Meeting my Anger – the side effect of People Pleasing
My anger is powerful.
When it rips through me, it feels like an all-consuming, overwhelming fire.
I realize that even when I do not actively experience it, it is still there, somewhere deep within me, dormant until triggered.
When directed at my husband, it also feels very self-righteous.
I no longer fear my emotions.
I have done enough work to understand that all emotions are the ways our bodies communicate with us, each of them carrying a message about our needs.
So while I am no longer ashamed or afraid of my anger, I also realize what a powerful killer of trust and connection it can be in relationships with others.
As a frequent recipient of my father’s anger until he cut all contact with me, I also know that anger may be misdirected.
Recently I have come to see that the anger I express toward my husband has to do with a lifetime of stifled protest, which I’ve carried unexpressed since very early childhood.
In order to survive in my family of origin and society at large, I coped by becoming a people pleaser.
People pleasing is a complex survival strategy, consisting of two parts.
The first is a natural impulse to proclaim a boundary, to say no, to move away from unwanted closeness. The second impulse overrides that initial visceral response in order to survive by avoiding rupture in relationships.
That is why in childhood we will choose attachment over authenticity every time. We depend fully on our relationships and will simply not survive without them.
However, the energy from that stifled impulse of protest has no place to go but within. It often turns into anger and resentment later in life, and frequently lands on people who may have had nothing to do with the original wound.
Many of us never dare to express that stifled energy and it lives inside of our bodies, creating dis-ease in our organs, darkening our thoughts, poisoning our lives.
Anger is violent.
As such it is often shamed and feared. Which leads to the fact that it is often misunderstood.
When I was a child, my father was either disgusted or violent any time I displayed any sort of agency, especially anger.
For most of my life – on rare occasions when anger would burst out of me – the shame I felt afterward was so destructive that I could not process or relate to my anger at all. I was scared of its power and would just stuff it deeper in.
During the latest episode – a few days ago – my anger was witnessed by my daughter, who judged me as being “unnecessarily aggressive.”
Hearing these words from my daughter, whom I adore and with whom I share a deep soul-level bond of understanding, really stopped me in my tracks.
Everything happened so quickly. I didn’t even see how we got here. One moment the three of us were walking down the street to a local restaurant for dinner, cheerfully chatting. The next thing I knew I was fully activated and raising my voice.
My daughter’s upset face and these words were like receiving a bucket of cold water over my head.
So it took me some time to replay each moment to even find the trigger that brought me here.
But most puzzling was the fact that, while I was feeling like a victim – in righteous self-defense because I perceived myself unfairly treated by my husband – my daughter saw me in that situation as the aggressor.
I trust her sense of fairness and objective regard toward me. I know how much she loves and respects me, so to hear this from her was a striking mirror reflection I could not ignore.
I felt like a victim, but acted like a bully.
This was abruptly eye-opening.
I immediately thought of my mom. Just a few years ago I saw that while for most of her life she behaved like a victim with my father, she was also an unconscious manipulator and a pretty harsh critic.
The fact that I may be continuing my mother’s modeled behavior does not surprise me. I know that we inherit and perpetuate the relating dynamic we observed in childhood. However, now that I am conscious to this behavior in myself, I definitely do not want to continue like that.
My job is to honor my emotions, while I try to understand what they tell me about my needs. This means I am also responsible for meeting my needs, so that my decades-old anger does not poison my current relationships.
And it is a fine line.
For decades I did not allow myself to access my anger in order to keep a semblance of peace in my relationships.
The problem is whatever we resist persists, and what we suppress becomes even more powerful with time.
The path to peace in my family is not through my suppression of anger.
It is in my meeting it head on, feeling it, understanding it, metabolizing it, and honoring the need that it represents. All this while doing my best to prevent my rage from spilling on people who share my life.
While I want to honor my emotions, my moods, my feelings, and my psycho-somatic states, I also do not want to live as a slave to my childhood coping mechanisms and to my triggers.
Yes, my anger is powerful.
I carried the stifled protest within me all of my life, because it never felt safe in my family to express raw emotion. Later, when I could no longer ignore my anger, I tried to convince myself to rise above it, judging it less honorable than love or compassion.
And now I realize: compassion is fake if it glosses over the inner reserves of anger.
My love remains conditional if one word that I misunderstood from my husband unleashed a kind of reaction that was aimed at destroying him.
My daughter’s witnessing forced me to see that I wasn’t reading the situation for what it was at all. As usual, whatever triggered me transported me out of the present moment, to a dark place in the past where I was fighting my demons, no longer even seeing the people right in front of me.
But I felt so in the right. I was outraged and spewing venom.
I wouldn’t have been able to see the situation in any other way were it not for my daughter’s defending her father.
Her reaction really made me pause. Instead of feeling betrayed by her, which in the past may have been my go-to, I was yanked into the clarity of the present moment. And it dawned on me that whatever was going on looked very differently on the outside, than the way I was experiencing it.
Luckily, I was able to revisit what happened with my daughter the next day.
She helped me see that I misunderstood the situation because, in fact, I did not even hear most of what my husband was trying to say. She also showed me that her father was actually stepping up to something I expressed a wish for just a week before.
I didn’t see any of it.
My old anger blinded me to the current truth.
And it made me sad. I wonder how many times I have shut down my husband when he may have tried to break out of the box into which I stuffed him in my wounded defensiveness? Or when he may have tried to respond to my expressed needs and wishes in a way that I did not see coming?
When I saw that possibility, emotion moistened my eyes, and my heart exploded with the warmth of love and an ache of compassion toward my husband.
Hearing my daughter’s side of the story reminded me that I am no longer that disempowered little girl. No matter how insidious that imprint is, today I have the tools and the skills to choose how I want to react to any situation.
In conscious choosing lies my power.
My work going forward is to get better at repair.
Both my husband and I came into our relationship with conflict-avoidant tendencies. The first fifteen years of our marriage we never fought. I thought that was the sign that we were very well-matched.
In the last ten years of questioning everything we had plenty of conflict. With no skills to deal, we lived each conflict as proof of the end.
Until I saw that some of those conflicts actually brought us closer together by giving an understanding of the other’s experience.
Since then I’ve learned that conflict is an opportunity for growth in a relationship, as it brings to the surface what has been hiding within all along.
Conflict and especially conflict resolution is a portal to more truth, more awareness, more long-term health in a relationship.
The way I see it, repair post-conflict consists of several stages.
Part one: repair with my husband. Own my part, admit where I am wrong, offer my explanation of my side of the story. Becoming a more attentive listener to him, taking in his side of the story, not only believing my inner child.
My inner child should not be running my relationship with my husband anyway.
Relating with my inner child is my job. And that is part two of my process of repair: I continue connecting with and healing my relationship with my inner child.
I am working on understanding my anger, that stifled energy of protest which colors the way I perceive others’ behavior. I want to nurture my needs not only post-conflict, but daily and regularly, so that there is more capacity for life as it happens.
And I want to forgive – myself first of all.
I forgive myself for the coping mechanisms I had to develop as a way of dealing with trauma, hurt or loss. I forgive myself for using the hurt I’d endured from others as a mechanism of control or for diminishing others to make myself feel more right or more important.
I remind myself: You are enough. You are safe. You are loved.
I am enough. I am safe. I am loved.
I will not let the wounding from my father keep me on the defensive with my husband. I will love those wounded parts of me more, not less.
I will work on freeing my life partner from a box where I play the role of the victim and he the villain, because none of it is true.
I want to remember to come to my husband from curiosity and free from assumptions based on the past, keeping space open to let him be someone I actually want and need.
More to come.