Mommy? Why does everybody have a bomb?
~Prince
There was a lot of screaming during my childhood. “Get the fuck out of my house!” was one of my all-time favorites. That was mom. A whole lot of yelling, endless anger and rage. I got pretty used to it. It was totally normal to me, like breathing. And you know what? I learned how to yell and rage with the best of them! I became a professional yeller! When something pissed me off? Watch out! Run for cover, people!
And then I’d get silent. For weeks sometimes. The guilt showed up. I felt bad. Really bad. But I didn’t give up on being right! No fucking way! I held onto that shit like gold. It was all I had because in my mind I could never be wrong. Being wrong felt like certain death. And then shame would show up to the party. Did you happen to read my last piece on SHAME? Yeah. Pretty interesting progression of events. Anger, guilt and then shame. What came next? Well, the other person would generally attempt to make up with me. That’s right. Not the other way around. And then maybe I’d apologize. Or maybe not. Because sometimes the other person would actually apologize TO ME, taking on my shitty behavior. Why? Because they loved me! I wasn’t always like that if I’m being fair to myself. But to be sure, it happened enough to alienate a few people I once considered dear. The anger generally showed up when I was triggered by something and felt unloved or misunderstood, or usually, most of all, INADEQUATE. Somewhere along the way, one of my protective parts would probably think to itself, wow, this dynamic works! People actually are willing to forgive me for being an asshole! Let’s keep this cycle going and see what happens! But it sure kept me STUCK in a myriad of distorted thought patterns for most of my life and it took a lot of unlearning to change my behavior. Basically, it became unmanageable.
Dance break. I’ve been getting up and spontaneously dancing when my chronic pelvic pain shows up. It’s been really healing. I sing along to my favorite songs and dance up a sweat. No one’s here to watch me so who gives a shit! This one was in honor of my mom’s more joyful moments. Her favorite band was Cream (Clapton, Bruce, Baker) and I threw on her fave song, I’m So Glad. I used to watch her shake her booty to this song in wild ecstatic hippie bliss. I just did the same and invited her spirit to join me, what some might call “woo” but as a friend recently reminded me, what’s the matter with a little woo?
Here’s a story I’ve often told my clients or used as an example of an early childhood pattern for my therapists. Forgive me if you’ve heard it. Essentially, I used to confuse anger with vulnerability. Or… did I? (He writes with a funny quizzical look on his face).
Back in the late 80’s at UMO (University of Maine at Orono), I took an improv acting class with my then mentor, Dr. Sandra Hardy, a hard-ass manic depressant genius who I adored for her brazen honesty and edgy AF take on the theater, and life. I think maybe I felt like I had met my match. She was my first real-life hero and became like a mother to me. She directed me in probably my finest role in college, Jake in Sam Shepherd’s A Lie of the Mind. Perfect typecasting – Jake is full of rage and shame. I took it all the way, losing myself in the part to the point where it would take me hours to transform back into Josh. Or… did I?
The improv exercise was simple. Two people created a scene and one of them had to be vulnerable. My roommate Mike and I were paired up, a sadistic move by Sandra because she knew we were beefing over a woman we both liked. Okay Josh, you’re the vulnerable one, go! You might guess what happened. I started screaming at Mike, raging about what I perceived was shitty behavior on his part and feeling like he was trying to steal my thunder with a hot grad student (who I ended up living with for four years, poor Mike). Anyway, Sandra waved her hands histrionically and said, STOP, STOP. STOPPPP! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING JOSH? THAT’S NOT VULNERABILITY THAT’S RAGE!!! I truly thought it WAS vulnerability and I didn’t, in the slightest, get what she was talking about. In fact, I didn’t truly understand the lesson until years later, when I made a conscious decision to stop yelling at my kids because I realized they were clearly the vulnerable ones. As was I when I was their age. Didn’t mean I stopped yelling entirely because I was still more than capable of taking on the victim role whenever it worked to my advantage. But my kids were my first true teachers in the unlearning process around letting loose on people.
For years I would tell that story to illustrate the point that we often confuse vulnerability with anger but now I’m not so sure that’s true. Here, I’m going to defer to the poet David Whyte and his profound little book called Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
There are a few authors who make me feel like a rank amateur and this bloke is definitely one of them. As Steve Martin says, some people have a way with language and other people… not have a way, I guess. Anger is the purest form of care? What? He goes on to say that anger is the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life. I mean is he basically saying anger has value but is also a protector of vulnerability? Let’s continue on with this oh so complex string of sentences.
What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
Powerlessness, yes I get that. Can find no proper identity or voice, okay. Or a way of life to hold it? Unwillingness to not know in the face of our love for (fill in the blank)… in the face of simply being alive? Heavy sigh. I mean we usually peg someone who’s angry as simply an asshole, right? Whyte seems to be getting deep into the core of trauma here. Speaking for myself, often when I get angry, I’m in desperate need to fill a deep hole of grief, longing or need. And it’s usually rooted in fear. The wounded animal fighting for its last breath. Whew. Let’s go on.
Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague.
I’m starting to see a spectrum forming here, a distinct connection between anger and vulnerability. Are you seeing it too? And it even resonates from that place of silence I mentioned earlier. Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are made vulnerable through love? This is mos def a strange incoherence. But then something more familiar emerges here --
Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things – we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.
