Healing from an emotional trauma or extended traumatic experience is a like a long, intimate dance with reality. Or perhaps a three-act ballet. We are on the stage of our own minds, surrounded by the props of our lives, dancing to the music of our emotions. Our memories flash on the backdrop or float around like ribbons in the air. Down below the stage, in the orchestra pit, a chorus puts words to the feelings and gives us advice drawn from our parents’ rules, our church’s rules, all the rules from the movies and books and conversations that have ever colored our thinking.
And our job is to dance our way through the acts.
The first act is named “Magic Thinking.” We stumble onto the stage, stunned, confused and in pain. Our first dance is denial — the “it doesn’t matter” dance. Our second dance is bargaining — the “maybe I can persuade whoever is in power to fix this” dance. The third and last dance before the intermission is anger.
This article is about anger.
The emotional spine
Everyone here who has gone through the angry phase knows how complex it is. We are indignant, bitter, sarcastic, outraged, waving our fiery swords of blame. We are also — finally — articulate, funny, re-asserting power over our lives. We are hell on wheels, demanding justice or retribution. We are also in transition between bargaining and letting go, so all this is tinged with hope on one side and grief on the other.
Anger really deserves a book, rather than a brief article. It is the end of the first act of our healing, because it really changes everything — our way of seeing, our thinking, our judgments, the way we move forward. Like the element of fire, it can be clarifying, but it can also be destructive. To complicate the situation further, many (if not all of us) tended to repress our anger before we entered this healing process.
So it may be helpful to discuss what anger is, where it comes from. What we call anger is part of a spectrum of reactions that originates in the oldest part of our brain. The brain stem, sometimes called the lizard brain, oversees automatic survival mechanisms like breathing, heartbeat, hunger, sleep and reproduction. It also generates powerful emotional messages related to survival.
These messages travel through increasingly sophisticated layers of our emotional and intellectual processing. One of those layers, the limbic system or mammal brain, is where we keep memories of good and bad events, and work out how to maximize pleasure and avoid pain (often through addictive strategies). The messages pass through this layer on the way to our cerebral cortex.
There in the thinking layer, we name things and organize them. We maintain concepts of community and identity (right and left brain), and we manipulate them continually to run our lives as thinking, self-aware beings. Beyond the thinking brain is the even more advanced area of the frontal cortex, which maintains our awareness of the future, interconnectivity (holistic thinking), and the “high level” views that further moderate our primitive responses into philosophic and spiritual meanings.
What our thinking brains name “anger” is actually a sensation of physical and emotional changes caused by the brain stem in reaction to perceived danger. The spectrum of those danger-related sensations roughly includes alertness, fear and anger. While our higher brain may see a purpose in separating fear and anger into different categories, our lizard brain doesn’t make those distinctions. It just keeps altering our hormones and brain chemicals for all kinds of situations, depending on its analysis of what we need to do to survive.
The point of this long digression is this: alertness-fear-anger responses are a normal part of our ability to survive. They travel “up” into our higher processing as the strong spine of our survival mechanism. There is nothing wrong with feeling them. In fact, paying attention to them is better for us in every way than ignoring our feelings (denial) or trying to delude ourselves about what is happening (bargaining).
The many forms of anger
One of the most interesting things about the English language is its many verb forms, which express various conditions of timeliness and intent. I can. I could. I could have. I would have. I might have. I should have. I will. I might. I was going to.
Those same factors of timeliness and intent can be found in the many facets of anger. Bitterness and resentment are simmering forms of anger related to past and unhealed hurts. Likewise sarcasm and passive-aggressive communications are expressions of old disappointment or despair. Frustration is a low-level form of anger, judging a circumstance or result as unsatisfactory. Contempt and disgust are more pointed feelings associated with negative judgments.
