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
Great article. Except I’m not enjoying anger very much at the moment because the things I feel angry about I also feel powerless to change. I feel like I need to hide away from society to stop finding injustices to be angry about. The anger is draining me and aging me. As soon as I let go of one thing, there is something else. Some company I bought supplements from charged a fraudulent charge on my credit card, requiring months to clear up. My HOA is refusing to take responsibility for a common line plumbing back-up, and there is nothing I can do about it that I can afford to do. The S reappeared in my peaceful internet community and spiked my blood pressure probably to dangerous levels. It seems like it’s just one thing after another in my life these days. There is always some battle I’m fighting. Antisocial neighbors, loud cell phone conversations everywhere I go……I got the lesson about anger. It’s okay to be angry. Now when can I stop being angry?
Oh my goodness, learnthelesson, you’ve made me cry.
I was just telling someone today that I want to be invulnerable to what people think of me. And now your kind words have just pierced my heart.
I hear them as encouragement. Because that’s what I need. You’d think after being a professional and personal cheerleader for so many other people, I’d be able to do it for myself. But there’s always that niggling voice in the back of my brain, carping about whether I’m deluding myself. You know that voice?
I have to tell you a story. While I was healing, I was writing poetry. There’s a whole book of it that I’m trying to get together, because I have one friend, a poet, who keeps nagging me to publish it. Bless him.
But while I was in the middle of all this major emotional stuff, I would struggle with myself to pull a few poems and drive the 45 minutes to a town in my county where there was an open-mike poetry night every week. Most of the time, I would fiddle around until it was too late to get there. But every few months, I would make it into my car in time to drive through the night to this old bar.
I didn’t look like the other poets. There were impoverished old guys from the beat era, who would read their beat era poems. And younger people from the universities around here, who looked like beautiful hippies and read their spare, elegant, intellectual pieces.
And then there was me. Chubby, middle-aged, with my expensive haircut and spiffy clothes (no matter how diligently I tried to dress down) and my poetry that was like stream-of-consciousness out of hell. I went because there were other poets there, and I needed to share it. But it took every ounce of courage I had.
Some nights, mostly the nights where it was overwhelmingly the old beat poets, I would get polite applause and I’d drag myself home feeling like I must be crazy to expose myself like that. But the last couple of nights I went, there were a lot of women in the audience. And they went wild. Hooted. Whistled. Grabbed me when I came down from the stage, and told me how much the poems meant to them.
It was simply astonishing. How it felt. Like being mowed down and injected with a million vitamins at the same time. I didn’t really grasp how alone and afraid I felt until I was faced with approval and understanding.
I am afraid of this. Afraid of this need in myself and my reaction to it. It’s why I want to be invulnerable. So I can’t be hurt. And I can’t get crazy with bloated ego if people actually do like me.
Whew. You know this is all about trust, don’t you? With me, everything is about trust. Since I’m an incest survivor, I suppose that’s not surprising. But I think it might be true with all of us. I’m always talking about socialization as the problem behind the problems we see, how we’ve been socialized to give up our power to authority structures, which turn out not to have our best interests at heart. And then we have to learn how to trust ourselves. Except it’s a bit lonely and disorienting just trusting ourselves. So we turn to God, who requires some effort to believe in and communicate with, but has the advantage of being fully supportive and understanding (since we can choose how we imagine God to be).
But wouldn’t it just be nicer to have a community of people with whom we share trust? With whom we share understanding and support. I’m always talking about other people growing up. That’s part of what I have to grow up into believing in. (Like believing we “deserve love” is a way we shape our lives, so, for me, is believing in the possibility of this kind of community.)
When I say how grateful I am to be able share my thoughts here, this is part of what I’m saying. And when you come back to me and say you want me to finish the book and publish it, because you want to give it to your daughter…well, you made me cry and you made me understand my own dreams a little better.
Thank you. Namaste. And I’ll do my best to meet your deadline.
Kathy,
Oh my goodness. It was an emotional post for me. I could feel my love for my daughter and my desire to share with her all the things I didnt know and all the knowledge she/we can gain from you, your book. And the message that there is hope and healing and growth and enlightenment at the end of the process.
