Reclaiming Me: Heal Your Childhood Attachment Wounds, People Pleasing, and Complex PTSD for Women
Jul 15, 2026 · 11 min · 5 segments
Monday we talked about anger as information. Today we're getting practical. This midweek reframe gives you a concrete skill for slowing down and actually hearing what your anger is trying to say…
All right, everybody, I want to walk you through what I call the anger decode practice.
This is a four-step process that takes maybe two minutes in real time, but it can actually completely change the trajectory of how an anger moment unfolds.
So am I frustrated? Am I hurt? Am I feeling dismissed? Am I scared? Am I a combination of some of these questions? Because anger, what we know for sure, is that it is often a secondary emotion, meaning that something else is almost always underneath it.
And what I would add to being able to name it by asking about frustration, hurt, dismissed, scared, et cetera, is can you do a quick body check? So where are you feeling this? Is your chest tightening? Is your jaw clenching? Is your stomach all knotted up? Are your thoughts moving really fast and you're just feeling like you need to come to a conclusion? If you can tune in to a body check, I think you will find that your body is already telling you something.
So when you can notice what's going on in the body and you can name accurately what it is underneath anger, I think you're clear to s- to move to step two.
Go one level deeper, and I'll give you an example that I used in the full-length episode on Monday.
And I had been watching the boys, you know, be on their phones in the evening time specifically because that's when all their friends were waking up back home.
We had many, many, many moments that I will never forget that took my breath away.
But one of the things that had bothered me all week was being at the dinner table and just, you know, engaging in conversation in the beginning but then kind of fizzling out, and then I would notice that they would pull out their phones and they would be on their phones, sometimes even under the table.
And I just was feeling all the grief, uh, knowing that this was the last big, you know, kind of together moment for all five of us before everybody disperses in their own direction.
And it's getting harder to take longer vacations with the boys because they are starting to have girlfriends and internships and study abro- abroad programs and summer school and jobs and just all the things that emerging adults start to do, as they should, because they're forming their own pathway in life.
But I was really, really extra aware of this, and again, it was going back to my expectations, and that's when it just all came out sideways.
I'd had a lot of expectations, and because of a lot of the, um, wheels coming off the bus early on in the trip and with my son being sick and all of that, it just felt like, "Oh, this is...
All right, everybody, I want to walk you through what I call the anger decode practice.
This is a four-step process that takes maybe two minutes in real time, but it can actually completely change the trajectory of how an anger moment unfolds.
So am I frustrated? Am I hurt? Am I feeling dismissed? Am I scared? Am I a combination of some of these questions? Because anger, what we know for sure, is that it is often a secondary emotion, meaning that something else is almost always underneath it.
And what I would add to being able to name it by asking about frustration, hurt, dismissed, scared, et cetera, is can you do a quick body check? So where are you feeling this? Is your chest tightening? Is your jaw clenching? Is your stomach all knotted up? Are your thoughts moving really fast and you're just feeling like you need to come to a conclusion? If you can tune in to a body check, I think you will find that your body is already telling you something.
So when you can notice what's going on in the body and you can name accurately what it is underneath anger, I think you're clear to s- to move to step two.
Go one level deeper, and I'll give you an example that I used in the full-length episode on Monday.
And I had been watching the boys, you know, be on their phones in the evening time specifically because that's when all their friends were waking up back home.
We had many, many, many moments that I will never forget that took my breath away.
But one of the things that had bothered me all week was being at the dinner table and just, you know, engaging in conversation in the beginning but then kind of fizzling out, and then I would notice that they would pull out their phones and they would be on their phones, sometimes even under the table.
And I just was feeling all the grief, uh, knowing that this was the last big, you know, kind of together moment for all five of us before everybody disperses in their own direction.
And it's getting harder to take longer vacations with the boys because they are starting to have girlfriends and internships and study abro- abroad programs and summer school and jobs and just all the things that emerging adults start to do, as they should, because they're forming their own pathway in life.
But I was really, really extra aware of this, and again, it was going back to my expectations, and that's when it just all came out sideways.
I'd had a lot of expectations, and because of a lot of the, um, wheels coming off the bus early on in the trip and with my son being sick and all of that, it just felt like, "Oh, this is...
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