attachment Fireworks: Why holiday Gatherings can Turn Into Anger You Didn't See Coming
Holiday anger often isn't about anger. It's panic and grief in disguise. A look at attachment, RAGE, and how to work through it when tempers flare.
Holidays carry memories of both togetherness and loss. Today's holiday, the Fourth of July, can bring up either side of that. Family visits, cookouts, long weekends with the same handful of people from morning to night. Or the absence of those gatherings: kids grown and gone, family members who've passed, living somewhere else now, a fallout that never got resolved. Either one can stir up old attachment wounds. Old roles come back. Old sore spots get touched. Someone brings up something from years ago, or nobody brings it up and the silence says just as much. And often what shows up first isn't sadness or fear. Alongside the fireworks outside, there's a different kind of combustion happening inside. It's anger.
It's easy to misread aggression. By design, it triggers fight, flight, or freeze in whoever is on the receiving end. Those are self-preserving modes, and in them it's nearly impossible to stay mindful or to do what Peter Fonagy calls mentalizing: accurately tracking what you think and feel, and what the other person thinks and feels, at the same time. Whether the anger is coming from someone else or from us, it's hard to tell in the moment whether the anger is really about anger, or whether it's covering something more vulnerable underneath.
This is especially true when anger is standing in for panic, and underneath that, grief.
The system underneath the anger
Attachment distress and attachment security are rooted in a brain system Jaak Panksepp called PANIC/GRIEF, working alongside two other systems called CARE and SEEKING. When disconnection happens and you need connection back, the automatic reaction is panic. That panic exists to alert you, and the people around you, that you need connection for survival. It teams up with SEEKING to point you toward the person you need. When that person notices your panic, it's their own CARE and SEEKING systems that pull them back toward you. These are old, fast circuits, and they run well beneath conscious thought.
When panic doesn't succeed in getting reconnection (through neglect or through attack) it risks tipping into the pain of isolation and grief. That's a state where you feel helpless, alone, and often like you don't matter. It can feel close enough to a threat to survival that the FEAR system recruits its counterpart, RAGE, to pull the system out of that collapse. RAGE brings a stronger, more mobilized feeling than panic or grief, and for a nervous system that's starting to feel it might not survive disconnection, that mobilization can feel like relief.
Why anger works, until it doesn't
Anger is empowering. Its original job, as Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins both described, is to clear whatever stands between you and something you're after. It comes with a sense of rightness and a jolt of confidence. Paired with SEEKING, it can help a person get real things done.
The problem is that in relationships, when anger is being called up in service of PANIC/GRIEF rather than in service of an actual obstacle, it tends to produce the opposite of what's needed. It pushes the other person away and adds to the misunderstanding instead of resolving it. The person on the receiving end usually focuses on the anger itself and misses the panic, grief, and fear driving it. That deepens the isolation, the helplessness, and the hit to self-worth that started the whole cycle.
From response to pattern
This pattern doesn't come from nowhere. It builds out of repeated experiences where attachment cues weren't met well, and over time the response becomes automatic. At the automatic, repeated level, we start calling it personality.
This particular pattern (anger that is really panic and grief in disguise) shows up more often in certain personality profiles: Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and in Enneagram terms, the one-to-one (sexual) subtypes of Eights, Ones, and Fours in particular. In each case, the anger looks like the presenting problem, but the attachment system underneath it is what actually needs attention.
What changes it
Change comes from three places: awareness, tools, and new experience.
Awareness means being able to mindfully notice when you're about to tip into this state, when you're in it, and what happened as a result once it's passed. That includes recognizing your own patterns: how you think, what you feel, where your eyes go, what happens in your body, how you move, and what you tend to say. A simple way to check yourself, or to notice it in someone else, is to ask what you tend to:
Think
Say
Feel
Do
Tools, from a Somatic Experiencing lens, give the nervous system a way to move through activation instead of getting stuck at the top of it or freezing under it.
Titration means taking the activation in small pieces instead of all at once. Rather than diving straight into the memory or the argument that set off the rage, you touch it briefly, notice what happens in the body, and back off before it overwhelms you. Small doses are easier for the nervous system to process and complete.
Pendulation is the rhythm of moving between that activation and a place of relative ease or resource, back and forth. You might notice the heat rising in your chest, then shift attention to your feet on the floor or a steady breath, then check back in with the heat. That back and forth is what teaches the body it can go into activation and come back out, instead of getting flooded.
Shifting attention in and out works alongside both. Attention in means noticing sensation, tension, temperature, and impulses to move. Attention out means noticing the room, another person's face, or something neutral and steady nearby. Moving between the two keeps you from getting swallowed by the internal experience or dissociating away from it entirely.
Tracking waves of activation and deactivation means watching the rise and fall as it happens rather than judging it. Rage has a shape: it builds, it peaks, and if you don't feed it or fight it, it comes back down. Learning to watch that curve, rather than either suppressing it or getting swept into it, is what turns rage from something that happens to you into something you can move through.
None of this is about stopping the anger before it starts. It's about staying present enough in your body to ride the wave instead of being ridden by it.
New experience comes from two places at once: growing confidence in your own capacity for self-regulation, and being met by people whose own nervous systems can stay regulated while yours isn't, people who can understand you and stay close to you through the storm instead of matching it or retreating from it.
