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
Milo & Oxy,
Often times this is the most difficult part of processing something that is so unimaginable to us. Finding the answers to the many questions we have as to how something so tragic could have happened.
People do want to find a scapegoat. Or a reason THEY can wrap their brain around or somplace/someone to lay the blame or point the fingers at.
I understand this to a POINT, as I am a person that has to understand something to the best of my ability in order to process it.
HOWEVER I come to find that this can also be a slippery slope.
When we hear a story on the news (or even a story by word of mouth) and the news media has a field day with whatever they are “reporting” it is very easy to get caught up in that “opinionated” mentality of what the general publics opinion might be. We might be quick to say or judge a person. Just by the few things we know.
Life experience has taught me that what you hear is NOT the WHOLE of any story. Most of the time we WON’T ever know the whole of the story.
A few days after my husband suicided I was standing in line in a convience store and two women behind me were talking about the suicide. Because I was in a “haze” it took me a few moments to realize that these two women were talking of the “story” of MY husbands suicide and also about me. I almost didn’t recognize the story because of course the facts and the story itself was so distorted from the actual event of what had happened.
Although I had never seen these two women in my life and they didn’t know who I was either they were discussing the suicide as if they had front row seats to the event itself. Their callous remarks and insensitivety and plain ignorance of what actually had happened is something that I will never forget.
This also taught me a very important lesson.
I now always try to put compassion FIRST for anyone that is involved in any “story” that I might hear….And not just compassion that comes naturally to me for the OBVIOUS victims in the situation. But I now also am able to feel that same compassion for others (in the situation) that I might have been quick to form judgemental opinions about before.
I felt a huge guilt as a survivor of someone that I loved ending their life by suicide. How can you know someone so WELL and NOT see this coming? This guilt compromises grieving in a big way. Feeling the heaviness of such guilt is no way to live. Day after day after day….
My husband was sober for two and a half years before he took his life.
Instinctively I KNEW that he was going to drink again. (saw the red flags) I had these “feelings” about 4 months before the suicide.
I labored over this in therapy afterwards. How was it possible that my instincts were right about him drinking again (he resumed drinking ONE week before he took his life) But I didn’t see not even one red flag that lead me to believe he could be suicidal???
Finally, one day my counselor asked me a very simple question that “clicked” with me.
He asked me if my husband had ever drank before AFTER having a period of sobriety?
And of course he had so I answerd the question yes…..
Then he pointed out the obvious to me. Although there was a repeat pattern in our lives of periods of sobriety & going back to drinking…..There of course was no WAY I could have known that he would take his life when he drank this time. I recognized the red flags that WERE waving. I had no clue to his inner thoughts as to the suicide.
I agree with you Milo….There are times when even in hindsight something such as this shooting tragedy with this young man couldn’t be predicted. Even by those that were the closest to him. Red flags were not there.
We WANT to think as a society that this should have been predictable. (in hindsight) Because if it was predictable then it could have been preventable.
Society wants to believe that his grandparents, family members, neighbors or friends…SOMEONE should have or could have seen this coming.
BUT I for one don’t believe that these things are always predictable. Everything is not black and white. Lots of grey areas.
This young man could have held so many things inside of him that he didn’t give out the signals…
And everyone of us has a breaking point. He reached his breaking point.
Ox Drover,
Awww, thank you for your post. I’m in some need of support and encouragment, so it is very sincerely appreciated. I’m hoping you are doing well. I’ve been on reading articles here and there lately, but not able to communicate as much. Always think of you folks, though! (((HUGS to you too!)))
Witsend, you are right about people wanting to find a “scape goat” or someone to blame things on….in the case of Columbine, the cops had been warned that Eric was building bombs and had threatened to kill another kid that had ticked him off….they took it seriously enough to write out a warrant to search his house, but then dropped the ball….Eric had bombs at the house at that time and so he WOULD have been arrested and the whole thing probably would have been prevented….but the cops covered that up for years until finally they were FORCED to admit that and the papers were made public. So the cops in the case of Columbine WERE at fault for not preventing it.
In MOST CASES though…there is NO WAY anyone could have predicted what happened or prevented it. Like your counselor said, in the past he had had periods of soberity and then periods of drinking so you had no way to know in advance. There’s no way to prove a negative.
In the case of the Columbine shooting, because the shooters themselves had suicided, the public didn’t have anyone to punish or blame so they turned on the parents, then later they turned on the medics and the cops because they were so so that one of the teachers who was wounded bled to death because the medics were prevented from goingn in until the cops had SLOWLY cleared the way (they didn’t know how many shooters, and didn’t know that the shooters were dead)
There was one person who tried to show compassion for the parents of the shooters and he put up 15 crosses on a hill to represent the 13 deaths of people, plus the 2 deaths of the shooters. It divided people into pro and con camps and the two extra crosses were pulled down.
Donations were taken up for the survivors and the parents of the dead kids…and there were problems on how to divide it.
While I agree with the author that Eric (one o fthe shooters) was a psychopath, the other kid was simply depressed and looking for a way to kill himself. Very sad, but not predictable. He gave out “tells” and warnings but no one except one lady believed him and when she went to the cops to tell them about Eric making bombs, THEY dropped the ball and didn’t follow up on the warrant.
