Awakening Anger | There’s Nothing Like a Mad Woman

“Who I’ve become does not belong to you.” | Photography by the lovely Rachel Renee

I thought I was suppressing my anger because I can never seem to find it when I need it.

When I’m in a bad relationship, I feel like a worm, not a fire-breathing dragon.

I wonder why he doesn’t love me enough to do better by me, to treat me with more gentleness and consideration and affection, to prioritize our relationship highly enough to dive into personal development work or emotional healing when his unhealed issues are obviously damaging the relationship or actively hurting me.

The survey results come in once the breakup news hits the radio. Family says: I’m a flake, irresponsible, overly emotional, psychotic, that’s why I can’t commit and stay with a man. When I hear it, my heart hurts… but still, there’s no fire. No anger. Just sadness.

“Where’s her head? Where’s her nerve? Does part of her think this is all she deserves?” Faith Hill sings in my mind. (Listen on Spotify here)

Being mistreated at work?

Time to turn up the people-pleasing and look for a new job on the down low. I won’t tell coworkers or future employers the real reason I left the old job.

I know the survey will say I’m dramatic, unprofessional, naive. When my family hears I left (or maybe now it’s just their voices on repeat in my head): she’s such a flake, so irresponsible, run by her emotions, unrealistic, she needs a man to take care of her, she can’t do it herself, I don’t know why she left her husband — she had it so good.

I had expectations for what anger looked like. They blinded me to it.

I thought I had a hard time feeling anger, that maybe I suppressed it before it could even occur… But today I got curious in a different way.

Instead of trying to feel my anger toward Big Traumatic Events I think I should feel “fire in my stomach and my teeth clenching” (how I’ve expected anger to look, what I’ve been looking for)… instead of looking for that, I asked my body and the younger versions of me I’ve been meeting and healing in therapy: do you have any anger? May I see it? Would you tell me about it?

And they did.

I learned that I have been angry nearly every day of my life for over a decade. My anger is just a little tricky.

“Your anger is just tricky because you try to make it cute,” my sister told me.

THAT made me angry. Instantly defensive, I wanted to say: I’m not trying!!! I can’t stop it! I hate that I default to fawning cuteness, to being a baby, to inadvertently trying to solicit pity and adoration when what I’m actually feeling on the inside, what I really want and need, is not at all any of that nonsense.

I chuckle at my defensiveness and carry on the conversation, not telling my sister her phrasing brought up such a strong flash of emotion… I understand immediately that I am defensive because it’s poking a tender wound that goes much deeper and well beyond this tiny interaction. I understand that the root of the wound has nothing to do with my sister and I want to process this on my own right now, so I don’t tell her.

Busy worker bees in my brain hum: Numb, silence, sooth… Don’t react, don’t feel it, shhh…
(Elsa sings: Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let it show!)

Instead of reacting or shutting down, I take a slow breath and stay curious…

I’m actually grateful for the flash of defensive anger just sparked. Now that it’s here, I can note where it hits in my body. It feels like a bolt of lightening in my gut and a punch in the throat. I watch how it melts and evaporates, how quickly parts of my mind work to annul my sister of the wrongdoing I’ve assigned to her, how quick I am to try and distract from the hurt I feel at not feeling understood and the frustration of feeling like I’m failing in my intention to be authentic and honest as a person, always.

And I realize… The vast majority of the times in my life when I have expressed anger, whether directed at someone or merely discussing a situation I was upset about with a trusted uninvolved adult, it has been with people who were emotionally immature and/or suppressing the difficult things they didn’t want to see.

I’m having a hard time recalling times where I’ve been able to express anger without being chastised, ridiculed, subtly (or not so subtly) religiously shamed, or met with defensive outbursts and lashing out.

When I was a child, the people I could share my difficulties with were actual children, all with immature parents of their own, mostly in homes dealing with poverty, divorce, addiction, and often also children of teen parents like mine. When it wasn’t other children I shared struggles with, it was adults… The adults available to me were mostly those who would defend my parents or their friends and tell me how grateful I should be, shame me for not being more appreciative, telling me I was spoiled or too little to understand.

I think I tend to gaslight myself when I feel angry as a way to diffuse it rather than validating and moving through the feeling.

When I try to talk about anger or understand or validate what anger I do carry, I feel like I’m crying “poor me, poor me.” I struggle to understand the point of experiencing the anger… Because I can’t go back, and even if I could, nothing and nobody could change the way the adults in my life behaved when I was a child. Being angry with them feels like burning holes in myself, and it doesn’t change what happened.