When anger turns into action, we have explosive violence, plans for future revenge and sabotage. When anger is turned on ourselves, we have depression and addictions. The judgments associated with anger foster black-and-white thinking, which can be the basis for bias and all kinds of “ism’s,” especially if the anger is old, blocked for some reason, and thus diffuse or not directed primarily at its source. This typically happens when we feel disempowered to defend ourselves.
All of that sounds pretty terrible and toxic. But, in fact, the most toxic forms of anger are the ones in which the anger is not allowed to surface. The lizard brain does not stop trying to protect us until we deal with the threat, and so we live with the brain chemicals and hormones of anger until we do.
Anger can also be healthy. The anger of Jesus toward the money changers in the temple is a model of righteous anger. In response to trauma, righteous anger is a crucial part of the healing process. Anger has these characteristics:
• Directed at the source of the problem
• Narrowly focused and dominating our thinking
• Primed for action
• Intensely aware of personal resources (internal and environmental)
• Willing to accept minor losses or injuries to win
Anger is about taking care of business. At its most primitive level, anger is what enables us to defend our lives, to kill what would kill us. In modern times, it enables us to meet aggression with aggression in order to defend ourselves or our turf. We expect to feel pain in these battles, but we are fighting to win.
However, anger also has its exhilaration, a sense of being in a moment where we claim our own destiny. For those of us who have been living through the relatively passive and self-defeating agony of denial and bargaining, anger can feel wonderful.
As it should, because anger is the expression of our deepest self, rejecting this new reality. We are finally in speaking-up mode. We are finally taking in our situation and saying, “No! I don’t want this. I don’t like it. I don’t like you for creating this in my life. I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like what I’m getting out of it. And if it doesn’t stop this instant, I want you out of my life.”
Getting over our resistance to anger
Of course, we don’t exactly say that when we’re inside the relationship. In fact, we don’t exactly think it, even when we’re out of the relationship. And why is that? Because — and this only my theory, but it seems to be born out here on LoveFraud — people who get involved with sociopaths are prone to suppress their anger, because they are afraid of it, ashamed of it, or confused about its meaning.
When faced with a painful situation, they suppress their inclination to judge the situation in terms of the pain they’re experiencing, and instead try to understand. They try to understand the other person. They try to understand the circumstances. They try to interpret their own pain through all kinds of intellectual games to make it something other than pain. To an extent, this could be described as the bargaining phase. But for most of us, this is a bargaining phase turned into a life strategy. It’s an unfinished response to a much earlier trauma that we have taken on as a way of life.
Which is very good for the sociopath, who can use it to gaslight us while s/he pursues private objectives of looting our lives for whatever seems useful or entertaining. Until we have nervous breakdowns or die, or wake up.
We can all look at the amount of time it took us to wake up, or the difficulty we’re having waking up, at evidence of how entrenched we’ve been in our avoidance of our own anger. It retrospect, it is an interesting thing to review. Why didn’t we kick them out of our lives the first time they lied or didn’t show up? Why didn’t we throw their computer out of the window when we discovered their profiles on dating sites? Why didn’t we cut off their money when we discovered they were conning us? Why didn’t we spit in their eye when they insulted us? Why didn’t we burn their clothes on the driveway the first time they were unfaithful?
Because we were too nice to do that? Well, anger is the end of being nice. It may be slow to emerge. We may have to put all the pieces together in our heads, until we decide that yes, maybe we do have the right to be angry. Yes, they were bad people. No, we didn’t deserve it. And finally, we are mad. At them.
Anger in our healing process
Anger is the last phase of magical thinking. We are very close to a realistic appraisal of reality. The only thing “magical” about it is this: no amount of outrage or force we can exert on the situation can change it. The sociopath is not going to change. We cannot change the past, or the present we are left with.
But anger has its own gifts. First and foremost is that we identify the external cause of our distress. We place our attention where it belongs at this moment — on the bad thing that happened to us and the bad person who caused it.
