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
@silvermoon and ExDrover regarding anger. I spent my whole life NOT getting angry. I grew up watching a sociopathic father lie manipulate and cheat on my mother and literally send her nuts. We were never allowed to get angry or speak up. If we saw what was going as children we were told not to say anything or it was all a figment of our imaginatin I remember my dads classic line when she confronted him about affair number 6 or seven and he would say “your not feeling well darling isn’t it about time your went back to the doctor on the antri depressants ”
I watched that movie gaslight the other day with and it was like watching my dad and my ex rolling into one LOL
My mum is nearly 73 now and after marrying clone number two of my father with a different face and finally having to move into a government house in a couple of weeks because she is divorced as he too abandoned her. Having a daughter myself who is in her late teens who was about to date a clone of her own father I decided “enough is enough” If I dont stop my stupid family repeating the same old patterns of behaviour then allowing these manipulative men to control us then I will be watching my own daughter replaying a horror movie just like I did and my mother before me!
We owe it to ourselves and our children to inspire them and NOT to be victims.
Yes its a difficult journey these Dark souls love people who are full of light empathy and and so on. I used to have so much self loathing I would say they are drawn to us like flys round sh*t now I prefer to say they are drawn to us like moths in the dark.
But if you choose to be with one you will go down the black hole with them. There are still the odd days when I get drawn into the black hole but as an empath I do something nice for myself and remind myself that if I have to stay single for the rest of my life I would rather do that than go back into the abyss that is their warped twisted mind.
I try to always see the positive side however small !
Yesterday I had a black hole day when I received yet another unpaid bill for a untility that my spiteful ex had put in my name. I think he had put it in my name hoping I would have to pay. I had let him stay at a property I owned when his wife kicked him out. It was for nearly $360 dollars and having lost about $200,000 my whole life savings you kind of lose track some days and think is there really light at the end of the tunnel. But sometimes their spitefulness backfires on them.
I called up the utility company and fortunately the bill was in my name as the landlady. I explained that there may have been a mistake and that I didn’t live there, which was sort of true in a sense and that no one had been living there fore the 6 months. I was positive they would make me pay it. Amazingly they wiped off the bill!
I called up my psychotherapist to tell him the good news however feeling a bit guilty about lying about the fact I had told there no one had lived there when in fact he had.
Interestingly there was a post on on his website forum a couple of days before about truth. I had said to him its important to know the the truth otherwise I would have been stuck with this man. He replied yes but “sometimes its ok to tell a white lie”. I said I felt guilty for telling the utility company that he hadn’t lived there during the months when he had used my rental property to “dump all his stuff” he was hiding from his wife.
He laughed and said “but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t a real person so you weren’t lying”
I too laughed and said yes your right he was just a cardboard cut out.
So yes get angry. If it wasn’t for the anger you would never get rid of them and then keep on giving yourself little pats on your back for being strong enough to get rid of these moths LOL
No Ordinary- He wasn’t a real person: That pretty well covers it. Yep, I’d say!
Ox Drover, you’d signed off last night and I didn’t get a chance to thank you individually for your advice. My hope and wish that YOUR dedication to what is true and to pepople who seek it never, not even for a second, feels unappreciated.
Thank YOU.
Anger. Its been a topic today.
Its a great energy. Angry people can rip the bullshit out of any moment in a highly adrenalized charge.
Nothing raises ire and fire more than realizing you’ve been played for a fool, taken advantage of and mocked in the vilest moments of discovery.
Nothing.
A good friend once explained to me that the reason Shakesepeare could write about the woman scorned is that in the specie, the 46XX is wired to become viscious when anything threatens her security and sense of being safe. Its an evolutionary advantage.
We’ve all been robbed and the amounts taken so great as to be unrecoverable because who has been betrayed this way who will be the same?
We are made made different by the fires of HELL.
And we are all of a mind to be so mad as Hell as not to take it any more.
This is a healing thing. Absolutely.
The idiot who doesn’t sleep here any more has over 30 active girlfriends half of whom he dated at my expense and his wife is grateful I was dumb enough to come along and protect her assets while I am gliding into homeless ness paying a lawyer who has not produced a tangible result in 90 days wondering how to support myself and a son who is ready to excape his toxic N dad from 3000 miles away and the perpetrators who raised me surround me now with the same level of “support” they gave me as a child which is where the fear and self loathing that set me up for these creeps relishing that they are correct in their assesment of my lunacy, his criminality and justifying the evil that underlies this whole F*.* mess.
Only the work of my hands and my heart day by day is going to turn it into something better- before I die- I WILL LIVE!
