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
Tilly,
What a horrible story! I agree, while we all need dentists, I can see that it could attract sadists. Wasn’t there a movie about one, and a plant that ate people?
Agree with Matt. You could report all the theft to the police department, and if they ask about the delay, explain that he tricked you. You have the earlier report against you to confirm it.
Or, you could just sneak over there with a friend or two and grab the dog.
Hi Love Fraud FAmily–
and the movie– I WAS a musical theatre major was…
“Little Shop of Horrors”!
My life feels like a Big shop of horrors.
I am reaching out to you guys b/c I am “jonsing” for my sociopath. It makes no sense– but then again it does. How abnormal to bond with someone, be with someone for two years, bond with his five year old daughter– have intimate, vulnerable conversations with HIS psychologist while holding hands.. Trust.
and then within a minute– to be discarded. hated! The enemy. jCalled narcissist and I bitch in front of his audience– his family.
I hope you do not mind- but several of you have suggested that I write down the negatives of this person. It is like my brain only remembers the good or soemthing. Then again– if I had known he was ?
Well…. some wonderful friends were getting married and even though you were not in the wedding– they wanted you at the intimate, gorgeous, southern at the Citadel rehearsal dinner.
You ex– had his little girl the same night and wanted you to babysit o he could do a job– he wa a photographer– and make himself yet more money.
You– had comitted five months prior to these friends who take fulltime care of your dog– and have taken care of you where your family should have.
So– he said to you, “You are unreliable!” He threatened abondoning you. He acted like you were betraying him. You broke out in shingles. More doc visits, missed work, lost money b/c of this guy! When you went to the psychologist with him and told him about the shingles- gosh- the doc was so conned by your guy as well– that he told you, “Oh– it is not stress or anything that you got those. I have had them once.”
so the next weekend– loverboy brings you to paradise at his fams’ estate in the mountains. So romantic. So gorgeous– God-filled, romantic.
Did he have sex with you or be much of a Romeo with you as is his nature? NOPE!!!
Months later what did he say meg? “You know I did not have sex with you in the mountains b/c I was so angry at you for not watching my daughter.”
Meg– when you went to the wedding– was he at your side? Nop[e. Did he get a babysitter so he could excrot his girlfriend? Remember how sad you were at the wedding. And a woman came up to you– in the church and said, “You are so pretty.” Your self esteem was so low– that you literally turned around and looked at whom she could have been speaking?
So my LF FAmily– do you all realize how SICK AND UNATURAL AND UNHUMAN if that is word– it is that I cannot pick up the phone and talk to a man who I soooooo loved and commited myself to?
I need some love or words or something you guys. Does ANYONE UNDERSTAND how I feel? I miss the man he wa before the discard– but– hey– with putting pieces together– that guy was a character he portrayed to keep me strung along.
Can someone remind me– God– talk about PTSD– why I can’t pick up the phone and call the man I was in love with for two years?????
Meg– he was able to discard you- sleep, eat– bury his mother without even calling to say hello or see if you were alive. He was ‘PUNISHING YOU” AND he obviously did not give a damn.
You nkow- I think be adopted has really, really messed me up. Think about it– do you know how UNNATURAL IT IS THAT my parents gave me up? My flesh and blood? It is kind of the same thing? I don’t understand the lack of “glue” that these sociopaths/narcissists have.
Why do I still feel conected to him? I can still feel him with me. This is where the thought of suicide always comes in. Do not be scared. I am seein a psychiatrist on MOnday. But what I am trying to say is– I am missing and longing and WANTING a man I loved who I will never have– and yet– he was evil so why do I want him? It is not the evil one I want and no one knows what I mean….!!!!
Thanks for letting me vent. I feel I will never be happy again. Is this how crack addicts feel? They know they will crave it for th rest of their lives?
Dear Lord help me please.
No contact!? It has been since Oct. 3rd. Someone wrote the other day and I thank you that they know that we know the truth about them in the fact that we have NC with them.
Something like that. This is my saving grace b/c every part of my brain and heart an body want to call him and tell him how much I loved him and was committed to him an surely he can understand when I blew up hearing his bro say,”She’s got commitment problems.”– yeah– I was overly committed. His bro was trying all he could to break us up and for no good reason except that is what evil, adult children of alcholics/borderlines do. The want to cause angst between people. And I had sooo much love for that man. And when I heard his bro lying about me and then making fun cuz I did not own a house– well yeah– I got angry. Then the S broke up with me b/c of it. What the f-ck——
Akitameg..WOW..I could feel your pain! I am so sorry and I completely understand….breathe through it…it does get better….slow yourself down….imagine detaching so as not to physically feel the pain..it has worked for me. I was involved with someone who went back and forth between me and a wife…altho I didnt know..and we have a son togerher…so his wife has gotten the brunt of it..not me…but i have been affected majorly my point is I have seen the devastation he did to that family and luckily got out 2 xs before it affected me that way..as I dont think I would have made it thru it….please try and remember..it was an illusion..theirs and OURS..we wanted it and they created it!! I believe what you said about the adoption pasrt I was adopted and I think that is the root of this with being involved with my ex S..however this experience has opened me up to looking at that issue instaed of focusing on him and what I wasnt getting…I was so unfulfilled being with him…he was there by not really..a body with no soul….it was empty..and endless chase to nowhere..hang in there and breathe!! xoxox
Tilly–
I just read your last post.
