Meeting anger

Like all women who were taught to be the good girl, I have suppressed anger. The first time I met it, was when I started to pay attention to my bodily sensations and found that I often unconsciously tighten my jaw. That was around 7 years ago. I went into deep research mode and tried to understand everything about a tight jaw. Turned out, it was a manifestation of angry words that I had been swallowing for years. Next I noticed my angry dreams. I sometimes woke up very angrily, feeling resentful for all the injustice that happened in the dreams, most of them had to do with what my parents said or did. That kind of initiated my journey to look inwards, to find suppressed emotions, to see the link between childhood programming and hidden beliefs, and to see in what way I am limited by those beliefs.

And so I know, clear as the sky, why I (involuntarily) chose to suppress anger. I am afraid of anger. Anger is loud, anger is stressful. My mother was always angry, she would scream with her entire body, her facial expression would be so stern, her eyes glared, her lips curled, her brows furrowed. My heart would pound, I would feel like crying, I would want to curl up into a ball and hide. And gosh I hate this feeling, I hate being surrounded by this atmosphere. You see, she no longer gets angry like this now but I teared up now trying to describe this scene. This is how deep childhood memories stay in us.

Being in a household like this, there is no space for my anger. Every time the centre of attention were 1) how angry mom is and 2) what have we done to make her so angry. If I were to meet this situation with my anger, obviously I would be punished, my elder sister was a good example. She was the rebel. Interesting side note, her eldest daughter is exactly like her when she was young in this sense, but seems like no one notices it, the focus is on how “bad” the teenage girl is. Examples of the repetition of generational trauma are easy to find indeed. In this highly explosive environment, my sister coped by pushing back, I coped by numbing any anger. The mantra in my small little brain would be “being angry is bad, anger is bad, being angry is wrong, you cannot be angry”.

If we were to go deeper into this belief, it is saying that being angry is bad because it will cause rejection. What was happening around me strengthened this belief. My sister was punished when she angrily voiced out what was unfair, my mom got even more angry at her, and because I kept quiet and fawned (which means I showed that I am scared by crying, hiding, etc.) I received less severe punishment. This indirectly taught me that the better I hid my anger, the more I will be rewarded, and hence loved. Being angry = being unloved. Being not angry = being loved. On top of this, I hated when my mom was angry, this proves that being angry just pushes people away from you, isn’t it? Obviously my belief got deeply entrenched. Pressing hard on my anger, pushing it down, swallowing it, hide it, ignore it, act like I never saw it. These is the only way my little being can feel safe.

I did a lot of work to recover from this deep suppression. I talked to the angry part, I talked to the part that want to stick with being a Goodie Two-shoes. I went back to the memories where mom was angry and I cradled and removed my younger self from those scenes. Yes my rage has a safer outlet now, yet today I found that this “being angry = being unloved“ belief has not left me.

So today I met my hidden anger again through an unprompted morning journaling exercise. I started listing all the things that I am angry about in the past few days. Note that this was close to automatic writing where I let my hand and pen go wherever my mind wanted to go, so even though I consciously did not want to write about the angry moments, but they just kind of flowed out. I was surprised because for many of those moments, I did not feel any spark of anger when they happened. I recalled feeling annoyed, inconvenient, unheard, but not angry. This showed that hiding my anger is still my go-to coping method. And then I got even more angry realising this, “what the actual fuck do you mean by this is still my go-to after working on it for all these fucking years?”.

I will not cover things like the value of healthy rage, the effects of suppressed emotions on the physical body, and how to continue working on stubborn issues as such in this writing.

I wrote this as an ode to my anger,

“Hi anger. I have not learned to love you. I am sorry. I will not stop working on it”.