Anger

I was initially hesitant to write about anger, as it’s an emotion I am not used to feeling¹. How could I write about something I know nothing about? But I now realize that the absence of anger in my life is significant in itself, and is indicative of how I operate.

Anger is an emotion that I am simultaneously very sensitive to, yet not at all familar with—I am incredibly sensitive to the external display of anger in others, yet not at all familiar with how it feels internally. I believe this is because when I was small, I grew up in an environment where my primary caregiver frequently displayed anger. This is because they had unprocessed trauma of their own, which came out as fits of rage. These bouts of anger were extremely terrifying for me as a young child, and ended in emotional and sometimes physical harm done to me. Because of the repeated association of anger with terror, pain, and instability, I believe I learned to internally separate anger as a “bad” emotion, and shoved it away as an emotion that I did not want to experience. My relationship with anger was tainted by my early childhood experiences, making a powerful emotion that should be utilized as part of an emotionally healthy life inaccessible to me as an adult.

I once naively believed that not feeling anger was an asset of mine—that anger was a disruptive emotion, and it was safer for me not to feel it. While it is beneficial to those around me for me to not ever display anger, I now believe that anger is an important emotion that should be part of my emotional repertoire. Anger enables people to enact change. By my not being able to experience anger, I’m more likely to stay involved in situations and environments which are not good for me, making me to be more likely to be repeatedly victimized. Due to my upbringing, I learned to value other peoples' comfort over my own, and use dissociation to subconsciously withhold my sometimes justified anger.

I believe that because I have DID², my dynamic range of emotions is very shallow—most of the time, I feel mild contentment. I grew up in an environment where I didn’t feel like I could take up any emotional space, as the emotional landscape in my family of origin was dominated by others' strong emotional displays. I enjoy my internal stability—I do not want to feel strong emotions. I am scared of the loss of control I was so used to seeing in others while growing up. However, this separation of anger and other emotions leads to a less full life, including amnesia, behavior that feels out of my control when I’m triggered, along with stunted “good” emotions, like happiness and excitement. By using dissociation, I’ve traded experiencing a full range of emotions for internal stability. This served me well in the past, but in the future I’d like to live a more full, complete life—one that does not rely on maladaptive dissociative coping mechanisms.

While I now see anger as a valuable emotion, my learned patterns of removing it from my awareness continue, so still I have difficulty accessing it. My understanding of anger comes from a theoretical view—I can intellectually understand it, but I do not believe I have felt genuine anger before. With time, I hope that will change.