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Adrienne Rich
weave a silver mooned tiger’s robe and pull it tight,
’round the bloodied beating heart
carried forth as weft seals tiny slashes,
and warp sinks deep and fortifies ripped flesh,
heart roars gentle world,
and tigers grow from woven heart,
prancing, proud and unafraid,
stretch in rhapsody in the imagined garden.
And then, glancing nervously around the tatoo parlor she said “OOOH, I want one of those, right THERE!”
One you are amazing.
What will it be like two years from now when we are long past this?
(insert expletive here) AWESOME!
and we better express that awesomeness with a little sit on a beach…and little margarita….
(i know, it’s early, but i need to go do some work tonight) 🙂
i wonder how i would symbolize the tigers…?
Yes. Reposado. Rocks. No Salt.
Andela Chica
YOu can draw them in the sand with your toes…
Buuenos noches.
dulce suenos
Kathy
I finally felt my anger, and expressed it instead of pushing it down and feeling guilty. My anger was coming out in response to articles that triggered it, some people ran from it, others helped me through it…I felt rage at the people who couldn’t, wouldn’t facilitate it here!! the cheek of me! I somehow “expected” veterans of psychopaths to be able to handle it, but I guess they didn’t want to (why would they?)…and they just ignored me, leaving me on a thread .
You were one of the veterans that helped me through it, and I will never forget you for that! it’s risky exposing real feelings on the site because you put yourself at the mercy of the more experienced posters….and when they” ignore” me, it’s really upsetting…yes I am a sensitive pain in the ass.
Thanks for responding to me with such obvious experience and knowledge of the EMOTIONAL components. You didn’t make me feel bad for being grumpy and snappy, you saw it for what it was.
I’m doing self defense classes now and punching mats, (I picture the P’s face on the mat and punch the livin daylights out of it)
I can use my voice, shouting, defending myself , waking up to the danger, snapping out of the denial which was smothering me.
the instructor talked about how the predator relies on ‘denial’ to operate. They hope that you are so shocked, you can’t do anything and they have you in this ‘dirty little secret’ to-gether
My body felt exhilerated to move into the expression of anger…with real people, for me being angry on my own just does not work, it’s destructive as it tends to ‘eat away’ at anything joyous. Something about finally throwing punches, putting words on defending myself like “go Away” leave me alone” felt so empowering and matched all the residual energy in my body.
It’s the tip of the ice berg but I’ve touched on some joy and bliss feelings since releasing what felt like a ton of anger….it’s phenomenal the amount of rage involved in this for me…
This article speak volumes to me now, I don’t feel alone, You have speeded up my healing process with advice that really fitted well with where I was at. I am more intellectually developed than emotionally, and all these feelings need to to catch up..
This life has been returned to me. I’m the one in the drivers seat. I can hear my intuition operate like a laser, I can sense things acutely and there is no reason ever to “doubt” my reality ever again. I can feel sarcasm, insults, surpressed rage a whole lot better now and feel compassion for people who cannot BE angry up front…. it has to come out side ways….as long as they show heart and conscience!
You have brought me through and now I can bring others through that angry viscious phase where every word hurts and nothing makes sense. Thanks and blessings to you, I feel as if something has finally grocked into place. I can do anger and it’s great. I need to watch swinging the sword around and try and keep my clarity focused on myself…I have somehwere to let it out now and it’s a weight off my being.
I’m still raging AT the P, but I am beginning to respond physically to every thing he did to me…it’s layered in my being like toxic tar and I need to get it out. He is a despicable scumbag that deserves a few life threatening lessons, but somehow I do not think he would be able to accept anything is wrong with him.
His lies cut me to shreds emotionally, the way he robbed me left me with a feeling of total helplessness, and he told me I was so small and worth nothing in his eyes.
I have no doubt the anger will catch me again and again but I’m much more aware of how it works thanks to YOU!
Thanks for being there and being wise enough to pick me up and encourage me forward…xx
I am so angry. I have been in denial for a loooong time. I know more of the facts now and I am sitting here itching to send an email — to him and all of the women I know he has had contact with. I will read until the feeling goes away, because it surely isn’t worth being in contact with the raping piece of shite just to get my anger out. If my post has to be deleted because of my language, so be it. I apologise if I offend anyone here but I am FULL of anger. This is the first time in my life I have felt this way, not having been allowed to show emotions as a child and only just learning that I have the right. Haven’t been able to afford therapy for a while but I’m treating myself because these feelings have to go somewhere. Hope I can see her soon or I might just explode, or send one of the big boys I know around to see the spath. That wouldn’t be a good idea.