by Restin Wells
Chapter 13
For several months after my release from Dr. Pash and the hospital, I worked heavily with the anger in me. It was the only thing that seemed to make a difference in the anxiety level. I felt it holding things together like glue in a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. After an hour of maximum yelling in rage, I would feel dramatically normal, as if a dense fog had suddenly been wiped off the windshield of my mind, to present a clear panorama of the world. But I feel it's important to bring up a special point to the business of expressing anger.
Sometimes the relief wasn't so clean after a siege of anger. I would have a pesky anxiety hangover. That really threw me, because I depended on the anger to take away the anxiety, as that's what kept me out of the hospital. It was a damned-if-I-do and damned-if-I-don't situation there. But that was one place where it really paid to do the reading on psychology.
I had read where a child often feels anxiety after a bout of anger with their parent or caregiver. Children know that even if they are very displeased with the parent for the moment, they are totally dependent upon them in the world. Nothing is more terrifying than the feeling that a parent will abandon you for being too much trouble to endure. Some children are even threatened verbally, out loud, that they will be kicked out, killed, or some other dire consequence. And in some cases the threat is carried out.
The child learns to shut down anger and the expression of it. If that suppression is too great, too permanent, and the child grows up into an adult who has decided to never be angry, there is going to be a problem there. When this person goes into therapy and finds that it’s important to express anger, in appropriate ways, the first efforts are destined to meet a special difficulty. Anger, genuine hot anger, will bring up the fear of being angry, tagged to it like an old price ticket. The fear is of what the big, strong parents of the past are going to do about it.
But the jig is up, for you know obviously, that you're a grown-up now and all that is entirely different now. This, by the way, is one of the clearest examples of how inner division gets going. It shows how the past can influence the present when the past is repressed instead of maturing all along the way with the rest of the developing self.
In childhood I learned to shut down anger, for fear of the parent figures, and it resurfaced in adulthood as an unlabeled anxiety. The fear of anger, both mine, and seeing it in other people, jumped right in there as an unwelcome visitor: A ghost from the past. But, all I had to do was remind myself that the anxiety was a leftover from the past, not related to the anger at hand. That, I'm relieved to say, was one of the easier outdated assumptions I had to deal with, and I did have to deal with so many!
Another way I dealt with the anxiety over anger was to remind myself that anger didn't make me a bad Christian, either. It isn't anger itself that is good or bad, it is what you do with it. Anger is for the mind what vomit is for the stomach. If something is upsetting, it is just there. I'm not an evil person because I vomit when I get indigestion. But I try not to vomit all over the carpet or the furniture. I run to the bathroom. I take responsibility for it. As an adult, I felt I should decide how much, or in what way, I should tell someone I'm angry at something they did. Meanwhile, maybe there is so much anger that I also need to go someplace private and yell into a pillow until all the anger is purged and I'm free of symptoms of trapped anger. Easier said than done. It's a hard subject for everyone. It's especially hard for people who have had to hold it down all their lives. They don't have enough practice at dealing with it when it tends to boil over. I was getting a lot of practice.
I didn't have the experience then to know I was doing the right thing by letting myself be so aware of my anger, both at Dr T and at the things that happened in my past. But I did work through it, and I did stay out of jail too! I can't say I never acted out and did some things I've regretted. I lost a few jobs over it. I've made some wrong choices, and disappointed some people. Yet, I did change. I began to feel more like a "citizen of the world" by being able to handle deeper interaction and strong emotion in skillful, knowing ways. As I got a lot of my old anger out, I began to have more patience with people. I began to feel some genuine kindness untainted with neurotic issues of my own. The hard knot my soul had become began to soften just a little bit. I could tell that. I didn't have to carry a chip on my shoulder, but could stick up for myself when a situation arose. As I grew to know my own feelings, I became a lot better a reading other people. All that began to build a sense of self-confidence, a sense that there was something real to me after all.
As I have explained before, I was raised a Christian, but I sort of shelved it when praying didn't seem to help my symptoms. For those who could be open to it, I would like to say a few things about that.
As scientific research indicates, anger floods the body and brain with endorphins and adrenalin. We've all observed how teeth-gritting rage can load someone up with courage when they are threatened with extreme danger. You can face almost anything if you can get angry enough. But the other side of anger is that it isn't the better-accepted solution within society. It isn't considered the Christian way. It certainly isn't the highest level of maturity. But if you've repressed all the hurts in life and are suffering the consequences of that, anger is a stage that must be worked through, not skirted around.
Many Christians, and even followers of other faiths, seem to trip over that stumbling stone. They hold anger in, and hold it in, until they explode, or get an illness. In trying to do right, they find the anger thing has tunneled another way through. They become divided between an ordinarily good person--until something triggers them off. It isn't wrong to get angry enough times to learn how to manage anger. What is wrong is to get stuck in that stage and go around with a rotten attitude the rest of your life.
While I was in the anger stage, I learned that anger was a weapon I could pick up to defend my little ego in an emergency. While that was where I was along my journey, that was where I was obliged to meet the gut level of me. It was where I first tried to include a God sort of figure in my view of things there. I began to sense that something was helping me do better in ways that were more than I could do by my own effort. I got out more than I put in. But that only happened when I got into the muddiest part of the mud-puddle and started shoveling. I will say I was very strict about not hurting people, or breaking the law, but otherwise got right into the worst of me. I recalled the venerable old hymn, "Just As I Am, Lord." It was only when I was there that I began to perceive any help. It was there that I first realized that my logical self had to give way to some other "chiefs" within.
I wasn't always right about what should be done. I had to learn to suspend my reasoning at times, and learn to follow something leading from deep within. I followed what felt helpful, as long as it helped. I began to sense something that seemed to know the way from me. But I tried not to be a fool about it. One time I decided I would just quit trying: "let go, and let, God" and fell into the worst pain and confusion I ever had. I did learn to let go and let God, in many ways, but balance it with good sense. I believe the difference between someone who goes way off base with religion, and someone who is helped by religion, is in maintaining responsibility to society and loved ones.
If my newfound spiritual leadership inspired me to disregard someone else's feelings in a flagrant way, I could be sure I'm getting off course. But to me, at that time, doing things the right way meant relief from illness. I wasn't trying to be good just for goodness sake. I can't say I'm such a nun type of person. But I was desperate to find a way that would change my hell to a life I could stand to live.
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Restin Wells