And yet… When I hear someone invalidate my sisters’ rage or experiences or decisions, I feel furious! I become so fiercely protective of their rights to their experiences, to feel the way they feel… and I want to argue with and shame the person trying to tell my sisters not to be angry for the abuse they’ve suffered. How dare anyone try and tell them how to process what they’ve been through? How dare anyone try to take from them their right to speak about it, to connect and not feel alone in the trauma?

Everyone knows there’s no point in lingering in resentment and anger.

That’s not what I’m talking about. Experiencing anger isn’t about holding a grudge or going for revenge or trying to change someone else.

But when someone assaults you, betrays you, intentionally harms you again and again and again… anger is a natural response. Anger is a healthy response. Anger is an empowering response. And just like we don’t necessarily feel happy at someone or sad at someone, I don’t think we necessarily need to feel angry at people either… We can, sure, but I think anger is an emotion which comes and goes and needs to be acknowledged and expressed in healthy ways, more than it needs to be dissected and corrected and corralled into some peachy perfect expression. If I am angry because of someone else’s actions, it’s still my anger. It’s my anger to experience, and as unfair as it is sometimes, it’s also my anger to process and release.

I’m reclaiming, between me, myself, and I, the right to feel, experience, honor, validate, express, and release my own anger.

I told you already that I asked my body and my younger selves to share their anger with me… In doing so, I accidentally unlocked a new perspective on memories I don’t think I’ve ever truly stopped reliving in my mind before.

This perspective was more clear, less dreamy… and it was very honest.

I saw the day-to-day lives of the many children I grew up as.

(If you didn’t grow up between homes, constantly moving, or visiting parents and step-parents every other weekend, summer, and holiday, this might not make any sense, but if you did, I think you’ll get what I mean. There were so many versions of me, from the one who slept in a shiny beautiful room with its own bathroom at dad’s in Las Vegas where my bed had a fluffy white blanket and a satin comforter to the me who spent Christmas tucked in a room barely bigger than a closet with six other kids trying to keep the TV up loud enough to drown out smell of smoke and the sex, drugs, and crying in the room next door.)

I watched as my anger swelled up in waves, then rolled out with a tide of grief, sadness, heartache…

It rolled back in, burning hot, as I calculated how old my mom must have been that Christmas and compared it to my age now and what I would and wouldn’t put a child through. I remember the picture of me the year my youngest sister was born, I must have been about 8 years old, my dress was tattered and stained, my eyes sunken in and hollow, my body so skinny and pale, and the anger becomes devastation, rolling out once again.

My grandpa is in that picture too, and I try to shut the anger down, but the question slips out: was that before or after he did time in prison for meth and his house got burned down because he cooked it there?

I think most of the women in my family would slap me for asking that question out loud. They’d ask me, without caring to hear an answer: how dare I go after my grandpa, he loves me so much, how could I talk about him this way?

I think about the lilacs on his front porch, burning into ash… the only memory of them in photographs I’ve never seen and in the tattoo on my shoulder. More anger, more grief.

Then I think about times I’ve tried to have difficult conversations with my grandpa… and my heart hurts. It’s always so passive. Perfectly vague and spiritual, or quiet, or changing the subject, or passive aggressive comments about someone else’s part in it or an angle that must be considered before pointing fingers. The anger tumbles away again, a tide pulled out by the swell of loneliness and disappointment. It reminds me of the Robin Williams household concept I wrote about a few months ago.

I realize I’ve been trained, and I have been such a good girl.

I’ve been trained to be so pleasant, so easy to be around… Easy to be flawed around. Forgiving. But not just that, because I think there is value in that… I’ve been trained to be easy to abuse. Easy to disappoint. Easy to hurt, repeatedly. I was raised to distract and ease the guilt and shame of abusers and addicts almost as quickly as they could hurt me. I was raised to bring joyful adoration and instant soothing — be cute, be happy, be forgiving, be gentle.

I don’t know how to access the fire and rage I expect anger to be, but I do feel the weight of the sadness and in it, I notice strands of fire glowing, moments of anger and outrage at the injustice.

For a moment today, I wanted to scream:

I WAS A CHILD! I WAS YOUR CHILD.

YOU SAID THAT YOU LOVED ME, BUT THEN YOU HURT ME EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

YOU SAID THAT YOU LOVED ME, BUT YOU WATCHED THEM DO THESE THINGS TO ME AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN! YOU DID THESE THINGS TO ME AGAIN AND AGAIN, TOO!