It’s been six months for me too and not only did I lose everything physical– but he became a millionaire the day he discarded me (mom died) and me– a musical/geriatric therpist who makes little money– well-
he kept MY STUFF. He’s using my kitchen table and I do not even have one!!!
let go or get a cop to escort you to get your stuff.
Get your dog– call a cop about that to or go talk to one! God they are evil.
Yeah– he’s got three million and is using my bookcase and kitchen table and I have nothing inthe physical realm. I understand your anger.
I used to be a model (no I’m ugly after all of this0– my guy has hundreds of pro shots of me on his computer and puts them up for sale on the internet!!!! TAlk about exploitive.
Love to you Tilly. You are in the right place here at LF.
Endthepain–
your empathy has brought a tear to my eye and I thank you. breathing, breathing.
You know endthepain– he knew of my traumatic adoption and used to against me. How sickk Yeah– keep telling an adoptee who never even had a mom raise her that you are going to “leave the relationship” over trivial things like when I quit a TAe Kwon Do class b/c I had not energy for it.
Where do we put our nergy at being so exploited? My past with him plays in my mind like a movie and I now see the the truth of the movie. I want to break into the film and get myself out of there, but I can’t! It is the most helpless feeling. Like watchin a child be molested and you can’t stop it.
Kindheart– I have just bought Betrayal Bond and I am hating it. In fact it is bringing a lot of this up and pissing me off.
I am getting in touch with my anger you guys and I hate it.
Tilly– I am wondering if you can call an animail patrol officer. They have the animals’ best interest at heart and are often cops as well. Call your SPCA. It is abuse that they are keeping a dog from its owner. If I was there– I would bring my huge, white Akita with me– scare the pants off your exs’ daughters and grab your dog for you!
Akitagmeg –
Wow, do I understand, and yes, it was “Little Shop of Horrors.” Senior moment.
You are in a danger zone on calling. I saw it in Jane before she cut me off, she said they had talked about their son and when he hung up she cried, did not understand. Listen to Endthepain, hang on and hang in, it does get better, there are others in LF who are already better.
It’s been a bad X S day for me too, wrote on another post. A legal problem with unemployment forced me to revisit the past fall when we were “reconciling” during which I threw the other S out and then fired an S gal who had been mooching off me. She’s the one taking me to unemployment. I got so depressed I had to lie down and I’ve been on this site all day, not much else got done but this letter to unemployment. But ouch it hurts.
Realize, Meg, that if you call he will either a) hurt your feelings again, or b) agree to see you, reconcile, and hurt your feelings again later. It’s a no win. He can never change. Did you read Women Who Love Psychopaths? Helped me a lot.
Hang in there, stay strong, it is not worth going back to. Love you Meg!
Tilly, you need to get those pictures down. Send him a letter with a copy to the server, he has no right to keep them up.
akitameg….deel what you are feeling…its all part of the process..your mind is now letting you see the truth in which you have kept hidden..it is an ugly truth..but nonetheless a truth..dont hide from it..embrace it and fell it..work thru it..and breathe…you needed this to happen to now look at yourself and appreciate yourself….he may have kicked you where it hurt but its your time to mend that hurt….feel the pain and feel the anger..you have kept it down and bottled…you’ve been exploited yes…but we let it happen…look at he reason why..look into yourself there the answers lie!! xoxox
soory for the typos!! lol
akitameg…usedandabused is right on!! be careful when communicating..I had to communicate with mine lastnight..and I stayed strong..he was quiiet and I could tell he was trying to get me to feel sorry for him..I know he wants to reconcile and I CANT GO THERE!! its not worth it…mstay strong..stay angry..it moves you forward…trust in the process and trust in yourself..believe in yourself and LOVE YOURSELF!!!
andthepain and used and everyone–
I truly have no intention of calling him. there is no reason to– it is not like the person that I thought he was existed. I just FEEL like calling the guy I soo trusted and who so nurtured me in the beginning (don’t they all?). NC for me. All they are in pain, so why bother?
TILLY– as many can attest on this site– like sweet Matt– I often get these feelings of wanting to call my ex’s exwife b/c I have figured out that he was playin us off of each other, blah, blah. You mentioned a bit about your situation. Please remind me that it would do nothing to call her. I sometimes obesess that he has conned her back, but you know what? Oh well and that is her problem. How long could he keep the act up for her? But gosh Tilly– I wish she knew the truth about he exhusband.