Tags
anger, defence mechanism, defense mechanism, exercise, food, freud, healthy diet, healthy food, healthy living, psychiatry, psychological, psychology, run, running, sublimation
Something I heard yesterday got me really irritated. It was a piece of fairly important news that a particular person should have told me about – literally more than a month ago.
To try and understand the complexities of this person’s mind for concealing such information would require another blog…or really another 10 blogs.
Anyway, I was pretty annoyed yesterday. I felt this pressure in my chest rising up my neck. No, it wasn’t a heart attack…it was basically anger starting to take a foothold of my body – surges of anger continuously pulsing away.
Now, some may think as a psychiatrist I shouldn’t be prone to anger and should be (a) able to control my anger and (b) maybe not even get angry in the first place. Well, yes and no.
Looking at the actual anger itself first of all…Anger is a basic human instinct that we all possess. If your phone was stolen, containing all your personal texts and photos/videos (those photos/videos you hadn’t quite managed to getting around uploading elsewhere), and you found out that a bill of £500 had been run up on it that you had to pay, I would applaud you if there wasn’t even a hint of anger starting to take seed inside you. It’s natural to be angry here.
Now, looking at being able to “control” anger is a different story. In the scenario above, most of us would have this seed of rage planted inside us. However, some people let this seed of rage take root and allow it to grow. Some let it grow into something small and manageable, maybe a few angry outbursts – that’s it. Others let it grow a bit bigger, maybe several angry outbursts.
However, others let this seed of rage grow quickly into something quite huge and sprawling, something they can’t control; this untameable beast of rage and wrath that consumes everything around it that there’s no growth for anything else – not even a little cheerful daffodil. This a toxic and dangerous situation to be in.
So back to my surges of anger. This seed of rage was there but I wanted to get rid of this ugly weed. So I decided to go for a jog. I’m not going to lie and say it was this energetic sprint. It was a good half hour jog – enough to act as a decent herbicide. I was able to turn my harmful impulses of anger into something less harmful, a jog – with added benefits to my fitness levels.
This act of changing basic impulses (such as anger, lust, jealousy etc) when we don’t want them, or they are inappropriate in a situation, into something that is socially acceptable is known as “sublimation”. These impulses (anger, lust, jealousy etc) create this energy within us. If this energy remains pent up we can end up doing something we later regret…I think we’ve all been there. A common example would be wanting to send an angry email to somebody in the heat of the moment. How many of you wished that you never hit that return button literally seconds after you did?
If you could have distracted yourself by doing a positive and constructive act, such as speaking to a friend, reading a book, jogging, cooking, whatever else activity apart from writing and sending that email, that’s sublimation. Note that doing negative things such as eating a tub of ice cream, drinking a bottle of wine, smoking a pack of cigarettes etc instead of sending that email don’t constitute sublimation.
Sublimation is the act of taking this unwanted, unacceptable pent up energy and turning it into something that’s more acceptable. Sublimation is a type of “defence mechanism”.
Freud came up with this idea of defence mechanisms. In fact, he came up with quite a list of defence mechanisms. They can be divided into a few groups, with sublimation falling into the group of “mature defence mechanisms”. This essentially means that sublimation is a grown-up way of dealing with problems in life.
Now, I admit that I’m not always so constructive in managing my anger as I was yesterday. However, the more I sublimate like I did, the more automatic a sublime jog will be for me.
So, next time you have this seed of anger in you, sublimate. Speak to a sublime friend, read a sublime book, go for a sublime jog, cook a sublime meal…just do something sublime!
Picture by KalerBlind (Run Tambi run…) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.