• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

In PTSD/CPTSD terms, what is the difference between “outraged” and “enraged”?

Status
Not open for further replies.

that_1_girl

Confident
Because actually feeling anger and it’s derivatives are new to me in the last 6 months (since I started withdrawing from Trilafon.) I seem to feel both “outraged” and “enraged” at the same time a lot, and sometimes just “rage” at the same time. For me “outraged” feels like I’m SO angry because I’ve been wronged. “Enraged” feels like I’m absolutely out of control furious, and until I became a self harm risk (again) I would purposely buy ugly dishes to smash in the garage, and then sweep up all the pieces and dispose of them, and that would get the “rage” out of my body.
Is there a difference between these three words and if so what is it, for you?
 
Solution
I never thought of this in this way, as English isn’t my mother tongue. I’d say I have a distinguish between rage being a very strong state of anger but still manageable, and fury being the moment you lose it. Then berserk for when you lose it really really.

I used to be quite I don’t know, precise in ways of describing feelings "classically" with the use of day to day language, but since I dove in the world of therapy, actually what I’ve been doing is simplifying. Anger. Fear. Sadness. Joy. With levels of intensity. And that’s it. The rest are blends and contexts. And that I find out how I’m feeling by observing my physiology and not listening to what my brain is telling me.

I figured out most of the time I was angry at a low level...
I never thought of this in this way, as English isn’t my mother tongue. I’d say I have a distinguish between rage being a very strong state of anger but still manageable, and fury being the moment you lose it. Then berserk for when you lose it really really.

I used to be quite I don’t know, precise in ways of describing feelings "classically" with the use of day to day language, but since I dove in the world of therapy, actually what I’ve been doing is simplifying. Anger. Fear. Sadness. Joy. With levels of intensity. And that’s it. The rest are blends and contexts. And that I find out how I’m feeling by observing my physiology and not listening to what my brain is telling me.

I figured out most of the time I was angry at a low level with spikes of fear, an being amok generally is a blend of very high anger and very high fear, that blend that gives an episode their nice flavour of being out of control. With very clear effects of compression-bursts. I prefer to have a vision of what mental state corresponds to what instead of digging to much inside of it because past a point I’d have a panicky effect of me panicking about my own feelings and that triggers self-destructive behaviours. I don’t know if it makes much sense.
 
Solution
outraged is more moralistic. i am filled with rage because of something that violates my ethics. i am outraged that being gay is not universally legal. i am enraged that, like, someone said something that made me mad. and that anger was beyond normal anger. it is rage. and those can overlap. you can be enraged and outraged at the same time. people can say stuff to you that makes you mad that also is moralistic. 🙃
 
I’m SO angry because I’ve been wronged. “Enraged” feels like I’m absolutely out of control furious,
Anger is controlled. Rage is dysregulated anger. I think nearly everyone with PTSD has problems with anger, rage and frustration.

Disorder is a good description for whats going on. There are lots of things that don't work right but at the base of it, there is likely something else. Shame, failure, weakness, and any number of other emotions that grew out of or were part of our trauma or part of our life after trauma. That's where the difference likely is. When anger is tripped by X emotion or feeling it's controlled. When Y emotion trips it anger continues until its out of control.

I know how it feels working through it in therapy. It's a tangled mess and there is a lot there to work through.
 
@grief gave an excellent and concise explanation of the connotations for outraged v enraged. As a linguist, yeah, there’s a connotative difference, but it’s negligible in usage. You would have to consult a corpus to find out whether there really is a strong connotative lean one way or the other, but I couldn’t imagine anyone giving a f*ck in the linguistics world because they’re too interchangeable. It’s like financial v fiscal: there’s a connotative difference, but no one actually cares.

I have my own definitions for what words mean to me, and I’m increasingly aware all the time these days that I’m synesthetic as hell, so I have strong personal feelings and associations about the way some words feel. I think that’s normal. I even have strong feelings about words in languages that aren’t my L1.

But these words don’t mean anything writ large in psychology as far as I know, unless we’re going back to the sixteenth century, when “rage” was a term for “madness.”

These days we have entirely new definitions for rage, as in “en vogue” or to describe partying (“That was a rager!”).

Excellent sizing up of berserk, by the way, @ruborcoraxxx. It comes from Viking warriors (who drank shroom piss and prayed for death by battle...).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top