I’ve been having some anger problems of late. After my last post, that’s probably no surprise. I’ve also written about my anger control issues before, which I’ve struggled with all my life. So this is not exactly breaking news, right?
But lately it’s taken on a different flavor. It’s beyond anger, or frustration, or irritation from being over-stimulated. It’s rage.
My rage makes an appearance pretty often lately. It sneaks up on me and takes over, swiftly and overwhelmingly. It’s triggered by a few different things, frustration being one of them. But a bigger trigger lately is the feeling of being powerless, helpless, silenced, and/or unheard.
For example, the person I wrote about in Vigilante Shit incurred my rage because they became aggressive towards me when I tried to enforce a boundary of mine that they were disrespecting. This led to me feeling helpless because I did everything I could to make that relationship harmonious, and the other person was still a bully. I was powerless to improve the situation while still protecting myself. And that sucks.
Smaller things can also trigger my rage lately, when they trigger the same or similar feelings. Someone honking at me when they were the one who did something wrong. Someone being rude to me for no reason. Someone being inconsiderate and then being a prick about it if I say something.
Basically, I go through the world trying my best to be a kind person. But when my kindness (or just my audacity to exist and/or stand up for myself) receives an aggressive response, it really pisses me off. In short, I’m a sweet little bunny until you fuck with me, and then I morph into a honey badger.
It was hard at first for me to see the connection between that type of interaction and the feeling of helplessness or being unheard. But basically it’s a situation where I’m doing everything I can to be a good person, but I’m still treated as if I did something wrong. That feels helpless because I have no control over other people or how they treat me. My only influence over that is how I treat them, and unfortunately there are many people in this world who just don’t care. They will treat others badly if it suits them in the moment, and there is nothing anybody can do about it.
Why does this trigger such rage in me? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself and exploring, and I think I might have an answer.
This may sound a little “out there” to some people, but I believe that I experienced a childhood trauma that I have repressed. I believe that it was some kind of sexual abuse, and I have ideas about who might have been the perpetrator(s). But I have no solid memories. Just a gut feeling that has followed me around for over a decade now.
Because I don’t have any memories, I tend to question myself about whether anything really happened.* I have high key imposter syndrome when it comes to being a trauma survivor. It feels really wrong to put myself in that category when I’m not 100% sure that I belong there.
Of course, I know that I’m good at gaslighting myself, and it’s also possible that’s what’s going on here. Because when I allow myself to mindfully explore my childhood memories and speak to my past selves, I hear myself saying that something happened.
Ultimately, the results are the same. For some reason, either trauma-related or because it’s just who I am, I have a high sensitivity level to feelings of helplessness and being unheard. I believe that is because it triggers a childhood trauma in which I also felt helpless, powerless, and unheard.
I feel unheard often. Sometimes it feels like the people closest to me don’t pay attention when I talk. Sometimes it feels like I’m shouting into the void and nothing I say is being absorbed by anyone. Sometimes it feels as if no matter how much I write and share, the few people who read it still don’t truly understand me. These are feelings, not facts. In reality, these things may or may not be true. Or, maybe it’s impossible for anyone to truly understand another person; maybe we just think that we can.
Feeling unheard in those ways doesn’t put me in a rage, though–it just makes me feel sad and alone. What puts me in a rage is when I’m in any sort of conflict with another person, and I try to communicate something to make the situation better, or I try to defend myself, and they either don’t hear it, won’t listen, or misunderstand. Often it seems that they hear things I didn’t say, or read things I didn’t write. It’s so frustrating to be unable to make people understand.
I think that the key to my rage is that I sense aggression directed at me. When I feel unheard, it doesn’t feel like an attack. But when somebody is mad at me, I do feel like I am under attack. I can literally feel my body going into fight or flight mode. My heart starts to race, I feel blood rushing from my extremities, and often I will start to tremble. Sometimes I feel nauseous or an uncontrollable urge to cry.
When I am under attack, my first instinct (after my brain has a moment to process the threat) is to fight like hell. I quite literally am ready to fight someone, even though the threat is almost never physical. It’s all emotional, but to my brain the threat feels very real and needs to be addressed immediately. I can’t fully calm down until I have resolved it in some way, and even then just thinking about the event can cause the same physical reaction and trigger my rage all over again.
It’s all very interesting. It’s also something I don’t want to be controlled by. And so, it is something I am working on.
My new approach is to remember the most important rule when dealing with a bully: usually the best way to stop them is to ignore them. Silence is golden! Any sort of reaction from you only gives them the attention that they want. But when you ignore them, there is nothing left for them to do because you are simply not engaging. Of course, it’s also important to protect yourself and your boundaries, which I believe is best done clearly, and succinctly. Everybody deserves a chance to realize their mistakes and redeem themselves.
However, they should not need to be reminded constantly of your boundaries, nor should you try to explain yourself over and over again. They. Will. Not. Change. That’s when it’s time to move on to ignoring them.
None of this applies to children being bullied, or people of any age facing physical threats, to be clear. Children need to be protected from bullies, period. They should not be expected to ignore it; they can learn how to do that when they’re older, but until then we must protect them to the best of our ability because they are vulnerable and that is our job. Children who are bullies need to be stopped if there’s any hope for them to grow up and not be an adult bully.
Side-rant over.
My new approach is to ignore bullying behavior. Don’t respond. Do nothing. Say nothing. So simple!
I also am using mantras to help soothe my stress response and feelings of anger that could quickly escalate to rage. My mantras are: “This is not an emergency.”; and “I am calm, cool, collected, and in control of myself, even in chaos or conflict.” That second one is long, but easy for me to remember because of all the C’s. And it helps. If I can manage to stay silent and still for just a few moments and repeat these mantras, I can usually regain control of myself.
Reminding myself that “this is not an emergency” is huge. Because my brain thinks it is an emergency and I am being threatened in some way, when really all that’s happening is something insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Maybe my kids are running late for school… but really, that is okay. Nothing bad will happen. Or maybe somebody honked at me. That’s okay, too. It is not an emergency. I am calm, cool, collected, and in control of myself. Who cares that somebody I don’t know and will likely never see again wrongly thinks I did something to them? Who cares if they’re screaming profanities at me from their car window? I don’t have to look. I don’t have to do anything except continue to drive safely.
In situations like this, whatever happened truly does not matter. So I can just let it go.
A lot of the time, reminding myself of that is all I need to calm down and diffuse my rising anger before it explodes into rage. And that is super important to me, because I want to be the kind of person who makes the world better, not worse.
*Correction: I do have some definite memories of these things, but I’m so used to disregarding them because I didn’t want to believe it was sexual abuse. The things I remember were “not that bad” so to speak. But I suspect that there were more and worse events that took place which I have completely blocked out.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
I want to make it very clear that the abuse I experienced was not at the hands of anyone in my immediate family. This was not my dad, mom, or brother. I have no intention of naming names, but I do want to make sure nobody thinks my parents did that. My parents never abused me in any way!
