Acting Out

Saying or doing something impulsively in order to get rid of unwanted feelings, or to make the source of unwanted feelings stop whatever it is doing.

Sometimes also to punish the person who makes us feel something we don’t want to feel.

Can also be directed towards creating positive feelings that mask bad ones.

Basically, the concept acting out encapsulates all of the flavours and extremes of the temper tantrum.

The best analogy I can think of is food poisoning. You eat something with dangerous bacteria and as soon as your body recognises it, it gets rid of it. Sometimes it happens immediately and you vomit, or it can make its way into the intestines before it’s identified, and so it is ejected downwards, rather than upwards.

Acting out has a similar dynamic. An unwanted thought or sensation enters, and the mind ejects it through either words or actions. Sometimes the reaction is immediate, and sometimes it is delayed. Sometimes it’s directed at the feeling’s source (the person by whom you feel abandoned, for example), and sometimes it’s redirected towards someone or something else.

Another good example is seen in movies and series. Any time anything even slightly emotionally difficult happens, the character immediately reaches for a bottle of alcohol. Instead of containing and managing their feelings directly, they are overtaken by a reflex reaction which seeks out something to make the bad feeling go away.

Getting drunk, throwing things, hitting, biting, and scratching yourself or others, but also more subtle things like playing pranks, making deliberate mistakes, backstabbing/gossipping, and other forms of revenge.