathetic nervous system, and the calming of the parasympathetic nervous system, balancing us out. The nervous system is located in the Brain Stem in the primitive part of our brain, called the Reptilian Brain. We are hard-wired to heal from stress and trauma because of the gentle waves that oscillate between the charge and discharge of the nervous system. This is no different than the basic wound healing trajectory that is triggered from even a simple wound on the skin, when phases of hemostasis and inflammation begin the complex process of tissue repair.

     EMDR and other mind/body therapy models such as Somatic Experiencing (SE,) Brainspotting, and Hypnosis are powerful experiential opportunities – in the hands of the creative clinician, to repair the rupture caused by BIG and little traumas. The language of sensation, body awareness and emotion lies at the root of these processes.

     Often people have difficult problems and issues that seem to have dug into their personality or character structure, and taken up unwelcome residence causing great unhappiness in their lives. Sometimes, these problems don’t at first seem to be associated with a trauma. I find that during my work with patients we open the possibilities for the body to communicate, and the gateway usually leads to remarkable shifts often related to early trauma. Let me give you an example – be aware that I’m changing some of the details to protect the anonymity of my patient.

        Jeff is depressed, yet a successful lawyer, handsome, charming and bright. His relationships with women, however, typically ends in disaster when they repeatedly reject him for his violent temper tantrums. After losing the love of his life recently, Jeff sought me out for treatment. He had heard of EMDR, wasn’t sure if it was the appropriate therapy for him, but hoped we’d figure it out. We utilized a combination of EMDR, SE and Hypnosis during our third session. I usually take at least one or two sessions to make certain that the chemistry between us is right, and to pinpoint patterns and triggers. During the next few weeks Jeff spontaneously connect ed to a trauma that occurred when he was fifteen, when his all star hockey game was interrupted by a fall that fractured his left ankle. Surprisingly, this accident was highly charged for Jeff, and left in its trail a lifetime of bravado that covered his shame, a sense of failure, and an acute sensitivity to rejection. We were soon on our way to clear that trauma and replace it with positive felt body experiences that led to a large shift in Jeff’s sense of himself as a man. Naturally, this led to a diminishment of his rage and depression,, and positive changes in all of his relationships.

All the best,
Rita