Anger Was Only Secondary

Anger Was Only Secondary

Anger was only a secondary emotion to all the sadness and fear in my life. I was frequently sad from the time that I could recognize the feeling. I first recognized sadness when I was three. Growing up, I thought that I was a sad baby until my dad and other relatives told me that I was the happiest baby that they had ever seen. I was also frequently fearful, and this emotion seemed to run concurrently with sadness. I was a very anxious child. I first recognized the emotion of fear when I was three.

I had a keen awareness that I experienced both fear and sadness simultaneously on the same night with my mother when she sent me into a dark kitchen to retrieve a bottle from my baby brother. I did not like being in the dark, and instead of my mother getting up to turn on the lights for me, I sensed that she sent me into the dark on purpose. My mother could be mean that way. She should have known that an accident was bound to happen, and that is exactly what did happen. In fact, she warned me before going into the kitchen not to make a mess, but I did. I knocked a pail of water off of the table. Water splattered everywhere.

In the midst of all that, I experienced great shame. I remember the feeling of heat flushing all over my face. I could not bare to take myself into the room with my mother now. How was I going to clean that water up in the dark, get my brother’s bottle from the stove, and run back out of the kitchen in the dark? I was sure that some hideous shadow monster was going to reach out and grab me. My fear of the dark was enormous. I remember my heart beating so fast that the sound of it was just as deafening as the ominous sound of the dark. However, I was quickly jerked back into the present moment as I became more aware that my mother had heard all the commotion. For some reason, I feared my mother greatly.

Needless to say, I experienced an array of emotions that my little body could hardly handle alone. I needed comforting, but that was not going to come from my mother. So I remember bracing myself to face the dark. I grabbed the bottle and ran back to the bedroom from the kitchen in a dress that was soaked with water that drizzled down my legs. I nearly fell trying to get into the light of the room because I was so afraid from thinking that the darkness was chasing me.

Instead of providing me with comfort, my mother scolded me by backing me into a corner of her bedroom and lashing out at me with her verbal assault of words and hands. I was terrified to say the least, and I remember curling up into a heap of flesh daring myself not to cry but being unable to control myself. I did the best I could by whimpering my way through my mother’s tirade. When it was all over, I felt anger, but I willed myself not to express it. I knew to do so meant a far worse punishment. So I stuffed that anger down into the pit of my being as I would learn to do so many times in the future.

Tears: Often An Expression of Anger But So Much More

Many times, I would become so angry as a child that I would cry. I would literally lose my ability to articulate my expressions with words, and I would just cry. For that, I would be faced with ridicule and taunting mainly by my mother. She always laughed when I would cry. She would also mock me. Many years later when other narcissists would laugh at me and mock me too, I would fight to withhold the tears, but I could never stop thinking of the correlation with my mother. She was mean enough to force me to tears, and so were these narcissists.

To my mother, my tears were perceived as weak. My show of tears meant that she had definitely inserted herself under my skin, and she took pleasure in this. Years later, this would be the case with other narcissists. They, too, would view my tears with pleasure and realize that they had power over me because of my display of emotions. I am not sure what they thought those emotions were, but inside I would feel the anger within me boiling over into finely cooked rage that became distant, silent, and simmered into what felt like nothingness.

It was when I reached this stage of feeling nothing because the rage within me had become hidden that unsuspecting listeners would receive my verbal assassination of sarcastic eloquence suited for their destruction. Even my dad said that I had a sarcastic wit like he had never experienced, and if he did not find it so funny, he would have taken me seriously. In fact, others have told me the same … that I do not give way to a visible anger all that well because the fact that I can cut a person with my words and smile at the same time makes it all humorous but fearful when I easily break back into a serious face. To be honest, I am not sure what that is about or even where I learned it, but reaching that place is a sign to others that I am fed up.

Nevertheless, when I am deeply hurt, I cry. The anger I have often expresses itself in tears. Even the rage I have experienced translates into body-racking sobs. It is like a great tension building into a bursting well of water that reaches a crescendo and gushing violently out into the open drowning everything in its path. Sometimes I ache with tears. The pain of those tears pulsates my entire being, and all I can do is cry, mourn, and grieve while letting go of the anger. When it subsides, I feel a release and I feel relieved as well.

Anger Was Only Secondary

Anger was only secondary but it manifested the great hurts, disappointments, trauma, sadness, depression, anxiety, fears, resentment, and bitterness that I harbored and held within me that I was often not allowed to express. I could express nothing really because all of my emotions were scrutinized and held up to a microscope for later parental discussion. Anything but a remote sign of calmness was the only acceptable sign of emotion I was allowed to display. I could not even display happiness without immediately being forced into having the smile forced from my face via a snide remark or devaluing comment.

The anger and rage I held onto as a child was only secondary to the true emotions that I often harbored, and I felt them all as distinctively different. There was a time, however, when anger and rage nearly destroyed me because I did not understand how to navigate it for my good, and I did not understand why my parents or other adults would not allow it for expression. It ultimately needed to be acted out and expressed for injustices, but that was never allowed, and for that I suffered greatly. The progression of that anger held within would seep through my pores rendering me as a crazed child becoming ever more emotionally stunted to the point that I turned inward and no longer used my voice.

At some point, I remember a time when my voice became chained, closed, and shut down into oblivion, and I accepted a life of mutism. This was during a time that I also was forced into a class at school for a speech impediment. Anger had locked up my voice chaining me to a time of complete solitude, but nothing could prepared me for the future of the anger to come. Although anger was only a secondary emotion, it made itself a primary function in my life.

Stay tuned for more to this story in the next post.