You said that you loved me, but when I told you something was hurting me, you said I was speaking too loudly.

You said that you loved me and it made you sad that I was hurting… that you were sorry for the things I’d been through (things you’ve put me through)… and then you judged the way I healed from them…

You said you loved me, but when you heard a rumor that I did something your pastor didn’t agree with, you attacked my character, spread rumors about me, made horrible and increasingly wrong assumptions about me, told everyone we know how unhappy you were with me - but never bothered to actually talk with me about it.

YOU CALLED ME A WHORE WHEN I WAS A 14 YEAR OLD VIRGIN, GETTING STRAIGHT A’S AT A CHARTER SCHOOL I PICKED OUT, APPLIED TO, GOT MYSELF TO AND FROM, AND WAS PAYING FOR COLLEGE CREDITS AT BY MYSELF, WHEN I HAD BEEN IN ONE RELATIONSHIP FOR TWO YEARS… BECAUSE I WORE EYELINER FOR A DAY.

What you have done with me is not love. What you have done for me was not love. Love is brave. Love is kind. Love is caring. Love is not a socially-acceptable coward! You failed me when I was a tiny, innocent, helpless little thing. So many times, you failed me. You don’t get to judge who I have grown into — who I have grown into is someone who wouldn’t have failed me. Who I became does not belong to you. You can stay the hell away from me.

IT WASN’T LOVE. THAT WASN’T LOVE. IT STILL ISN’T LOVE.

I trusted you. I thought you cared about me. I believed you. I have to heal what you did to me now and it sucks. Do you even care? I didn’t ask for this. And even as I do it, as I carry on and take responsibility for my own healing, you continue to let me down, to not be there, to use me and call it love. I’m sick of hoping you will change, it’s not good for me. It’s not poor me, it’s just “I’m done.”

I feel angry about all of the ways people have tried to call their control “love.”

I feel angry that they taught me how not to rock the boat, and called that love.

I feel angry as I realize most of the things I’ve been through in relationships really are re-enactments of experiences I had as a child, and that the reason it hurt so much when they didn’t turn out better was actually because it just further deepened the wounds I carried from the times my parents and their friends hurt me when I was little.

I’m angry at how cliche and textbook that sounds. I’m angry knowing I’m thinking that because mental health has been mocked by adults in my life who seriously needed the same help I’ve sought out and committed to.

I’m angry when I think about how I will be the villain in their stories.

How they won’t change and how my younger siblings won’t get to experience these people as grown and healed versions of the ones I knew… And how the ones who should have protected the little girl I once was will look at each other and say I’m crazy, how I’ve jumped off the deep end, and how I’m only mad because I saw my sisters get mad first.

I’m angry that the people these voices in my head belong to didn’t love me the way every child deserves to be loved.

I’m sad and angry that I’m having to give myself that love without them now, that I’m having to learn from strangers how to do it and having to trust strangers to be with me through it, because my own family was absorbed in their own addictions and hypocritical puritan practices and refused to do better. I’m angry that, when I have to explain why I am out here all alone, I have to coach myself through shame and guilt and remind myself that what you showed me was not love…

I don’t expect anybody to do anything about this anger.

This isn’t a message, just the sharing of the experience because I know my fellow healing girlies can relate and I couldn’t find any articles on how to access your anger when I was looking. I hope this helps.

Now that I’ve awakened the beast, so to speak, the plan is to let it move and flow… To be with it. I’ll go for a run, dance (salsa music is fun, but dramatic songs might work better for this particular emotion — Beth Crowly has some wonderful songs for moving big anger/fear/resentment/devastation), and maybe scream into a pillow. (That’s my least favorite thing to do, but my therapist encourages it, and it’s kind of growing on me…)

I have plans to book a rage room experience, but for now my money has to go to bills and puppy needs, so that will wait a while. The point is to physically give the emotion a place to go and allow it to leave my body… and also to dance with it. I know if I’m in a hurry to get rid of an emotion, it digs itself in deeper.

Instead of trying to resolve the anger right now, I will feel it.

My stomach feels tight, my brow is a little furrowed, my jaw is a little tight, my breathing is shallow. I’m going to ground myself in my body with a few deep breaths, really imagine the air moving all the way to my toes and my fingertips, feel the weight of the seat beneath me… and I’m going to thank my body for showing me this anger and feel grateful to myself for taking the time to look at it. I’m glad I’m not suppressing it and trying to hide from myself.

Anger scares me a lot and I feel brave for the way I approached it today, and proud of the way I have taken care of myself throughout the process.