The abuser as the abused. We’ve heard this before. The cycle of violence fed and fucked by anger. The mind refusing to listen to the body and thus creating the classic Jungian split. Anger in the mind becomes our shadow part, alienating us from love, creating self-sabotage and literally splitting us off from what we truly desire, connection to others and ourselves. Literally splitting us into two parts, probably many more. So we then, with awareness, begin to crave wholeness, bringing us back to where our journey began.
But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.
Is the true internal essence of anger vulnerability? Mic drop. Is the idea to integrate the anger into wholeness? Is anger a wise teacher in this regard? Seems to me that what’s required is holding the anger as one would hold a child, with unconditional love. Anger is uncomfortable, of course, an emotional imprint usually borne from our negative childhood experiences. It surely is in my case. I’ve heard it said that war within ourselves cannot realize inner peace. Anger and its cousin violence are emotional imprints of conflict. Is it possible that integrating anger by simply being with it unconditionally, watching it, with no specific agenda, without trying to fix it, understand it or manipulate it, may gradually transform our relationship with it? Does treating it like the small child from which it came release the emotional charge and allow vulnerability to emerge? I’ve been reading about how we come into this world equipped with the felt-perception required to integrate pain and discomfort so I assume this would also apply to anger too. Is David Whyte suggesting that anger has the capacity to make the mind clearer and more compassionate. Is he talking about integration?
“Integrating any experience requires us to gauge exactly how out of harmony the experience is”, says Michael Brown. Brown says that feeling and integration partner to create wholeness. This, he says, is called insight. He goes on to say that in placing unconditional attention on our feelings, in this case anger, we begin to notice how it begins to change or shift. He suggests we have mostly ignored and suppressed our pain, anger, grief and fear, throughout our life. As in war, we’ve treated these feelings as enemies instead of welcoming them to the table as messengers. Perhaps anger then gets a bad rap and thus guilt, shame and a myriad other distortions evolved out of the suppression of it. Is it possible that if we nurture our anger, hold it dear, it might transform into vulnerability? Is that a stretch? I’m going with that hypothesis for now and I’ll tell you why.
I recently wrote an angry letter to a person I love deeply. I have been trying desperately to win this person’s heart for a long time and I’ve failed miserably. Recently, I’ve been putting all my energy into convincing this person to forgive me. So much so that I forgot how to stand in my own truth. I’ve felt so much grief and fear around losing the relationship but very little anger. This week I suddenly got angry. Really angry. I wanted to tell this person exactly what I thought of them. They’ve been airing grievances about me for a long while and I felt it was my turn. I wrote a letter spelling it all out. I won’t go into the details but I want to tell you how this unfolded to illuminate how I’ve arrived at the idea, aligning with Whyte and Brown, that anger can potentially transmute into vulnerability as they are quite possibly on the same spectrum. I hope this makes sense.
Yesterday I woke up and wailed like I've never wailed in my life. I mean I was rolling around on the floor screaming and crying like a wronged toddler. Like my daughter used to do when she was having a tantrum. So much emotion poured out of me accompanied by award winning guttural screaming. It scared the shit out of my dog who began barking at me! I arrived at my wits end, feeling like I'd done my work, owned my part, made amends, atoned for my sins. And now it was my turn to air my grievances so I did just that. I sat down wrote the letter. It was pure anger. I then sent the letter to my therapist who responded by saying it’s good that I’m no longer trying win this person’s heart and that I’m finally “loosening the restraints” by allowing myself to be angry. I asked a friend if I should send the letter and they told me to write it down on paper and then burn it. Then, after two days (very specific), if I still felt called to send it, I should.
After one day, I decided not to send it. However, welcoming the anger was an excellent way to allow myself to feel that emotional charge and integrate it into insight. And I suppose that’s how anger can be a messenger. It now feels like the original intention evolved from pedestrian justification and finger pointing into releasing the anger I’ve been carrying for several years. I would say a profound felt-sense of self-love emerged instead of sparking yet another war. The anger transformed into vulnerability over the course of 24 hours. Cause for celebration!
Yet it was an extremely painful process. And I’m sure there’s so much more to investigate about anger but I’m going to call it right here. All in all, my anger served me because it allowed me to understand the core of what lies underneath it and it helped me discover something new about my strength of character. And yet, it’s totally okay that I got angry about certain behaviors that I found wounding but again, I realized I didn’t need to retaliate or create more conflict. I simply felt it and integrated it instead. That, I believe is the process of inviting presence. It’s also a key milestone in my recovery.
More to come. Here’s are two photos that tell the story of my day yesterday. Yes, I like taking selfies.
And here’s me dancing to The Black Crowes earlier when my pelvis was alive with pain!
Keep dancing. It aids clarity, reduces anger stress, and feels so good!
Thanks for sharing what sounds like a cathartic experience and the insights you gained, Josh.
Here's something I do that might be helpful. When I wake up in the morning, if I'm feeling a strong emotion, I lie there and feel it as intensely as I can for as long as I need to. Then I let it dissolve into the love I feel for life that seems to underlie everything.
Sometimes it feels like those big emotions just want to be witnessed, and felt.