You are an incredibly gifted and talented writer. And your insights from your experience, journey, research and heart collectively shine through your words of knowledge and wisdom.
This could be your shining moment which perhaps began when you ended up taking that road to that little old bar to share your poetry which gave you the courage to start to trust yourself and fulfill your need to do this.
They say the only thing to fear is fear itself.. Can we add S/P/N’s to that :))) Seriously, it must be quite scary to do this – to not know the outcome or how it will be received. But remember we must do things for ourselves, especially fulfilling our own wants needs and dreams, and not worry about others!
TRUST is my goal. It was something I always thought I had within me, but really it was something I mostly gave to others — having very little of it about myself — and part of the reason I am here today. To learn to trust myself.
I encourage you to do what you have encouraged me to do – trust yourself! You can do this, boy oh boy can you do this!!!!!
Cant WAIT for the picture in the back of the book, with my LF friend Kathleen Hawk in her expensive haircut and spiffy clothes (dont dress down for that lady :))) – its your time to shine – inside and out! xoxox
Thank YOU. God bless
Cool…Kathleen’s new “Recovering from Sociopaths” book AND the book of “The Collected Poems of Kathleen Hawk, (you can pick the subtitle)”…new items available at the Lovefraud Store…and Oprah calling, too. You go girl! Works for me!
Jim (funny one) — You truly are! So Cool!
learnEDthelesson…thanks. There’s nuthin’ on 400 channels tonight I haven’t seen or want to watch. And I’m afraid to go “out there” where the predators lurk. So here I am…this is me…Sorry.
Stargazer, the distance between anxiety and rage can be very short, especially when there’s enough anxiety. They’re both sensations that originate in our survival mechanism. I sense as much anxiety in your letter as rage, if not more.
Anxiety is not fun. And if it’s triggering rage, that’s not the type of anger I was talking about. Rage originating from feelings of helplessness is a really complicated emotion that probably comes down to fear about your own effectiveness or capacity to run your life.
And it sounds like you’re running yourself ragged in response to this emotional state, trying to make it go away.
Here’s what I suggest. Just stop. Take a breather from everything you can take a breather from. You can go back to it. Just give yourself a little vacation. Stop worrying about it. Stop thinking about it. You’re trying to exert order on the universe and the universe isn’t cooperating. It’s bigger than you are. Get the message. Give it all some time, and let the forces of destiny reorder a bit.
While you’re taking a break, get some exercise. Preferably cardio. Walk, run, use your Gazelle or step climber. Do as much as you can do and get your endorphins running. It would be good for you to be dazzled by a sunset right now or blown away by the fractals in a green cauliflower. (if you’ve never seen one of those, they’re amazing.)
Then sit down with a pen and paper for notes, and turn your attention inside your head and listen to the emotional noise. Just sit there and listen, preferably to the biggest, noisiest piece of the noise. I do this by imagining the different feelings as musical instruments. Find the one that’s playing the loudest and listen to the music, not the words. Your feelings are generating stories from your word machine. But you want to get past that and just listen to the feeling. It doesn’t talk in words, but you’ll have to translate what you hear, what it’s telling you, into words.
I think that part of what you’re dealing with is a kind of flooding. You’ve released your anger but there’s a lot of backlog. You’ve got big angry feelings, bigger than you can stick on just the sociopath, and there’s a rational organizer in you that’s trying to make sense of them by assigning them to anything that even looks slightly annoying. The person talking on the cell phone doesn’t really qualify for that level of anger. So the question is: what is that anger really about? That’s why you give some attention to the anger and see what it has to say about where it’s coming from.
If you’re not used to feeling angry, and especially if you’ve been stuffing anger for most of our life, you have some backed-up blaming to do. If you’ve been taught that it’s not safe to blame the real source of your anger, this can produce anxiety. Likewise, if you’ve been taught it’s not safe to express anger at all, this can produce anxiety too.
When I first started to get angry ”“ and I never got angry, because I had my whole manufactured, post-incest identity riding on being an upbeat, perfectly normal, not-bitter person ”“ I was really scared. My therapist told me that people who didn’t get angry were often afraid that if they got angry, their anger would burn up the world. I wasn’t afraid of that. I was afraid I would never not be angry again.
