attachment Fireworks: Why holiday Gatherings can Turn Into Anger You Didn't See Coming

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.

The Seven Core Emotions: How Your Brain Helps You Understand What You Feel

If you’ve ever wondered why emotions can feel so big—or why they sometimes take over before you have time to think—you’re in good company. Emotions are biological. They come from deep, ancient parts of the brain, and they exist to help us survive, connect, and navigate life.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified seven basic emotion systems that all mammals, including humans, share. Each one creates a unique emotional experience and shows up in the body in its own way. When you understand these systems, identifying your feelings becomes easier and more intuitive—an important first step in managing them.

Here’s a simple guide to each emotion system and the typical body signs associated with it:

1. SEEKING – Curiosity and Motivation

This system gets you moving toward goals.
Body Signs: alert eyes, energized posture, slight increase in heart rate, interest, leaning forward.

2. FEAR – Anxiety and Threat Response

Helps you detect danger and stay safe.
Body Signs: fast heartbeat, tense muscles, shallow breathing, freezing or wanting to escape, wide eyes.

3. RAGE – Anger and Frustration

Activates when something blocks your path.
Body Signs: heat in the face, clenched jaw or fists, raised voice, tight shoulders, narrowed focus.

4. LUST – Sexual Desire

Supports bonding and intimacy.
Body Signs: warmth, arousal responses, focused attention, physiological sexual readiness.

5. CARE – Warmth and Affection

Supports closeness, empathy, and nurturing.
Body Signs: softening facial muscles, relaxed breathing, warm tone of voice, desire to comfort.

6. PANIC/GRIEF – Sadness and Separation Distress

Activates when connection feels lost.
Body Signs: tightness in the throat or chest, tears, heaviness, low energy, slumped posture.

7. PLAY – Joy and Social Connection

Encourages bonding through fun and laughter.
Body Signs: smiling, laughter, loose movement, lightness in the body, bright eyes.

Why This Matters for Managing Emotions

The first step in emotional regulation is identification—being able to notice and name what you’re feeling (as psychiatrist, Dan Siegel says, “name it to tame it”). When you recognize the body cues, you can understand what your system is trying to communicate. From there, you can use specific tools to regulate, soothe, or support the emotion in a healthy way.

Learning these seven systems gives you a map:
not just what you feel, but why you feel it—and what your body is asking for next.

References

Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt.

LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. Viking.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.

Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind. Delacorte Press.

Solms, M. (2019). The neurobiological underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 1–13.

The Cult of Meaning-Making: When Thinking Hijacks Feeling

In our fast-paced culture, thinking is often elevated as the highest human function—our prized problem-solver, meaning-maker, and escape hatch. But thinking, as necessary as it is, can become a trap. Especially when it overrides our capacity to feel.

Neuroscience tells us that emotions come first. Literally. We feel before we think. Research by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (2012) demonstrates that emotional experience arises from deep subcortical structures in the brain—what they call the “core self”—before the neocortex (the seat of conscious thought) even gets involved.

Yet when we feel overwhelmed, vulnerable, or dysregulated, we often reach for thinking as a shield. We lean into analysis, planning, interpreting—often without realizing we're doing it to avoid the raw intensity of emotion. This pattern shows up neurologically in the dominance of the left prefrontal cortex—what psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (2010) describes as the left hemisphere’s narrow, detail-focused grasp on the world.

McGilchrist’s work reveals that the left hemisphere, especially the top-left-frontal region, tends to "make meaning" even when it lacks full data. It creates interpretations to soothe uncertainty—even if the result is distorted, fragmented, or, frankly, wrong. It favors coherence over truth. It would rather invent an answer than admit it doesn't know.

And here’s the rub: the left brain doesn’t have direct access to the richness of lived experience. It depends on the right hemisphere—our embodied, relational, and emotionally attuned brain—for that. The left side is secondary. A translator. A map-maker, not a navigator. As McGilchrist puts it, “The right hemisphere sees the whole, the left sees the parts and confuses the map for the territory” (McGilchrist, 2010).

The danger is cultural as well as personal. A society dominated by left-brain modes of thought can become obsessed with control, explanation, and certainty. Feeling is dismissed as irrational. Intuition is sidelined. Opinion replaces embodied knowing. As a result, we become more reactive, less reflective—and more cut off from ourselves.

But there’s another way.

Like many in the fields of affective neuroscience and psychotherapy, I invite a return to the wisdom of the body. As developmental neuropsychologist Allan Schore (2012) suggests, we can "shift down and to the right"—from the high-speed highways of left-brain cognition to the slower, more relational terrain of the right hemisphere and subcortical brain.

This shift asks us to pause. To feel. To listen to our body’s signals—its tension, breath, heart rate, gut response—before rushing to interpret or explain. It’s in this space, Schore says, that self-regulation becomes possible. And once we’re regulated, the deeper wisdom stored in our emotional and somatic systems begins to rise.

Our nervous systems are not just reactive—they're adaptive. But they need time. Time to feel before we think. Time to notice before we narrate. Time to allow the truth of our experience to emerge from the inside out—not be forced from the top down.