Bringing it back to the holiday
If this weekend brings up a flash of irritation at a family member that threatens to turn into a blow up or painful drama, or you watch someone you love go from calm to furious over something small, try not to jump straight to conclusions about "bad behavior." Underneath a lot of holiday tempers is an old, fast circuit doing exactly what it was built to do: trying to get connection back before the isolation underneath becomes unbearable.
That doesn't excuse harm done in the heat of it. But it does point to where the real work is. Not in suppressing the anger and not in venting it, but in learning to recognize the panic and grief driving it, and building the capacity, in yourself and in your relationships, to stay close through the storm instead of being scattered by it.
Your Eyes Are Talking to Your Nervous System
Most people think about their eyes as the tools they use to see. What they don’t usually think about is that their eyes are part of their brain. Literally. In utero, the eyes separate from the same brain tissue that becomes everything else. The connection never goes away.
Most people think about their eyes as the tools they use to see. What they don’t usually think about is that their eyes are part of their brain. Literally. In utero, the eyes separate from the same brain tissue that becomes everything else. The connection never goes away.
My friend and colleague, Lillian Giocondo, turned me on to following the Biology of Trauma podcast, and a recent episode with neuro-optometrist Dr. Bryce Appelbaum grabbed my attention. Not because the information was fringe or surprising exactly, but because it put language to something we work with in Somatic Experiencing all the time.
In SE, we pay a lot of attention to the eyes.
We’ll sometimes ask a client to let their gaze soften. To notice what’s in their peripheral field without turning their head. To slowly move their eyes in different directions and notice what happens in the body. Or even to track our fingers and notice when the eye sight glitches. These aren’t quirky add-ons to the work. They’re rooted in the same biology Dr. Appelbaum describes.
Two-thirds of the neurons entering the brain come through the eyes. That’s not a small number. Your nervous system is constantly reading visual input to decide whether you’re safe or in danger. And one of the clearest signals it looks for is whether your peripheral vision is open.
When the nervous system shifts into fight or flight, peripheral vision collapses. The world narrows. You stop seeing what’s beside you and start locking onto what’s in front of you. This is your threat response working exactly as designed. The problem is that for many people who carry stored trauma or chronic stress, that narrowing becomes the default. The tunnel becomes baseline.
Dr. Appelbaum describes this as the body adapting to a tunneled state. The brain stops expecting wide vision. It reorganizes. And over time, people describe feeling like they’re looking through paper towel rolls. Which is just their eyes staying in a survival state.
In SE, one type of eye work we do is called, “orienting.” When a client can slowly, voluntarily move their eyes around the room and allow their eyes stop and focus on what they see, that’s the nervous system checking in with reality and finding it safe. The body follows. Shoulders often drop. Breath often comes in a little more easily.
Dr. Appelbaum introduces three simple exercises in the episode: peripheral pointing, eye push-ups, and eye stretches. Peripheral pointing involves fixing your gaze on a point in the room and then noticing, without moving your eyes, what else is out there. Pointing to it. Then checking. It rebuilds the body’s sense of being in space rather than locked into a single threat point.
These exercises build the same capacity we’re reaching for in SE. The ability to be in a body that can take in more of the world, to have more capacity not just tolerance. A nervous system that isn’t white-knuckling.
If you’ve ever wondered why we slow things down in trauma therapy, why we ask what you notice in your body or what catches your eye in the room, or to stop and feel into your eyes, this episode offers one clear answer. The eyes are not passive recorders. They’re active participants in whether you feel okay right now.
Understanding Your Body's Alert System: A Guide to Feeling Safer in Everyday Life
Ever notice how your body reacts when you open a stressful email or get into an argument? That racing heart, those tense shoulders - these aren't random reactions. They're part of your body's natural alert system called the threat response cycle, and understanding this system can change your life in wonderful ways.
Ever notice how your body reacts when you open a stressful email or get into an argument? That racing heart, those tense shoulders - these aren't random reactions. They're part of your body's natural alert system called the threat response cycle, and understanding this system can change your life in wonderful ways.
Your Built-In Safety System
Think of your body as having a special safety alarm, an instinct for safety. Just like our ancestors needed this alarm to stay safe from wild animals, we use it today in our modern world. This system kicks in when:
Reading a difficult email
Sitting through a tense meeting
Having a disagreement with someone you love
Walking into a crowded restaurant
Even chatting with a friend when a sensitive topic comes up
The Threat Response Cycle
Why Understanding This Matters
When you know how your alert system works, you gain a superpower: the ability to pause and check if you really need to be on high alert. Sometimes your alarm might go off when you're actually safe, like feeling panicked about giving a presentation to friendly colleagues. Other times, you might not notice real warning signs when you should, like staying in an unhealthy situation for too long.
Taking Back Control
The good news? Once you recognize when your alert system is active, you can:
Take a moment to pause
Look around and check if there's a real reason for concern
Choose how to respond rather than just react
Return to feeling calm and present when you realize you're safe
This awareness helps you move through your day with more peace and confidence. Instead of being controlled by automatic reactions, you can choose how to respond to life's challenges.
Remember: Your alert system isn't your enemy - it's trying to protect you! Learning to work with it, rather than against it, can help you feel more in control and at peace in your daily life.