Second, we reconnect with our own feelings and take them seriously. This is the beginning of repairing our relationships with ourselves, which have often become warped and shriveled with self-hatred and self-distrust when we acted against our own interests in our sociopathic relationships.
Third, anger is a clarifying emotion. It gives us a laser-like incisiveness. It may not seem so when we are still struggling with disbelief or self-questioning or resentment accumulated through the course of the relationship. But once we allow ourselves to experience our outrage and develop our loathing for the behavior of the sociopath, we can dump the burden of being understanding. We can feel the full blazing awareness that runs through all the layers of brain, from survival level through our feelings through our intellect and through our eyes as we look at that contemptible excuse for a human being surrounded by the wreckage s/he creates. Finally our brains are clear.
And last, but at least as important as the rest, is the rebirth of awareness of personal power that anger brings. Anger is about power. Power to see, to decide, to change things. We straighten up again from the long cringe, and in the action-ready brain chemicals of anger, we surprise ourselves with the force of our ability and willingness to defend ourselves. We may also surprise ourselves with the violent fantasies of retribution and revenge we discover in ourselves. (Homicidal thoughts, according to my therapist, are fine as long as we don’t act on them.)
It is no wonder that, for many of us, the angry phase is when we learn to laugh again. Our laughter may be bitter when it is about them. But it can be joyous about ourselves, because we are re-emerging as powerful people.
The main thing we do with this new energy is blaming. Though our friends and family probably will not enjoy this phase (because once we start blaming, it usually doesn’t stop at the sociopath), this is very, very important. Because in blaming, we also name what we lost. When we say “you did this to me,” we are also saying, “Because of you, I lost this.”
Understanding what has changed — what we lost — finally releases us from magical thinking and brings us face to face with reality. For many of us this is an entirely new position in our personal relationships. In the next article, we’ll discuss how anger plays out in our lives.
Until then, I hope you honor your righteous anger, casting blame wherever its due. And take a moment to thank your lizard brain for being such a good friend to you.
Namaste. The healing warrior in me salutes the healing warrior in you.
Kathy
Kathy, I totally get what you’re trying to say. I grew up with a cop father, and a nature-loving mother. My mother opens every window on a sunny day, she doesn’t think about who might be looking in the open windows, and my father goes around behind her closing the blinds, locking the windows, warning about strangers in the bushes. I can’t live like either one of them, I know too much to be as trusting as my mother, and I don’t want to live a life of hypervigilance like my father. I’ve come to a happy balance, even though I still make adjustments and sometimes question if I’m being too paranoid or too open. I’ve trimmed the bushes so no one can hide behind them, and I open the windows.
I’ve got a bunch of comments in response to posts on this thread, I got behind after being offline for a few days. My baby and I had snow to play in.
Kathy – In regards to the other victims of the S’s, the ones who don’t rise up… I think people are like seeds, everyone has a potential to grow, but when you stick them in the ground, some never sprout, others sprout only when the conditions are right, and others are determined to grow no matter where they are or how they’ve been tended. I have a small garden on my back deck in ceramic pots, in the spring I clear out the dead plants, put some fresh seeds and dirt in, give them some water, and walk away. Over the spring and summer, some of them grow, some of them don’t. I’ll give them some water if it’s really dry, or pluck some weeds from among them, but most of the time I let nature take care of them. I’ve found that overtending them often leads to them withering and me getting upset, so it’s better to just let them grow or wither on their own. I’m working on applying this tactic to the people I know.
Matt – It used to baffle me when I watched the S using his power for evil. He was intelligent, articulate, driven, if he had applied that for good purposes… but he didn’t. Weak people accomplish nothing for good or for evil. Those who have the power to do the greatest good also have the power to do the greatest evil. We have power too, and choices. It’s not that we’re incapable of cruelty or malice, we choose to walk the path we know is right. That’s power.
