I have rage attacks

What this looks like

You explode in fury that doesn’t match what set you off. Twenty minutes later you’re calm and you have to deal with what you said and what you broke. You apologize. You promise yourself you won’t do it again. The next time something small sets you off, you do it again anyway.

You’ve been storing the small annoyances for weeks. You barely needed a trigger.

What you’ve already tried

• Counting to ten
• Walking out before it gets loud
• A daily meditation app
• An exercise routine you used to like
• An anger management course
• Therapy that traced the rage to your father
• A mood stabilizer your psychiatrist offered
• Telling yourself you’re a calm person who has occasional bad moments

You exploded again the next time something small set you off.

Is my anger normal or a problem?

Why counting to ten was always going to lose

You learned at some point, usually in childhood, that you weren’t allowed to express anger directly. You may have grown up with an angry parent who made the household unsafe, so you decided you would never become that. You may have been the parentified child who held it together for everyone else. You may have learned that staying calm was the only way to keep the room from going off. Whatever the original lesson, you spent years swallowing the small annoyances. You stored them.

By the time you’re remembering to count to ten, you’ve already stored too much that day, that week, that decade. You can use breathing exercises to slow the explosion by ten seconds. You can’t use them to reach what loaded the explosion in the first place.

For the related patterns, see I yell at my kids , I throw things when I’m angry , and I scared my partner with my anger if any apply.

You can’t see what you’ve been storing. That’s why every explosion feels like it came from nowhere.

How we work with it

In strategic therapy we open up the days between the explosions, where everything has been getting stored. You learn to use the small annoyances as they happen, at human size, instead of swallowing them and waiting for the load to detonate. The choice between holding it together and blowing up stops being the only choice on offer.

You inherited the guilt-and-explosion cycle from a younger version of you who couldn’t safely show anger. The cycle stops once that younger version stops running the show.