metonymy4u

Over the past several years I have been working to reduce vulnerability to shame by being more open about things that I want to hide away. Anger is a much more difficult emotion for me. Anger is often my response to the fact that the world does not conform to my values. This is difficult for me because of my learning history which includes the experience of having to figure out how to survive chronic physical and emotional abuse as a child. So for me the experience of the world not conforming to my values cues a response conditioned by chronic abuse. Lack of conformation to values looks to me like abuse. It’s a process called respondent conditioning. You learn to respond to a conditioned stimulus with an artificial response as if it were some other stimulus with a naturally occurring response. Pavlov’s dog learned to salivate in response to the bell as if it were the meat powder. Whereas shame I think has been maintained by the reward of not having to face the anxiety of open exposure, anger for me is more of an automatic response to cues.