Anger


Description

In one form of anger, I perceive a movement in the throat area that transmits tension to the upper part of the head, producing an unpleasant sensation of 'hot pressure' in this area. 


This makes me tend to lean my head forward or clench it tightly. The movements of my hands, such as clenching my fists, seem to serve more as a way to express it and intensify it, with the purpose of releasing it. 


Although the feeling of anger is not pleasant, sometimes the desire is to increase its strength rather than try to reduce it—unlike fear—in order to release it. 


The breathing pattern changes, becoming more vigorous, and I notice that I exhale more forcefully than I inhale. 


There is a sensation of increased body temperature, which causes sweating, and a tension that spreads to other parts of the body, making movements rougher. 


The immediate impulse is to attack someone or myself (self-inflicted aggression) or to destroy something. 


However, this impulse to act is often suppressed, manifesting as a withdrawal from the situation that provoked it—twisting myself, holding myself back from acting in accordance with it, etc.


In addition to this type of anger, I also feel a kind of anger-sadness (which I call frustration). It arises when I dedicate myself intensely to achieve something very difficult, but still fail to attain it. 


There is also a type of joyful anger, which can be felt when something is achieved under challenging conditions—like a victory in a sports match after a tough competition. 


In anger-sadness, I feel tension in the center of my throat, somewhat similar to sadness, but lower, as I feel sadness between the chin and the upper part of the throat. 


There is a sense of weight that tends to pull my body down, but it is not like the passive weight of sadness; rather, it is a weight that starts tense and then passively tilts downward, usually accompanied by a strong, short, and audible exhalation. 


In the case of joyful anger, there is an energizing of the body as a whole. 

It is as if it were the anger described at the beginning, but without pressure on the head, and there is a sense of openness that the other anger does not have, which can be felt through a more open breath, where I inhale more strongly than I exhale.


Speculation

Evolutionarily, the posture of leaning the head forward is a bodily position that may be associated with the impulse to approach the stimulus that provoked it in order to attack and destroy it. 


Darwin (1878), for example, observed that the protrusion of the head was a common characteristic of those who were enraged.


Thus, this is how I perceive the phenomenon of anger, manifesting in different ways depending on the type of situation that provokes it.

Check here how I described the flow of sensations involved in emotions in general.


Check out these posts to understand the phenomenological approach used in providing these descriptions of experience: 1) What is Phenomenology; 2) Naturalization of Phenomenology; 3) Micro-Phenomenology; 4) Intersubjective Validation; 5) Embodied Cognition; 6) 4E

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