That didn’t happen, and here’s why. When you assign your anger to the actual cause of it, you close a kind of electrical loop. In yourself. In the world. I’m not sure which. But instead of being general, it becomes specific. I am angry with this person because of this event that caused this in my life. With that, something changes. Our feelings lose the diffuse, unmanaged quality that makes them scary. They have a reason. That’s not the end of it. With assignment of anger comes the question of what you want to do about it. Take action. Cut your losses and consider it a learning experience. Write a book. Whatever. But the question rises, and eventually you find an answer for it. And then you’re done.
So for you, right now, maybe you have to give the inside of your head some attention, and ask it why you are so angry. Why you’re having bigger rages than make sense under the circumstances. What are you really mad about?
This is good work, talking with your feelings. If it seems a little strange, practice a few times. You’ll get better at it. Believe me, there is no one in the world more interesting than you are, as you’ll discover when you start poking around in there. There are days when I’m sorry I’m basically through this big project, because it was like being on safari, something new every day.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to respond so eloquently. I actually got hit with several things all at once a few weeks ago, and trying to deal with the aftermath. You’re right, it’s much bigger than the sociopath. But also, I’m just seeing a lot of the injustice and entitlement in our current society. I sometimes just feel like I beat my head against a wall trying to deal with so much lack of humanity.
Jim, you sound like Springsteen’s “57 Channels and Nothing On” song. I’m so glad you’re here, have been since you arrived. I missed Heroes tonight. I can’t believe I did that. Just forgot about it in all this interesting (and so awfully gratifying) chat.
So thank you both. Your vision makes my vision a lot easier to hold onto.
I’m off to bed.
Oh, not quite. I had a dream last night. My ex, the sociopath, came into a place where I was working. He looked fabulous as usual, and he came up to me, all Clark Gable charisma, and said, “You know you can’t end my story like putting a period after a sentence.”
It was a charming moment, and I didn’t argue with him. We walked off, and I was watching us in my dream, like a camera following these two characters. He said something that made me sympathetically put my arm around his shoulders. He put his arm around my waist, and started to lead me off somewhere. I could see other people looking at us and seeing as a couple.
And then I popped awake in the middle of the night, thinking how could anything that starts that sweetly end in me needing years to virtually stop my life to get over it? Because that’s what happened every time. Five separate times.
It is so hard to hold onto these two thoughts that seem totally contradictory. Here is this man who feels like my soul mate. And here are the years of recovery and rebuilding myself. One in each hand, like souvenirs from two different planets.
Someone here on LF once wrote that in loving them, we were really loving ourselves. She meant that we fell in love with the reflection of our own dreams that they cleverly discerned and projected back to us. But I also think that we fell in love with our shadow selves, the parts of us that are unrecognized or underdeveloped.
I like this thought, even though it’s confusing. Is great love always only an attraction to what needs to emerge in ourselves? Maybe, I think, that’s not such a bad thing. Every love affair, every great friendship, all the threads of important relationships, good and bad, being a kind of classroom where we learn more about our true potential.
I love you guys. I feel so lucky.
Kathy
SG,
I keep telling myself there are more of us than there are of them. It’s the nature of hierarchies. The few at the top, the sleep-walking masses below.
If you’re seriously interested in changing things, get a copy of the The Starfish and the Spider. It’s a handbook for revolution. Personal, social, political, whatever. A fast and entertaining read that will do something amazing to your brain. I don’t know anyone who’s read it who hasn’t been changed. In a good way.
This world is totally screwed up. This country is ridiculous. The pathological lack of compassion that we accept as normal is, I believe, that cause of most of the social and economic ills we face.
I’m big into blaming, but complaining is a waste of time (except to figure out what we truly care about and where we’re motivated to invest in change). Becoming a change agent is what comes out of this healing process. That’s what happens when you finish taking care of yourself, and start looking around for the next right thing to take care of.
What could be a better thing to do with the rest of our lives than change the world?
Now I’m going to bed. Really.