Adam Lane Smith Adaptation: ANGER IV

Based on Adam Lane Smith’s work and my personal experience
Well then, I continue the series about anger and how I understand it.
This time I return to disorganization in relationships and why it matters even on a biological, physical level.
Because in reality, high tension, constant drama, and the inability to stay in calm for long — all of this seriously dysregulates the body. When stress becomes a permanent state, the body prepares more for defense, attack, and survival than for rest, recovery, and growth.
And here is a strange thing: life conditions can already be completely different from when you were small, yet the body can still behave as if danger is right here.
When you were little, bigger people were truly dangerous. Your chances of defending yourself were much smaller. Everything resembled survival more than the calm, safe growth and adaptation of a small organism.
As an adult you can already be in a completely different reality.
Only the body does not always know that.

1️⃣ Disorganization – when the body no longer learns calm
Adam Lane Smith’s idea:
Disorganized attachment can show up differently. Some people turn conflict, needs, and vulnerability inward — they become quiet, withdrawn, highly adaptive. Others express them loudly — through anger, protest, explosions, withdrawal, and return.
My reflection:
Disorganization in relationships more and more looks to me like excessive accumulation of everything inside myself — just so that, God forbid, I won’t be seen. Noticed as I really am.
Better not to get in the way.
To exist only in an acceptable role.
This kind of disorganization in Adam’s classification is called the quiet type.
From the outside such people can look like snow queens or snowmen, while inside there are storms. Endless deep feelings and experiences.
People who are convenient.
But they are as if not there.
They don’t know how to stay in a connection without disappearing in it. How to open up. How to be seen. Not necessarily to be convenient.
Or — people like ticking bombs, exploding when their boundaries are crossed and their needs ignored. When they are forced to abandon authentic goals or their autonomy walls are disregarded.
This is what Adam calls the loud type of disorganization.
Such people can choose partners who continue to disregard them. And even if they manage to be with understanding close ones, they can still, from inertia, tend to exceed their own capacities and ignore themselves.
They explode, disappear, recover, rush to apologize, restore, and start over again.
And in reality they build and realize things just as impressively as they destroy and scatter them to the winds.
They also care a lot.
They simply don’t know how to stay calmly.
Simply peacefully.
Calmly.
Core idea:
​Both the quiet and the loud forms of disorganization can be different faces of the same problem — one turns survival inward, the other outward.

​2️⃣ When stress starts destroying not only the connection, but life itself
Adam Lane Smith’s idea:
If a person constantly lives in a mode of threat and insecurity, the relationship cycle can repeat again and again: closeness, tension, withdrawal, conflict, reconciliation, closeness again.
My reflection:
The essence is the same — both style variants carry constant stress inside them. Either spilling inward or outward.
And the permanent tension, in turn, starts to cost.
Sometimes physically.
Sometimes through the environment.
Loneliness. Social isolation. Career failures. Lack of money. Inability to enjoy everyday life.
And everything else that begins to collapse when a person spends most of their energy not on living, but on constant surviving.
All of this destroys the person or their life.
Even if people manage to stay together in a connection full of disorganization, all those on-off cycles can eventually lead to serious crises.
And this is no longer only about relationships.
A person can lose a job, money, friends, social connection. There can appear a strange inability to experience pleasure or even a complete refusal of it.
Well… life simply becomes another place where you somehow have to survive.
Core idea:
When constant tension becomes the norm, it starts costing not only relationships, but the whole of life.

3️⃣ Learning not only not to destroy, but also to stay
Adam Lane Smith’s idea:
To break the disorganized cycle, it is not enough just to understand why it appeared. One needs to learn a different relationship with closeness, boundaries, needs, and safety itself.
My reflection:
Here the conversation is probably already about cyclicity.
When people get completely tired of disappearing or completely destroying a connection, the cycles repeat.
And they are passed outward.
To children. To colleagues. To friends. To loved ones.
That is why it is very important to gradually heal from earlier dysfunctional connections and to get used to simply being oneself in a relationship.
And to get used to calm.
Yes… when you are yourself you will not be convenient. :)
And calm can seem boring.
But perhaps a secure connection does not have to be a constant roller-coaster.
Perhaps in it one can simply be.
Be oneself.
Say what is needed.
Say that something is not liked.
Not explode.
Not disappear.
And not destroy what is safe simply because safety feels strange.
So let those stress cycles gradually die down and fade…
Until safer, calmer, and more real, more authentic cycles replace the earlier ones. :)
Core idea:
Healing is not only stopping being angry or stopping destroying. Sometimes one needs to learn what at first can feel very strange: simply to stay calmly in the connection.

In closing:
Sometimes safety looks boring. Sometimes calm looks suspicious. And sometimes the biggest change is no longer creating a storm where there is none.

This time — not to run. Not to destroy. But to learn to stay in calm.

Other entries on anger
Teal Swan Adaptation: ANGER I
Teal Swan Adaptation: ANGER II
Adam Lane Smith Adaptation: ANGER III