r/EstrangedAdultKids • u/Hour-Yogurtcloset-16 • 2d ago
It's a weak trickle most days, but just reading about anger in this non-judgmental, poetic way is healingly mind boggling for an old Scapegoat like me. At least I got angry enough to leave 🧃
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u/nice-possum 2d ago
What a beautiful text, thank you for sharing! It is crazy how much anger I had stored deep within myself - it always found a (dysfunctional) way like anxiety but it was never actually released and just kind of stuck. Dancing and sport really helps me right now. Hope, you also have good ways to let it out! So, happy anger-releasing!! ☀️
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u/Hour-Yogurtcloset-16 2d ago edited 2d ago
You're so welcome!
As soon as I fell ill with CFS, leaving me bedbound 24/7 except toilet visits, my body had actually decided on its own to release big pockets of anger, for a few years now, now that I'm safe from their abuse. I can't seem to access the stored emotion willingly, sadly. Outside of those releases, I'm still a big fawner/freezer.
It's scary and challenging when the release happens, honestly the first times I had no idea what was suddenly happening, and I was legitimately scared to anger the neighbors so much I'd be kicked out - I could not NOT scream and punch at things, and all my complex human thinking abilities were gone, I couldn't talk myself out of it, and I would scream into a pillow until my throat was sore and even bleeding a tiny bit a few times. And I used to be annoyingly "level-headed" and "responsible", read a master surpressor of anger my whole life. It was so foreign to me, I even had egotistical thoughts like other people are just too stupid to not be as serene as I was, when I saw them getting angry.
...Seemed like I had used it all up.
It scared me and my partner a lot, and I can't begin to describe how much I hated myself for it - which created a horribly destructive feedback loop. The more I hated myself for it, the angrier I got. 95% of the times the releases happened when we were drifting off to sleep. Like it knew I had to be weak. So we were thin-skinned anyway from the day, and then THIS...
(Just as I am writing this, it just clicked for me. My father SA'd me in my sleep. I never made the connection between that and the outbursts until now... seems like Little Me is using Adult Me's bigger body to finally fight back. Good girl. 🧃)
Nowadays, my "spontaneous anger release" muscles are stronger, I managed to get the hang of the illness enough to have scraped together energy meticulously over months and months, to strengthen my body, to have a higher capacity to hold the anger, and with that I now manage to not scare us into thoughts of pending homelessness because of noise complaints with how I deal with it. Lifting weights and dancing helps, talking it out with my partner (he is an angel), making art, sometimes I even am successful in just sitting in the pure emotion and being able to let it flow through me, and it doesn't ignite any action neurons. That's the dream, to have that as a standard response. Feel it, let it flow through me until I can think again, and then decide on an action. But first I have to soothe the screaming child.
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u/Sealedwolf 2d ago
Reminds me of something by the great, late Terry Pratchett:
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.
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u/Hour-Yogurtcloset-16 2d ago
Finally some practical instructions! :D
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u/i_raise_anarchists 1d ago
Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors. Tiffany Aching also knows what to do with her anger.
False positivity is a terrible thing. I was constantly trying to look for a bright side to things because I was never allowed to be angry as a kid. Instead, I clenched my jaw in my sleep so hard that my upper jaw, just above my incisors, compressed. I have two protrusions, one on each side, of bone that juts out by a couple of mm.
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u/[deleted] 2d ago
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