Stiles – I know it must be incredibly embarassing to know the skank and her coworkers are mocking you, but really it’s more of a reflection on them than on you. I got made fun of a lot in school until I stopped getting embarassed. I learned this trick from my sister. When people would make fun of me, I wouldn’t say anything at all, I’d just stare at them like they bored me. The harder they tried to embarass me, the more ridiculous they looked. And if they get up in your face, or touch you, complain to a manager, you’re a customer in their store you don’t have to deal with harassment.
Shabbychic – It must be very hard trying to deal with your feelings for your S while he’s so sick, but you know, just because he’s sick it doesn’t make him any less of an S. It’s easy to overlook the bad things a person has done when they’re dying, but what if by some miracle he lives for another 20 years, he’s still an S. I may be out of line here, but his health issues sound like they might even be a product of his lifestyle. Wish him well, say goodbye however you need to, and focus on your life, no matter what happens to him, you’re still alive, and you need to take care of yourself.
S.O.S. – Hi and welcome. Your post Wed. 4th at 12:59a.m. enabled me to have another breakthrough moment in my healing journey.
My INITIAL reaction to your post was dont think I could ever live like that. Literally size-up each new associate, take notes, observe and look for trait after trait after trait., try to find out more about them and then begin journaling, adjusting notes, etc.
And then my SECOND thought, was, my goodness How can I NOT live that way, afterall look where I landed myself when I wasnt living my life that way.
A lightbulb went off. I was living that part of my life through the child in me (the innocent trusting believing child) but as a mature adult I have the responsibility and god given right to be ( cautious, self-protective, and make strong bold selfish choices as to who I want in my life). I NEVER MADE THAT TRANSITION, NEVER EVEN KNEW TO.
I was finally aware after the S that I had to watch for RED FLAGS – but I was still being that little girl within believing all are innocent until proven guilty. And usually that meant someone had to point those people out to me or I had to get hurt first, and then come to the conclusion. Afterall, who teaches a child to scout out a S/P amongst the crowd at the playground or look for a N teacher in his classroom or a see toxic parent as toxic in their own home. I was living as an open target for welcoming toxic experiences into my life.
Still, I must find a way to be who I am, while finding a way to be even more cautious, SELECTIVE and self-protective without becoming either shut-down or paranoid.
Im experiencing a sense of loss at this moment (of myself) as well as a sense of growth (within myself) – and its rather late in my life, so Im emotional about it. I wasnt prepared, armed, or even AWARE that I needed to be. But I am now, and my life, my sense of self, and my childrens future will be all the better for it. I can help them be armed, prepared and educated about themselves and others in ways we all need to be in life when it comes to personality flaws in ourselves and others. And learning a balanced way to exist, survive and thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Another breakthrough moment for me. Thanks
Thanks, Jim and Kathleen for the support. It has been suggested to start a petitition. The petitition will do no good against the HOA unless I can win a judgment against them in court. 1000 signatures will not make them budge from their position–they are just signatures. The board believes they are right. I need to prove them wrong. The only way to do this is with evidence. I am considering bartering massages to have another licensed plumber put a camera down the plumbing line. That would be indisputable evidence. The issue at stake is whether or not there are common vertical kitchen plumbing lines in the buildings. They say no. I say yes. There are no diagrams to back either side–only their word against my plumbers, and the word of numerous plumbers I’ve talked to. They won’t care what other owners want. I know this HOA well–I’ve been dealing with them for 6 years.
The other issue here is that many of the residents are renters who don’t care. The owners of those units generally don’t care either, as long as they get their rent every month. If I can win a judgment against the HOA, I will hand deliver a letter to every resident letting them know about the situation so they can also fight for their rights if they chose. But I don’t depend on owners around here. Most are apathetic. The ones I told about it didn’t bother to go to the HOA meeting. I have always supported my neighbors with stuff like this, even writing letters on their behalf. I have yet to see someone return the favor.
Yes, I agree about the sources of alienation in our society. I am not putting the blame on the kids, it’s the values they are raised with–as you say–the values that put “stuff” before basic humanity at the cost of alienating them from their feelings and the feelings of others.
