“If you know what your suffering means, and how to use it, it will become a precious source of knowledge about the meaning of your life.”
Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life
What lies “beneath”?
The shift was small. It started with my slowly allowing those intense emotions to come closer to me and be felt, without my rejecting them. I started to recognize those inner messages that sometimes popped up with the rage, like “I want to fight him…make him pay.” And instead of pushing them away, I felt them, and also added, “You have every RIGHT to be furious!”
That may not sound like groundbreaking progress, but it is when you were trained for decades to believe the opposite. And I noticed that the more I accepted the emotion and embraced my right to feel it, the more it actually calmed the rage.
Something about changing how I received my rage made it scream a little less inside me. I think it is like when someone is trying to get your attention, and you refuse to listen, they scream all the louder. When you finally agree to listen and acknowledge their pain, and when they feel heard and accepted, they don’t have to fight for your attention anymore. It was a small change at first, and would take a long time to grow, but still, I could feel the rage occasionally shift.
Slowly, when rage came up, I began to “hold it aside” a bit longer, and examine it, just as I would a specimen in the lab I was about to dissect or a sample under a microscope lens. I started to see deeper, UNDERNEATH the reactions, and tease out the reasons for the behaviors. Because the real answer to healing rage was to find what was underneath it….and there is ALWAYS something more beneath rage.
It’s not a journey of marketing slogans
But it was going to be a long journey, and a slow, complex one. Which is why sometimes, catchy self-help books really piss me off. They make it sound like “Dear fool, all you have to do is this technique or that and things will be all better, didn’t you know that?” It’s that kind of thinking that leads to comments like “All you have to do is – blah,” or “Just read this book and she has it figured out”...or my absolute “favorite” – “Aren’t you over that yet?”
For example, I read a book called The Let Them Theory, by Mel Robbins, and it royally annoyed me. No, it pissed me off. Her concept, which is NOT totally wrong, is that you can’t control or change the behavior of another person. Agreed. And when confronted by the opinions, drama, and judgment of others, if you just disengage and let them be however they will be, and make your own choices for your actions, you will have a more peaceful life. So let them, and let go of your need to fight them.
In theory, I don’t disagree with the concept. But the more I read what I considered a “formulaic” answer to a complicated trauma, the more a part of me hit the roof. I wanted to scream *” Yeah??? YOU do it then! You have no idea what would happen in my household if I did that! It’s not that simple!”
I felt like my entire life’s search to make sense of what happened, and my years of struggle to escape and recover, were being reduced to a simplistic slogan. And one I seem to have failed at no less. Gee, how could I have been so stupid not to think of that myself? Just let Dad do whatever and do what I thought was right, and life would be all better?
Yes, for an “average” situation, she is right. If someone at a company function is acting like a fool, I can walk away. I can “let them” do what they will. I don’t have to fight them or show them what I think they should do.
But for the world I grew up in, telling me to let them do whatever, and to let go of my need to change things, was dangerous advice. “Let Me” would have gotten me pummeled in that moment. And “Let Them” was part of the reason my father had been able to rule with abuse in the first place. No one put a stop to his inappropriate behaviors.
I know I am not being totally fair to the book, which did give some passing awareness that some situations need to be confronted. But one of the things I just hate is when self-help books reduce healing or problem resolution to a marketing slogan, and then everyone else looks at you like “Well, what’s your problem? The answer’s right here in the book!”
No. No, it’s not. In fact, it can be emotionally harmful for people who have lived through being mentally demolished, or sexually or physically assaulted again and again and again. When you’ve lived through your life being in danger, slogan answers don’t cut it.
I rank those things up there with platitudes like “You just have to forgive because that will make you feel better if you let go of the anger.” And regarding forgiveness, I will write about that later.
The point for me at that moment was that even as I was working hard to feel, embrace, and understand my anger, many things were still triggering me. Including self-help books. And that upset me.
But still, my soul YEARNS for something more
Anger at platitudes aside, I also did believe in UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. GOD. Mission and purpose in life. If I stayed stuck in rage, how could I reach those things? Rage versus eternal love seem polar opposites…worlds apart. If you are standing on one shore, how do you cross the ocean to reach the other one?
It left me questioning whether I was EVER going to find a way beyond rage. I knew that deep down, I WANTED to let the anger go. I WANTED to find a better, more peaceful way. But it had to be AUTHENTIC to my inner soul. It had to be a transformation at my deepest core, not simply parroting a slogan and telling myself that’s all it takes. No matter how many books say it’s possible, healing the rage from trauma and humiliation requires a lot of work and willingness to dig deep.
And I also knew that for me, the digging I’d been doing was starting to give me glimpses of clues that might lead to answers. The more I allowed the anger to come out, the more I moved closer to it, and the more I got to know it and “listen” to its lessons, the more insights I started to discover.
The choice
So for me, the real question was – “Would I CHOOSE to stick with the path I was on, that felt right for me, even if no one else understood? Was I COMMITTED to staying the course?”
From my Journal – 3/4/2024
If you can read this book and still wonder:
“When will I get over it?”
I have nothing more to say to you.
For those who are asked this question in their own life,
I don’t know how you respond,
but this book is my answer…
to me.
Because I need it,
the answer,
but more,
I need to believe me when I say it.
And to do that, I have to go back,
retrieve all the pieces,
and assemble them into a whole that can show me the answers
that I carry within,
that I feel,
but have never stopped to reach for.
I go back to the beginning
to have a different ending.
The short answer I already know
is that one does not get over it.
You learn to live with it.
To carry with you all the many scars seared into your every tissue,
for every minute,
of every day;
through every nightmare…
flashback….
anxiety attack…
and body memory.
You carry them through every celebration.
Joy.
Victory.
Moment of play.
You have the good things, yes.
But they are always there lurking in the background.
Scars stretch,
but only so far.
They were grafted into my muscles and nerves and brain cells
just as one binds a branch from one tree limb to another.
The part of you that is you,
and the part that was grafted on,
have long since become one,
yielding a hybrid fruit that you were never intended to carry.
But it is what it is,
and there is no “removing it, or excising it, or cutting it out.
It’s part of you for the rest of your life.
That said,
you can fight back.
Push to reclaim every bit that you can.
Push the envelope…and the scar tissue as far as they will go, to break free.
No victim here.
And you can love yourself back to health,
which starts when you stop running,
and instead, turn,
and welcome all the memories, pain, ugliness,
into your open arms
and love all of it…
all of you.
And when they ask you again,
“When will you get over it?”
Say “never,”
And be proud of yourself that you can hold both the joy and the pain
and not be vanquished.
The gift
So, in this work, my choice continued to be…push the envelope and keep digging, so I could give it all meaning. That is one of anger’s gifts in life…meaning.
But to do that, I needed to find what lay underneath the rage. Because there is ALWAYS something else beneath the rage…
Up Next
On to more EMDR and discoveries.
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Soul Mosaic 
Leave a comment