ANGER

I’m at the sink, rapidly cleaning dishes: I don’t remember deciding to clean dishes. My body is riddled with heat, electricity, and tightness. What’s going on? Oh right, I’m furious…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve run from feeling and expressing anger. I remember my Mother and Sister, from time to time, becoming outwardly, passionately angry; I hated it. At some point I decided that I wasn’t going to do that, ever. I was always going to be the calm, level headed one. When everyone else was freaking out, I would be the eye of the storm.

My childhood idol/abuser would also get angry every now and then, but it was a very different kind of anger; it was quiet, internal, cold, calculated, vengeful, and saturated in superiority. Beginning as a child, I think I tried to adopt his brand of anger. As with everything he did, I thought it was cool, yet I was terrified to ever be on the receiving end of it. In hindsight, this fear probably added to my already powerful compulsion to lie for and defend him for so many years. 

As a teenager and young adult, I took pride in people commenting on how calm I was, how I never seemed to get angry or stressed. My anger free strategy was to avoid conflict at all cost, either by people pleasing, walking away, being the boss, having someone else deal with it, or just cutting someone out of my life cold turkey: a tactic I also learned from my abuser. Along with anger, most of my emotions, I buried, or as I thought, “channeled” into my work. It seemed my plan was working.

One night, early on in my relationship with my now wife Amanda, she became very upset because she thought that I was attracted to another woman at a restaurant event we were attending. I calmly tried to explain to her that she was absolutely mistaken. She wasn’t buying it. The truth was, she was mistaken, as I was utterly in love with and only had eyes for her. As she continued to refute my “calm” defense, finally something snapped inside of me: I threw down my keys in blistering anger and screamed at her injustice. Amanda’s immediate response was to scream back, “Yeah! Come on! Now we’re getting somewhere!” Whoa, ha, not the reaction I expected. She was excited to finally see me express some anger. This was only a momentary release though, I rapidly bottled all of that back up. 

Several years later, our son was born; I had two nervous breakdowns over the course of a year, I disclosed the sexual abuse I experienced as a child and began my healing journey. As it turned out, keeping my anger submerged was no longer going to be possible. As 20 plus years of suppressed emotions began to be expelled from my mind and body, anger started to rise up with a vengeance and speed beyond my capability to suppress it. For the first time in my life, I began to argue, raise my voice, one time even punching a hole in our wall. In therapy, meditation and journaling I began to face and start processing my anger towards my Abuser, my Mother, as well as the many people around my abuser who turned a blind eye to his activities. This particular phase of release was both terrifying and liberating.

I then began to become aware that often when I would become angry, what was actually happening was that my ego was trying to protect me from what was really going on underneath: namely, embarrassment, guilt or shame. Another portal to another layer of possible healing had been revealed.

My Son is one of my greatest sources of joy, inspiration, meaning and purpose in life: as well as unintentionally triggering my anger like no other. I’d love to plead my case here as to why I’m justified in my reactions to some of his behaviors but the hard truth is, sometimes he merely doesn’t want to do what I want him to do, or he ignores me, or he makes us late, or he questions my authority, or will simply not be controlled. Often when I’m outside of the triggering moment, I’m able to appreciate his individuality but frequently in the midst of it, it all makes me really angry. Over time, I’ve learned that the source of my anger is not actually my Son, it’s old pain deep inside of me that is being triggered; yet in the moment, that’s often hard to remember. One of my early insights to this was from an incredible book, which I recommend for any parent, entitled, “Parenting from the inside out.” 

When this anger begins to swell up in me, I occasionally still try to repress it: remaining calm on the outside, pleasantly asking over and over again for my instructions to be followed. Once upon a time, I could continue to repress that anger indefinitely, but now I can only hold it down for so long. At some point, the top blows off, the valve releases and from the outside perspective, I go from seemingly complete calm to anger, in a split second. My posture becomes erect, my voice booming, my eyes laser focused, and my words cutting. 

Thankfully, the majority of my anger goes unexpressed to my Son. Rather I try to remove myself from the interaction, get some space and lean into the anger. I try to become intimate with it psychologically but most importantly physiologically: to observe it, and describe it to myself. I find that often by this act alone, the anger begins to dissipate. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing work has been instrumental for me in this process. Yet sometimes the intensity of the anger also requires that I expel it some other way such as exercise, journaling, venting to a friend, meditation, or as I began this essay, at the sink, rapidly cleaning dishes. 

Finding myself at the sink, without remembering having consciously chosen it, I believe has something to do with my ego, when stressed or angry due to a futile attempt at control, looking for something that “we” CAN control. “We can take these dirty dishes, and we can make them clean. It’s simple, they don’t talk back, manipulate or abuse: they do what we want them to,” says the ego. This human thing can be so messy: I guess sometimes I just want to clean it up, put it away and close the cabinet doors.

As children, we don’t have a lot of control of our external lives, and in my case as in many others, the child abuse and forced silence I experienced was a heightened experience of loss of control and disempowerment. Among other tactics, my ego sometimes tries to use anger to regain a false sense of control and power. This is of course not real power, not sustainable and not a tactic I endorse, as in these instances, the ego and anger are in control.

The good news is, as I keep leaning in, observing, questioning, redirecting and most impactful, meditating, anger continues to lose it’s grip on my mind and body. I no longer believe anger is wrong or a mistake, it is a part of the human experience and therefore has its relevance. I don’t want to repress it anymore but I also don’t want to project it out onto anybody else. Therefore, my constant practice remains leaning into it and engaging in healthy, non-violent ways to exercise it and channel it.

My experience with anger so far has been yet another lesson in regard to our infinite capability as humans to consciously or unconsciously create our internal experience. Therefore, since our experience of the external world is dependent upon our perspective on it, from the inside is how we change it. 

Love, Wade.