#traumatic anger

[furiousgoldfish]

One of the issues you run into when you're not allowed to express anger as a child, is that you're no longer able to get angry. When you're in a situation that should evoke rage, you instead feel fear, anxiety, panic, or grief, emotional hurt and helplessness. You end up operating a body that cannot feel or express anger. The only times you do feel angry is when you're directing it at yourself, it comes as a form of self hatred, and desire to cause pain and injury to yourself. Because this is the only way you would have been allowed to be angry, only way it was safe, to direct it at yourself, same as everyone else is doing constantly, teaching you that it's normal and expected.

Growing up like this means that all of the anger from your childhood keeps getting stored into your body instead of externalized, and you still cannot get angry when the situation demands it. Instead, when you're being disrespected and injustice is served in your face, you can either feel helpless and lost, or the frustration you feel irritates you so much you cannot stand it. Your body is not used to feeling anger and doesn't know how to process it. Instead it feels like you're going to explode, restless, endlessly irritated and at a complete loss on how to handle it. Because you never learned how to handle anger, except to take it out on yourself, and you might be driven to just keep doing that, forever.

Taking a stand for yourself and confronting whoever deserved your anger might still feel terrifying and all of the insane things that happened to you as a result of childhood anger might get triggered. You might feel too frightened to confront them because you can imagine all sorts of ways it could come back to hurt you - this person could try to get you fired, for example. They might smear campaign you and get you evicted, they could threaten you with something or blackmail you, they could destroy something of yours, spread rumors, hold a grudge and do thousand times worse to you. Those are thoughts evoked by memories of childhood, where abusive parents threatened and did any or all of these things, including torture, in order to keep you from expressing anger.

However this person is hurting you right now, unprovoked, and getting no resistance. From that, they're learning that they can keep doing it, with zero consequences, because you've already been broken and cannot fight back. That is a dangerous situation to be in too, even if it is impossible to predict whether this person is insane like your parents and will try to get revenge for any bit of resistance for their abuse.

I had situations where I would be pushed over the edge and allowed my anger to come out at someone - and people would sometimes complain about it, but they would usually back off, and I would regain my peace of mind because I created a consequence for disturbing it. Anger, however, doesn't feel good. My body is not used to it so it makes me incredibly tense, stressed, frustrated and upset, and it doesn't go away for several days, even weeks sometimes. Because scratching the surface of it evokes the repressed childhood anger which is almost unbearable with how giant it is.

Human body can learn to process anger, it can feel better, more powerful and more in control because of it. It can protect you without inflicting damage to others. It doesn't make you anything like your abusers, who let their anger out at someone who wasn't their equal, had no way to fight back, and did not deserve any of it. Your anger creates boundaries that keep you safe, it doesn't exist to torture others for existing.

It's easy to fall back into the place where you don't want to be angry, and try to be accommodating and allowing of injustice, just so you don't have to feel frustrated and afraid. I often fall back on it too, just wanting to live and have peace. But life around other people often doesn't allow it, and sometimes anger is necessary to send a message of what boundaries will not be crossed without a consequence. Anger is not a bad feeling, it is an act of self love. It comes out to let you know that you've been treated unfairly and it's there because it's telling you that you matter. That treating you unfairly is something to get mad about.

[borderlineangel222]

i’m afraid that one day my anger will overshadow the little love i still have left for the world

[riversidekid]

[hajihiko]

Hold me back 😡😡😡

[nabtime]

Okay hear me out. Fenton parenting “i support my son being trans but i draw the line at him being a ghost” type situation yeah? Yeah. So like.

They still vivisect him and all that. But also give him top surgery. Since they’re already there and all.

Do you see my vision

[spillsways]

spillways really is THAT song for me. like the whole “fuck forgiveness let yourself be bitter and you’re allowed to feel that way AND it’s okay to be angry and even though you try to bury that shit deep inside of you and move on IT’S OKAY TO LET IT OUT and be PISSED” vibe of the song hits directly home. that shit really does just resonate so much with my trauma

[etteraths]

[small-but-mightyy]

[i3utterflyeffect]

Imagine if Mango goes up to c!Alan and is just like "hey what the fuck did you do??" Just having someone directly confront him about what he did.

i've just been imagining this for several days i'm not gonna lie

i don't think this is even king merc au anymore but it's just. so funny.

reblogs > likes

[bpdohwhatajoy]

It’s so irritating that people view intense anger as an edgy emotion. Some of us have ptsd, Jeremy. That doesn’t make us edgy 15 year olds. Be glad you haven’t experienced enough shit to get to the point where you’re perpetually angry.

[borderlineangel222]

i never felt loved by my family which is why i always searched for it in the worst places because when you’re about to die of thirst, even a drop of poison tastes like heaven.

[yuricin]

"they're a minor" "they're just a kid" being a minor isn't an excuse to abuse and traumatize people, dumbass. you're too focused on the fact that they're a kid and not holding them accountable instead of paying attention to the person who they hurt.

minors are just as capable of abusing other minors and even adults like anyone else. but this shit is always glossed over because "they're just a kid"

and just because someone is older doesn't mean that they're not capable of being abused by someone younger.

