Sarah Harding’s news today that her relationship with her new beau, Theo De Vries, has become violent has brought home to me the links between alcoholism and anger. I was planning to write this blog post and now she has accelerated my thought process.

The relationship between anger and alcoholism is both complicated and simple.

On one level an individual may choose to drink in order to hide their anger. They may self talk that their anger is actually only frustration and that it will go away when they relax. Alcohol is the drug they choose to relax with and thus we refer to this as an anger bypass. It’s a form of self anaesthetisation. In my experience it is particularly common with the passive aggressive who stuffs their anger inside themselves and tries to hold on to it. The pain this causes them needs numbing and so we are back to the drink.

On another level I often find that the root cause of someone’s anger is a deep rooted pain from earlier in their life. As with anger, addictive behaviour can often have its roots in trauma of some sort. Once again we are in the realms if self anaesthetisation but for a different type of pain with a simpler causal link.

To make it more complicated we will often meet people who are drinking to numb their anger and the original trauma together.

To further complicate it my experience working with addictive behaviours is that another factor is self esteem. The lower the self esteem the more difficult it is for them to control the substance. The more difficult they find it to control the substance the further their self esteem drops.

What Sarah is demonstrating is that for a long time she has had an uncaring relationship with herself and the ultimate manifestation of this is for her to end up in an abusive relationship. Again, these often go along with alcohol and anger.

Finally, we find that some of our clients have been addicted to numerous different substances and by the time they get to us they are addicted to anger. It gives them a feeling of power and a rush they don’t get from anything else.

All of this can take on an extra painful perspective if the role modelling from parents was of alcohol or substance abuse. This often brings in a further deeper more complex factor of shame based anger.

Am I trying to say that Sarah Harding is angry? No I am not. She is showing a lot of signs that could be indicative of anger that is held in and is causing her deep pain. There could, of course, be numerous other issues for her to deal with.

What is the solution? In truth it is hard, painful work getting to the root cause and dealing with that whilst learning to take responsibility for our behaviour and learning to love and respect ourselves. Easy to say, not so easy to do. If it was easy though, you wouldn’t need me.

For Sarah? She is already along this road. She needs to stay true and, as she has admitted, avoid relationships with recovering addicts. Perhaps she could avoid relationships altogether until she is able to have an honest and loving relationship with herself.