I am writing down the name of the book you mentioned. I think I’d like to read it.
A BALANCED way to live is, I think, totally the way to go. I did have someone targeting me for murder, but I WILL NO LONGER LIVE IN TERROR, CAUTION, yes! TERROR? NO!!!!
Life has risks, but we need to make sure the risks are reasonable for the possible benefit. Everytime we get in our cars and go to the store, we risk being killed, but the odds are in our favor of coming home without a problem.
Defensive and careful driving also increase our chances of coming home safely. So it behoves us to be careful in everything we do to maximize our safety and lives.
I don’t expect my home to burn, but I have a smoke detector, and I also have a carbon monoxice detector because I burn natural gas for heat. CAUTION. GOOD SENSE.
When we come up against ANY problem, we need to do a correct diagnosis of the problem. Looking at people we deal with in an analytical way I think is a very good thing. NOT “paranoid” at all, but REALISTIC assessment of any POTENTIAL PROBLEMS.
A problem PREVENTED is a problem tht never happens, and we are the ULTIMATE WINNERS when we can anticipate problems and keep them from happening. Just like regular car care prevents the engine over heating and the engine burning up because we didn’t check the oil, or tires blowing out because we didn’t routinely check tread wear or inflation.
PREVENTING THE “ATTACK OF A P” is GOOD SENSE in my book. If analyzing new people who come into our lives in business or any other assiciation is a very good way to do so I think. It is just a reasonable amount of “caution”—
We all “assess” people we meet in several ways (if the cops do it it is called “profiling.”) LOL The little old “blue haired lady” is NOTas likely to be a Muslim terrorist as someone who resembles Osama Bin Ladin (how ever you spell it) and that is just a FACT. Doesn’t mean the guy looking like Osama IS a terrorist, but on the other hand, he is more LIKELY to be one than the “blue haired old lady on a walker.” LOL
If you walk down the street and see someone talking to himself, smell that he hasn’t bathed in days, and he starts “shadow boxing” you are likely to cross the street rather than get too close to him. GOOD SENSE.
If you see some kid walking down the street in “gang” dress, you are most likely to assume he might be a gang member or gang member wanna be, so again, you might cross to the other side of the street, or at least not make eye contact with him. These “profiles” are not always accurate, but we do it, we always have “judged” others by how they walk, smell, talk, dress, and behave. That is just a survival skill that we pick up just like the prey animals in the wild pick up on what type of animal is more likely to be a predator.
Assessing others (humans) for signs that they might be a predator (since we don’t have to worry very much about wild animals attacking us) is a survival skill, and by virtue of the fact that we are here on LOVEFRAUD, our past “assesments” weren’t really all that great, so we need to IMPROVE THEM somewhat.
An OUNCE of prevention is worth a HUNDRED POUNDS OF CURE! (Especially where a psychopath is concerned)!!!!
Oxy/Kathy – He always called me “the dreamer”. I always saw things as being possible. I always saw the bright side of life. I dont want to lose that part of me.
I never saw the bad, the negative, the evil. I never believed when he was telling the truth and I believed when he was lying? wth I never grew up, huh. I want to be able see the bad, the negative the evil.
Oh and something else he said to me ” People freaking come and go in and out of my life all the time… SO WHAT. BIG DEAL. Who cares.
I said what about continuity, what about growing with people in your life. How can it be ok with you that people always come and go?? Why dont you want the ones who you experience happiness, love and growth WITH to share your journey with you.
He told me Im a dreamer and I dont live in the real world. He told me never to trust anyone ever and never to expect them to stay beyond what they are there looking for, get and leave.
Star, good luck with it. I’m sorry it makes you so angry, but it sounds like you know what you want out of it. I hope you get it.