There were any number of kids and young adults who knew there were illegal weapons and bombs, but NO ONE except Dylan, the other shooter, “told.” That was one of the things with my son Patrick, he TOLD others what he planned to do (they seem to like an audience to appreciate what they intend to do) but that audience did not go to the cops.
My foster son who committed suicide called everyone to say “goodbye” and tell us he loved us, but none of us knew what he intended to do…we just thought it was a phone call. How could we have known?
Columbine is more than 10 years behind….so all the evidence is in, and people have calmed down about it now, lots of people don’t even remember the incident. Being the mother of a murderer gives me some compassionate insight into the hearts I think of the parents of those two boys. The memorialized their two dead sons privately and cremated the bodies so that where they were buried wouldn’t become a dumping ground for the hateful thoughts of some of the townspeople. I don’t know whether to be happy for them or sad that their sons killed themselves that day, though it was probably in some ways easier for them that the boys suicided. I also understand the wanting my son to be alive, even if he was in prison. Yet even that was painful because I worried about what would happen to him in prison.
Having compassion for and coming to a level of forgiveness and forgetting and moving on after such a tragedy is always difficult, but leads I think finally to a healing. The author of the book about Columbine, did an update on each of the injured but surviving people and each of them said that they had had to forgive and move on, I thought that was interesting since we had the article and discussion on forgiveness here on LF recently.
Witsend, thank you for such a thoughtful and thought provoking post. I’m glad you’re here.
LP Marie, keep on reading and learning because KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and that is how we take our power back. I know your life must be full with the Peanut! Learning how to be a new mommy is a big job just in and of itself! Just remember we are here for you if you need us! (((hugs)))
Ox, thank you! Being a single mommy is probably the hardest, most rewarding job I’ve ever had (waaaay harder and far more exhausting than deploying to a war zone!). I love that little Peanut like nothing I could ever imagine. She seems to be taking after my temperment and disposition more so than the sperm donor’s, so I am encouraged. I’m treating her with love, respect, and empathy. I let her explore and do pretty much whatever she’s interested in (bubbles, coloring, running wild in the grass). Within limits, of course! She pulls on my earings and says “This?” and I tell her “Earrings. Do you want earrings on your ears?” And she gets excited and says “Yah!” So I think I might take her to get her ears pierced this weeknd 🙂 Hope you have a great day 🙂
Witsend ~ Thank you for that moving post. Things are so hard to accept sometimes when a reasonable explanation just can’t be found.
We so want to understand, to put things in neat little boxes so we can store them away. Sometimes we just have to accept.
I think the one boy’s mother set such an example for the community to follow. She said she forgave the shooter because if she carried all that hate in her heart, she would have no room for the memories of her son. Many, many have expressed that if she can forgive, so can they.
The minister of one of the local churches took a prayer shawl to the shooter’s grandmother and prayed with her.
Right now, there still seems to be a lot more disbelief than hatred toward the shooter, even from the kids in the school.
Milo,
That boys mother set an example that I wish everyone in the world would know this….
This is the type of thing that should be reported in the news so everyone would hear this.
We could all learn from her. A shinning light.
MiLo,
Just read some of the thread and realize that you live in the community recently vicitimized by the school shooting. Just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry this is happening to you and your community. I wish you well. (((Hugs))) from me and the Peanut!
Thanks LPMarie, it has been a tough week, plus. It is a small, rural community, not a place where violence usually takes place. Plus, everybody had some sort of a personal connection.
Really shakes your timbers.
Give the peanut a squeeze from me.
Sharing, Darwin, Eliz, Wits, Oxy, Sky…and anyone else who has supported me…
Thank you.
I didn’t want you guys to think I didn’t read your responses and/or don’t appreciate your support.
My laptop is in repair so I depend on my two daughter’s and they’ve had homework! ugh!
I woke up this morning sad. It seems that one day I am angry and calm ….the next day I feel sad.
She called me for a ride and I gave it to her..yesterday.
So, today she called again. I was exhausted today from no sleep last night ….tossing and turning.
I barely made it through the day…subbing. I picked her up and decided to ask her if she wanted to come home.
She is still in “anger mode” and started complaining about me not buying her contacts and shutting her phone off.
I didn’t want to upset her…but I told her that I have feelings too and she hurt me with her text message terrorizing.
I told her that its not good to not be on good terms and have no r/s with her own mother and we need to talk sometime.
I asked her if she would come back if we figured out a way to give her, her own room.
She teared up and said that she wants HER old room back.
I explained the situation , financial.
She was getting upset. I asked why she wants me to drive her to work…have taxi service, …if she doesn’t want to have a relationship with me.
She said…”Let me out…I’ll walk’.
I told her not to be upset, I am almost there and I just want to iron things out with us.
She got out of the car and said…”I don’t need my own room, a phone, a car…..I need nothing!”
SO upsetting. I don’t know what to do anymore. She isn’t going to call me anymore for a ride. I don’t want her walking there.
This whole thing is going to be the death of me.