[adhdslugcrimes]

Wally: so... Wanna fix those anger issues?

Dick: I don't have anger issues.

Wally: look at me, do I look like Bruce too you? No. So stop lying, I know you better than anyone else.

Dick: okay, I don't want to fix them.

Wally: because of Bruce?

Dick: because of B.

[donut-entendre]

The real problem with the writing team for rvb is nobody has any GODDAMN RAGE in their heart about what the military does to people

[thechosenanubis]

Nina is actually a better person than people give her credit for. Like at the beginning of S1, I had the same scenario with Patricia happen to me: new girl at a new school, trying to make friends, and this other girl in my class didn't like my ~vibes~ or whatever and started saying nasty stuff and trying to isolate me. (thankfully in my case no close friends were kidnapped by secret societies in search for eternal life 💀 ) So not only i can sympathize with her situation, but even relate to it.

And what I don't see talked about enough is ( or if people did, I haven't seen those posts) calling out Patricia's behavior for what it really was: bullying. Keep in mind here, that I understand where Patricia's behavior is coming from, since she's being gaslit like crazy. But that still doesn't make her behaviour towards Nina acceptable or excusable.

And I wouldn't have blamed Nina if she refused to accept Patricia's apology, because is not a victim's responsability ( only their choice) to forgive their bully.

Still, Nina forgave Patricia because she's good like that ( and probably didn't want to break the already fragile ecosystem of the house with more hostility even if it was within her right to keep a grudge and refuse Patricia's apology. )

What i'm trying to say, Nina is a good person, flawed but good.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[problemnyatic]

You have to choose love. I'm sorry, I know. I know it hurts. I know you're upset, you deserve to be outraged. Your pain is real and deeply unjust. But you have to. You have to choose love.

There's too much hurt in the world. Too much bitterness. The powerful have built an inconciecable machine that turns all human suffering into unimaginable wealth, and it us hurting all of us. It has taught us to hurt each other.

We can't let it continue. We can't keep lashing out at each other. We can't keep making enemies of our siblings in pain. We have to choose love. We have to.

We have to forgive each other. Not entirely, we don't have to forget our pain, but we have to forgive enough to see each other as more alike than separate. We have to forgive each other for being taught to cause hurt.

I'm not your enemy. You aren't mine. There are people poisoning our planet en masse, killing our mother earth, erasing whole cultures, stripping human rights to keep us disempowered. We can't let ourselves become each other's enemies, even when we hurt each other.

Your pain is real. You deserve better. We all do. But we'll only achieve better if we save our ire for the real bigger fish. We can't keep fighting over the details, we all already agree on the most important part: we deserve better.

Language will always be muddy, we won't all speak the same meaning into the same words. We're gonna step on each other's toes, hurt each other deeply, even when we mean to be gentle. We're going to make mistakes along the way, we'll be misguided. But we have to forgive. We have to choose love.

I know this is preachy, I know this is vague, I know this is corny. I know. I'm just.. scared. I'm terrified. Every day I see so many like-minded people on here who would sooner tell one another to kill themselves than agree to fight for our common causes because of deeply held presumptions of character built on superficial things. I see people declaring anyone who finds joy in the wrong things, the wrong labels, to be as good as an abuser, as the very people who've put the boot on our necks in the first place.

I see so many people see the state of our world, the abysmal status quo, and respond by pouring a deep righteous passion into delineating who of us is a worthy enough aly and who is effectively a walking incarnation of their ideological enemy.

We'll never be able to achieve the unity we need to take our rights back if we're so quick to make teams and choose sides. I know, I know that a lot of these things actually matter, I'm not trying to dismiss the significance of any of these things.

What I'm saying is that, despite these conflicts, we need to swallow our differences and choose to love each other enough to focus not on the ways in which we are divided, but on our unity in oppression. Every LGBT person is threatened by any of us having our rights taken, we are a family. Every internet user, proship, antiship, vanilla, kinky, artist, lurker, all of us are threatened by attacks on privacy, by the advancement of censorship of any kind.

We can sort out our grudges when there's time. But I can't help but think too much is too dire for us to let ourselves choose to fight each other as enemies when we're all in such similar need of better.

We need humility in the face of error. We need to let go of the fear of being wrong, of having believed the wrong things, fought for the wrong causes, of having hurt other people. We need to release our guilt, for no amount of it will ever heal a wound inflicted, reverse an error made. We need to see even our enemies as human, even the worst of us as human. We need to remember that we, and others, can always make a choice.

Everything is so, so goddamn scary. It's hard to know what to believe, and who to trust, and who and what and where is safe. And I think that the answer has to be love. We have to love recklessly, we have to be kind no matter what. We have to trust ourselves to change, to be capable of change, of being accepted for changing, we have to trust each other to mean well, to accept us when we try to improve. We have to give second chances, we have to seek the humanity behind each other's actions, and seek to connect with it.

I love you. I want to make a better world with you. Even if we believe different things, I want your life to be easy. I want food in your fridge, I want joy to be an old friend you can always count on being in your daily life. I want rest for you. I want sleep to come easy, I want you to feel safe. I want you warm in the cold, and cool in the heat. I love you.