You’re the second person here who has said you’ll read “The Starfish and the Spider.” I hope you do. I might review it some time in an article. I did review it on Amazon. But I also did PR for the authors before it came out. (A rare event for me, only the second time I’ve done book publicity.)
That gave me the opportunity to hear and see all the testimonials and reactions that the book was producing. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. There were therapists, soldiers in Iraq, miitary generals and members of the join chiefs-of-staff, top-level including cabinet-level people in the Bush administration, spiritual healers, church leaders, CEO of corporations, people who write business management books, technology gurus, … it went on and on. Everyone talked about how it affected them. And this is a little, easy-to-read book that is basically a collection of anecdotes strung together with some theory about how grass roots actions coalesce and create impact.
The thing I got out of it — which reflects my personal issues — is that just one person speaking up about what is important to him or her can start something that changes the world. We pick our corners of action, just by what we can about enough to talk about.
One of the most interesting thing about this book is how heavily read it has been in church circles. If you Google it, you’ll find that a lot of the blogs that talk about it are written by religious people, who are trying to make their churches more meaningful, rather than toeing the line with the administrative hierarchy. It’s really exciting to read how these people are trying to take back their power to express their spirituality through improving their communities.
If I had enough time, I’d like to study small-group facilitation to help people like this refine their objectives and become more focused and efficient as a social force for equity and fairness. I love what they’re doing.
And in this, I see a model for us. I don’t know where alumnae of LoveFraud go when they graduate from this healing process. But it would make me feel good if they left here empowered with a sense of their abilities to make meaningful changes. I believe that we understand, increasingly as we heal, that we are not just victims of sociopaths but strong survivors of a kind of cultural and economic battle. We have recovered our independence of thought and spirit.
If we finish this whole process, we come out of it clear-eyed, impatient with deception, resistant to seduction and coercion, and demanding authenticity in our own lives. That is a powerful combination of characteristics. Even if we do not consciously commit to changing anything, we become world-changers just by the example of our lives.
So if you do read it, please let me know what you thought of it. When I get finished with this series on healing, I’ll try to start a separate thread on this topic.
Namaste.
Kathy
Today’s Bumper Sticker Sighting:
TAKE OUT YOUR EX TONIGHT — ONE BULLET OUTTA DO IT
typo:
OUGHTTA not OUTTA
LTL,
Do you hear the damaged child in there? This is a guy who has entirely lost his ability to trust. And he’s making that “truth.” But it’s only his truth, and it reflect his deep emotional damage.
I’m sorry this is so hard for you to accept. It gets harder when you feel compassionate for them. Because there is not a damned thing you can do about it. They don’t trust love either. They don’t trust your input about how life could be better. They don’t trust that everyone else isn’t living by the same survival strategy. There’s just no way in, no way to change them, or for them to get over their fear of changing themselves.
The net is that they’re dangerous. The best of them, the ones that know they are sociopaths and want to be better, are dangerous. Because their survival strategies close down their awareness to other people’s feelings, and keep them starving for whatever they can find to make up for their loss of any human connectivity. It turns them into the human equivalent of PacMan.
It just the worst side of the personality disorder spectrum. Tragic. Dangerous. Unfixable. (I actually think there could be ways to fix them, but it would be so radical, so inhumane in terms of what feeling poeple could endure, and so expensive and resource-intensive that I don’t think it will ever be funded or supported.)
The only thing you can do it let this go and grief it. It’s sad for you and sad for them. There are things we can’t change, at least not in terms of changing them. You sound like you’re heading into this grief right now.
I’m so sorry you have to go through this. I know it’s hard. But accepting it is part of growing up. It’s just what it is.
Kathy
Kathy,
Thanks for your note. I will “send you this energy.” This is the kind ofjourney I want to join.
My job righ tnow is helping people to heal but I am healing from being with them… and I amnoting that sometimes they just have to step on the landmines even if I point them out… they will still step on them.
But the journey you are on.. that’s one for me! Count me as a traveling companion!
Aloha…