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
Well, Oxy, in life I have made some dumb decisions and from time to time done things I wished I hadn’t done, but that affair was my biggest regret to date. At the time I wasn’t thinking of his wife and the pain I might be causing her at all. I was thinking about ME and what I wanted, which was HIM and how everything was affecting ME (like Steve’s article it was ME ME ME–his wife and her misery wasn’t even being considered at the time I was actually IN the affair). Thank God now I didn’t get him. He worked in the same industry as me and he went on to have other affairs thru the years, but that fact is irrelevant to what I CHOSE to do and how he chooses to lead his life did not excuse MY part in the betrayal of his wife.
So, yeah, I regret it. But I did learn from that mistake and have never repeated it and it has been 32 years now that I have stuck by that vow. And that was with having plenty of opportunities thru the years to break it. So, on the flipside of that regret, one of the things in life I am proudest of is that after that experience I NEVER cross lines even flirting with someone else’s man. I’m friendly to them, but nope, won’t even let the friendliness get out of hand to where it is inappropriate flirting. And like I said, once I made that decision to never go there again, it is not even a consideration to consider it.
I think we all make mistakes in life. But some of them, like getting involved with married men, really is SO freaking easy to AVOID if we just set boundaries in some areas that are easily identifiable as to whether they are crossed (like men you know are married) , then stick to them. Well, anyway, it has worked for me.
Dear Jen,
We have ALL I am sure done things that we are NOT PROUD OF in our lives….and I don’t condemn anyone who has made an error in judgment or let it lapse, but the people who do the same thing over and over and over and over are the people I am talking about. My X-BF-P had been a serial cheater for his entire 32 year marriage to his wife, with several affairs going on at once for years…after I found that out (after we had been together a few months) I deluded myself into thinking he would be “Different” with ME. Of course he wasn’t at all. When it finally dawned on me that I WAS THE ONE WHO WAS DELUSIONAL, it hurt to admit that I had been conned into thinking he would be different. Of course, as a fairly new widow (8 months) I was very vulnerable to being “alone.” I really, to this day, do not know where I got the strength to kick him to the curb, but I did and I am so glad. If I had married him, it would only have been worse.
Now I am learning to set boundaries, and I am looking at the “moral compasses” of the people in my life. Those without compasses that point in the same direction as mine, I am drifting quietly away from…or in some cases, not so quietly. It is becoming easier and easier to set boundaries that I know are reasonable and good. The “losses” from those relationships are no longer devestating to my heart, because I realize that those people lost a real friend, I AM NOT LOSING ANYTHING of substance.
Noordinary:
Same church, different pew. The cheating, the lying, the betrayal, the financial and emotional bleeding by the S, I know it all so very, very well.
Like you I had a Narcissist mother and a Sociopath father. That dynamic duo set in place an emotional dynamic in place which made me the perfect target for a lot of Cluster B personalities, culminating in my S. Read the book “The Betrayal Bond” by Patrick Carnes. It discusses the issue of trauma (betrayal) bonding, which is what so many of us on this site are grappling with.
Matt i just got that bookyesterday. I feel like i’ve about had it all with self help books and i don’t want to dwell and obsess any longer and just hope reading it doesn’t just keep feeding this whole ordeal. I too looking at my childhood, have a narcissistic Father who is very much like my s but is not antisocial as he has a heart but i was always trying to seek approval. Even now i’m avoiding he and my brother as they are wanting to do something with the family farm which is in Trust to me and i’ll get sucked in again trying to get them to love and approve of me so i just avoid them. What an awful way to live when your own family has the potential to screw you and then you wonder why we are so emotionally damaged and suseptible to toxic people. I try so hard with everyone to be nice and kind and i swear im not cut out for this world sometimes as i get so hurt and the reality of what humanity is really like is so dissapointing at times. love kindheart
Noordinary, i just read your post and it sickened me because it was so right on the money . There might be a few differences to my s but all in all it’s the same shit different day. I would like to fram e your post actually if ever i get the compulsion to have contact. The only consolation in it was that fact that they do feel inferior deep down and the mask is all a show. I used to feel sorry for my s , but not any more. He is evil to the core and im starting to accept this little by little all the time as the Stockholm Syndrome sometimes keeps me in the magical thinking but i know deep down he envied and at times hated me for everything good that i am. I could just sense it and he knew people liked me more than him . I esp loved the part about them being the age of 5. His last ex who was over 20 years younger than him when married said she felt like she was the mother at 23 and he was a child that needed to be scolded over her knee. He has never eaten a vegetable in his life, and another ex male friend said ” he should have been made to eat his vegetables when he was young” . They will never grow up just like petulant bad children only worse as they are evil children as well. love kindheart
Learn something new here everyday… On the blog page is a section called Blogroll.. beneath it is a link called Recover Your Joy… it is daily writings of encouragement and healing from M.L. Gallagher.
I encourage all of us to add it to our daily to do list. Its powerful… An exerpt from todays writing:
“To be free, we must let go.
