What is anger and why has it been labeled as an bad emotion? Anger is the one eyed beast most of us fear will consume us if we are not careful. Most of think of anger as an uncontrolled emotion that will lead us towards the scary things such as prison sentences or total loss of control.
In my experience, anger is much like the other emotions you have. Such as sadness, anger needs to be sat with, validated and processed. Refusing to acknowledge my anger, along with the actions, events and people associated with them, only allowed it to continue to fester into trapped emotions in my body. There was a period I was holding in such a vault of anger, I was unable to fully move my neck and had stiff shoulders. I didn’t make this realization until I broke down to get a massage and as a the poor masseuse was putting her full back into working out the mountains of knots that I felt a full push of emotions.
Sadly, I fell into the common trap of misunderstanding the feeling as one of sadness yet again. Thus the constant build up continued.
As a Capricorn, a child of trauma AND a recovering people pleaser, I’m use to letting things build. From everything from passive aggression, microaggressions and FULL on hit pieces. I’ve been conditioned to internalize it as my fault and attempt to brush it off as that. If it’s my fault, then there’s a way for me to fix it, right?
And I oop.
Part of my healing has journey has been clocking bullshit for just that and allowing myself to be sad when I am, in fact, sad. Anger has been more difficult. For as long as I could remember anger has been the emotion that meant the entire house was coming down. Both of my parents growing up were incredibly unregulated and went into blackout rages when they got mad, which was always followed by both physical and verbal abuse.
Subsequently, this taught my subconscious to fully shut down when anger occurs. Whether, this is around others or within myself, I go completely into freeze mode. And my anger? I would do my best to shove it aside, process it as sadness which is much safer or ignore it altogether. The fear of turning into the monsters that created me was too real. Especially, once I became a parent (and one without a village to boot).
I came to the awareness that not addressing my the green bodied beast growing inside of me, was another form of once again not putting myself first. How could I possibly be putting myself first if I allow these feeling to poison my body rather than sitting with it, understanding it and then allowing it to be free?
Essentially opening pandora’s box was terrifying. Emotions that have stood unacknowledged for almost 18 years came out in a rush, nearly overlapping each other in a rush. Instead of traveling the normal route of seeing where the other party was coming from in all situations, I instead took the approach of, ‘We didn’t deserve that and it fucking sucks’. It’s no exaggeration, that I did this layer by layer until I felt like I could take a deep breath and finally let my shoulders down again.
Anger itself it’s the enemy. In fact, it’s an important soldier often attempting to alert you before the waves of destruction fall in.
There were moments, I could would stop journaling, meditating or walking to scream into the void ‘I don’t know how to let this go!’ to realize it’s not something that needs to necessarily be ‘let go’ but rather processed, validated and accepted.
My anger peeled off this final layer of myself that was holding me back from exactly who I have been attempting to emulate for, what feels like, years.
Once I stood up from sitting with my anger, I stood with newfound self respect with myself. There may be many things uncertain in the days to come even so I will never allow myself to be treated so poorly again that I beg for scraps when my value is of a 5 course exclusive meal.
The girlies who know, know.