It is obvious from these "signs of anger" that anger is frequently a concealed or disguised emotion. And why not? Getting mad is scary... and potentially dangerous. One common way of expressing suppressed anger has been given a special name: passive-aggressiveness. It is releasing your anger by being passive or subtly oppositional. For example, such a person may be "tired," unresponsive, act like he/she "doesn't understand," be late frequently, exaggerate others' faults, pretend to agree ("sure, whatever"), be tearful, be argumentative, be forgetful, deny anger ("nothing's wrong"), procrastinate, and frequently be clumsy or sick (Hankins, 1993). Many of these traits and behaviors are listed above.
There is another related form of concealed anger: feeling like a victim. Feeling victimized assumes that someone or some situation has mistreated you. But a person who specializes in constantly feeling like a victim may not identify or accuse his/her abuser. Instead, he/she generally feels that the world is against him/her, that others vaguely intend to make him/her miserable. Victims usually feel helpless; therefore, they take little responsibility for what has happened to them. They think they were terribly mistreated in the past but they now seem unable to accept love and support, e.g. if you offer them help, they never get enough or if you try to cheer them up, it seldom works. A victim is much more likely to sulk, pout, look unhappy, or lay a guilt trip on something than to get angry. They play games: "Why does it always happen to me?" or "Yes, but" (no one's ideas or suggestions will do any good). The self-pitying, pessimistic, sad, jealous victim is surely sitting on a mass of hostility.
Resentment has a psychological payoff
Anger is destructive and it drags us down. Yet, we may, at times, become obsessed with misery-causing resentment in order to avoid some even more horrible misery. What could that payoff be? Theodore Dalrymple (1995) says that our resentment of others and of past events helps us deny our own responsibility for our failings and unhappiness. If we think of ourselves as the innocent victim of circumstances, we are not bad people or a failure, indeed, we deserve sympathy and help. For some people, our parents are seen as the cause of our problems and our failures (accurately in some cases, falsely in others). Such people obsess over and over again that a critical parent destroyed their self-esteem or an alcoholic parent made them totally ashamed or a busy parent made them feel worthless... Poor parents are made responsible for our lives and we are relieved of any responsibility. That's a big payoff.
If we portray ourselves as mistreated by a cruel world, we appear to be a righteous person, totally blameless, and it seems unnecessary for us to change or do anything about it. We become a helpless victim, which gives us some status. As Dalrymple points out, however, if we, as a victim, actually took action and overcame or corrected the unfair situation, it would suggest that perhaps we never needed to be a victim, that we could have helped ourselves much earlier than we did. So, we often resist trying to change our miserable situation in any way. Who wants to know that we have messed up our own lives? Criminals usually have tales of a wretched childhood and bad influences which account for their stealing, attacking people, and killing others. Our resentment of our past glosses over our possible failures in self-direction
Anger and Aggression - Psychological Self-Help Anger and aggression - Theories about how and why aggression develops. mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/chap7/
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armed with the twelve steps all things are possible