So let’s resist the cult of premature meaning-making. Let’s be willing to not know for a little while longer. In that not-knowing, something truer may take shape.

References

• Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. W. W. Norton & Company.

• McGilchrist, I. (2010). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

• Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

The Power of Play: How the PLAY System Supports Mental Health and Connection

Discover the Science Behind Play and Its Role in Emotional Well-Being

At Analog Counseling, we believe in integrating the latest affective neuroscience insights to help our clients lead healthier, more connected lives. One of the most fascinating discoveries in this field is the PLAY system, identified by renowned affective neuroscientist Dr. Jaak Panksepp.

The PLAY system is one of seven core emotional systems in the brain, deeply rooted in our biology. It produces feelings of social joy, encourages creativity, and drives connection. But the benefits of play go far beyond fun—they’re vital for mental health, resilience, and survival.

What Is the PLAY System?

The PLAY system originates in the brainstem, where it creates the neurochemical experiences that drive primary emotions. These emotions form the foundation of our consciousness, helping us process the world even before we think about it.

The primary function of the PLAY system is contingency seeking—our natural instinct to explore, try new things, and adapt to challenges. This playful curiosity enhances problem-solving and fosters social joy, an emotion that signals health and well-being to the mind and body.

Play also strengthens our connections with others, serving as a building block for social bonds. Research even suggests that play may have contributed to the development of language, a core element of human interaction.

Why Fear Blocks Play

Despite its benefits, play becomes impossible in the presence of high levels of fear or anxiety. When fear takes over, the brain perceives risks as real and immediate, preventing us from imagining possibilities or experimenting with new ideas.

This rigid mindset can trap us, much like wet concrete hardening into an unchangeable form. Without the flexibility to “play” with possibilities, our creativity, joy, and connection suffer.

The Role of Play in Mental Health

Understanding the PLAY system reveals how essential play is for mental health and personal growth. Play isn’t just for kids—it’s a biological necessity for adults too. It supports emotional resilience, strengthens social connections, and promotes creative thinking.

At Analog Counseling, we incorporate playful and exploratory techniques into therapies like Somatic Experiencing, psychoanalysis, and Enneagram coaching. By reconnecting with your capacity for play, you can reduce stress, overcome fear, and rediscover joy.

How to Bring Play Back Into Your Life

If fear or stress is blocking your ability to play, consider incorporating activities that spark curiosity, laughter, or creativity. Try:

    •    Physical movement like dancing or yoga.

    •    Creative activities like drawing, journaling, or playing music.

    •    Social activities that involve humor or light-hearted interaction.

Therapy can also be a powerful way to overcome emotional barriers to play. With professional support, you can create a safe space to explore possibilities, heal from past trauma, and rediscover your innate capacity for joy.

Start Your Journey to Joy and Connection

At Analog Counseling in Kansas City, we specialize in therapies that restore balance and foster well-being. Whether you’re struggling with anxiety, stress, or disconnection, our team can help you reconnect with the transformative power of play.

Contact us today to learn more about our services, including Somatic Experiencing, psychoanalysis, and online Enneagram coaching. Together, we can help you rediscover the joy, creativity, and resilience that come from embracing play.

Sources and Further Reading for Mental Health and Play

    •    Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press.

    •    Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. W.W. Norton & Company.

    •    Cozolino, L. (2014). The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. W.W. Norton & Company.

Six things you don't know about play but need to

Most people don’t know that playing is a biological need and drive. In fact, PLAY is one of the seven basic emotion systems that our entire emotional lives are built on (in other words, PLAY is one of the seven basic tools we inherit at birth in order to survive - it's not trivial to play it's a necessity). All of this means that the PLAY system (when PLAY is capitalized it is referring to the brain system that produces an emotion, not an emotion itself) is a vital part of being a mammal and being a human. Here are six facts about playing that you might not know:

1. Even though play can come in tons of different forms (we can have intellectual play, sexual play, dramatic play, witty banter, etc.) its basic biological form is “rough and tumble play”. This is the chasing, wrestling, and physical type of play that we see the most in children (and maybe if you get down on the floor with your dog!).

2. Playing is a well researched option for helping to manage ADHD. The research suggests that incorporating rough and tumble play into the life of a child with ADHD can have strong positive affects on concentration and focus.

3. We learn how to live together through playing. Playing teaches us where the line is. Most play ends up in tears if you let it go long enough. That’s because eventually we lose the “as if” feeling when a line gets crossed. Those experiences teach us how to read each other and how to understand limits and rules that we later apply to living in society. We also try on roles in playing that we use later on. Often you see kids playing house or playing different parts of social hierarchy (e.g. cops and robbers, etc.). Playing prepares us for life together.

4. Empathy evolves out of playing. We develop our capacity for empathy from the PLAY system. Playing is governed naturally by a 60/40 rule. If someone is winning more than 60% of the time the other person will lose interest, feel bullied and disengage. The bully may take the toy but they won’t get the joy.

5. We need to play everyday otherwise our need for play builds up. If we don’t play today we will need to play twice as much the next day.

6. Playing produces social joy. Social joy combats despair. Making play a really good medicine for feeling down.