Quiet Anger

I grew up with an angry man in my house. A loud, angry man. A terrifying—a truly terrifying—angry man. I would look in the mirror as a child, sometimes crying—pinky promising myself that I would one day get out of there and, that I most certainly could and would not ever end up like him. 

Flash forward about 22 or 23 years, and for the most part, I’ve kept that promise. I’ve felt upset, misunderstood, and annoyed—but angry was not an emotion I felt often. A rarity. There were entire years—365 days—where I didn't experience any form of true anger. Yet, over the last four sessions with my therapist—anger seems to be what continuously comes up.

Had I been more angry than I realized?

“Why don’t you think you could let that go?”

“Because it makes me angry.”

In fact, I started using the word anger so many times that we pulled out a feelings wheel to get somewhere with the word itself.

As I stared at what seemed to lie beneath the word on the wheel, I still couldn't articulate the sort of anger I had. I felt like any of those feelings didn't indicate angry for myself. Let down would have gone under Sad for me, the same for Betrayal. So many words would be moved around if it was my own personal wheel.

I think, early on, I learned that the safest thing I could do was to stay calm if I feel any form of anger. As a teenager, there was a few time I heard his rage come out of me (at him, surprisingly enough). That's what I call my angriest anger. But when I'm angry about smaller aspects of my life—I refuse to raise my voice, I don't storm off, I don't blow up. I just take it for what it is. Quietly.

There was this other side of my dad—the one who could be completely even, steady, unbothered. (This never lasted long). If I could stay even and steady, then I'd be nothing like the angriest parts of him.

But trying to mirror that steadiness has also built a kind of wall between me and other people. I don't always understand why other get as upset as they do, or why certain things affect them so deeply. It's as if my emotional range got trimmed down for survival, and now I am beginning to realize how much I struggle to tell where calm ends and disconnection begins. Anger has a way of silently forcing its way out, even when you swear you don't feel it. It hides in disappointment, in exhaustion, in the tightness behind your jaw. It builds slowly—and apparently for myself, quietly and privately—until it turns into something else, something you can't name but that feels heavy all the same.

When my therapist asked what I thought was beneath all of it, I didn't have an answer for her. Because maybe what's beneath isn't that sadness or fear. Maybe it IS the anger I promised myself I'd never carry.

It's strange—how the very thing I feared becoming might be the very thing I need to understand. Not his version of it—the loud, violent kind—but mine. The kind that says, I was hurt. The kind that says, I deserved better.

How can someone feel like they're drowning in an unknown, unrecognizable anger—then tries to explain it?

Then my therapist will ask me, "how can we get you out of that feeling?" and every time, like we are reading a scene in a script over and over, I say, "I don't know." At this point, I'm truly sure she's over me lol. There's nothing more upsetting than not knowing how to pull yourself out of a negative feeling. Its infuriating. Or there will be times when she asks me how I feel about something that I hadn't thought about and I'll tell her I don't feel that anger anymore. Only to end up feeling this rage bubble up on that same thing two weeks later.

I think there's still so much processing to be done. So much to think about.

I think that's probably what the work looks like—sitting in between the spaces of calm and chaos, learning that I can hold my anger and that it doesn't have to mirror his to be legitimate or to be real. I'm learning to allow my inner child, the one I made that promise to, to see that anger doesn't always mean danger. Sometimes it means honesty, especially with yourself. It's the body's way of saying, that wasn't fair, or that hurt me, or I'm allowed to want more than just peace.

I don't think the way you output anger is genetic—or maybe it is, and it's on us to undo what we were taught or what we experienced as children. I will never be like him. But I do think I'm finally learning how to raise it at all.

So...what does it take to unlearn everything you were taught about anger, and start seeing it as something human instead of harmful? How do you rewrite the story of anger when it's still written in fear?