To fly, we must leap.
To land, we must fall.
Holding on to feelings that got us through to where we are, keeps us feeling what was, and limits our experience of what is.
What is exists only in the experience of now. To experience what is real and true and happening right now, is to let go of feeling what was real and true back then.
That was then. This is now. And now is not forever.
Yet, sometimes, we hang on to now as if it will never change, never be any different. We hold on in the fear that to let go will mean we must change, be different. We hold on in the fear that to let go means what was had no meaning, no value, no purpose in our journey. We hold on because to let go of what was means we have no control of what is.
And we couldn’t be more wrong.
We always have control of what is in our lives today. We make the choices that determine how we live this moment right now. It’s what was we can no longer control. It is the past. Gone. Over. Finished. The feelings we carry with us, those are the stuff of our imaginings. The past is not ‘real’. It only exists in our mind. Perhaps in frozen memories pasted on the page of a picture book we turn to when we want to remember what was, or who was, part of our journey. But it is not real. It does not exist in the three-d realm of our existence today. It’s value is in the strengths we’ve gathered through coming through the experiences, the courage we tested and climbed upon to get to where we are. The value is in who we are today, not the journey that brought us here.
Let go of believing in the past, and hold onto being real in this moment. Drop the burdens, carry only your truth in this moment. Who you are, what you are doing right now is what counts. The only way to build a better tomorrow is to do your absolute, total, complete best right now.
Your best is good enough. Be it.
The question is: Are you holding on to spent emotions, fuelling the flames of regret, the fires of resentment, the embers of distrust with your desire to hold onto what doesn’t create value in your life today? Are you willing to put down the burden of feeling less than who you truly are when you set yourself free to be the magnificent, awesome, wondrous being who has spent your lifetime getting to this place where you are living your life for all you’re worth? Are you being rapturously alive?”
Thank you M.L. Gallagher!
M. L. Gallagher is an awesome writer—she can take things and make them so real with her word-smithing. Her advice is always so RIGHT ON as well! She knows what she is talking about too….and we should all reach the spots on the healing road that she describes for us! She is always an inspiration.
Sometimes we have to let go of the life we had planned and start living the life that is waiting on us.
Herny, I’m not sure who said it but it goes something like this “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” I agree with you, we have to live the life that is waiting for us…NOW!
hey guys , went to court this morning and remanded again for 3 weeks, suffice it to say my lawyer has done nothing and my mental health workker same. This was the charge for samples i took back in early dec. My lawyer is upset that i toldhim not to cash any more cheques and that i haven’t technically retained him as i told him to hold off on cashing any more chqs due to long term insurance. I couldn’t beleive it. Neither the woman from Mental Health Court Support Specialist nor the lawyer told me to bring a copy of the police disclosure. I had to call them to make sure that they would be there and neither told me i needed such. Then they were on diff pages as to diversion etc. and i said look you said you would work together and my lawyer tried to say i had to make a decision as to whom was going to represent me. I just about had it and i said i want to speak to both of you together so he left , talked to her and both came back saying he’d wave fee for doctors recommendation ( whoopee shit as his stupid sec already told me it would only be approx 50 dollars) . So for the last 4 weeks neither of them has done anything that i can see. I signed disclosure papers at first appearance with one of the ladies from Mental Health and i’ve had in my own possession a copy of Discharge papers from Trauma/addictions program from the getgo. Im so fed up as i honestly think i could have represented myself better. Then i got a call from the girl i brought home fr detox on Friday and i knew she had been drinking again, something about police and dog etc. I got to her house and the guy she is living with (controller whom she met approx10 months ago on dating site) was gone and she was inebriated and police said she had given the dog to a woman doing a delivery service for alcohol, some new service called Quicker Liquor if you can beleive it. I got her convinced to go to detox and called detox and they said call 911 as she goes into seizures. What a riga moral , paramedics came got her into ambulance, then we couldn’t find a key, finally did and then the dam cops give me the key. Away she went in ambulance and i assumed to detox an hour away and i called the guy she’s separated from and living with to tell him i have key. Im so sick of this stupid dam drama and i even tried to get the policeman that i had talked to , to come and get the key. Next her guy calls and she’s taken a cab back home and would i come and try and talk to her and i said NO i’ve had it. I can see where i have thrived on drama and im very aware of it lately and i want to change and get away from it all. It’s making me sick and overwhelming me to say the least. Then on top of it all im missing the s and feeling grief almost like i am detoxing myself and i hate it but i have to be honest with my feelings. How can i miss , never mind i know, i miss what i wanted to see , pretend guy. Anyway i hate not having the clarity to see that i shouldn’t miss what isn’t real but it’s where im at tonight. I can sure see where i’ve been suseptible to making contact in the past with the magical thinking. Think im going to take a bath and try and get all the nuts out of my head. I know it might not sound like it but i am trying to get away from the drama but i can see it’s going to tak e alot of work on my part. love kindheart