Anger and Sadness

* In case you didn’t notice, the ritual calendar has been updated and the 2019 version is now available.

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* You might miss this, as it is down at the bottom of the post. 1/20 – 1/21 Total lunar eclipse. (Super Blood Wolf Moon) Visible in all of North and South America and partially visible in Europe. See https://www.space.com/42830-supermoon-blood-moon-total-lunar-eclipse-2019.html The first moon the year is called the Wolf Moon because wolves howl at the moon with hunger. For information on Super Blood Moons, see  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/the-september-28-2015-super-blood-moon-full-eclipse/

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I was thinking how anger often masks sadness. If I am feeling angry and manage to stay with my feelings without acting on them in any way, I eventually feel the anger cracking. Tears start running down my face. I feel so hurt and sad that somebody could treat me like that – it’s painful in a way that anger is not.

I feel very vulnerable when I express my sadness. If I dare to let anybody know, I fear I will be hurt again. If I have been unable to protect myself in the past and “allowed” myself to be hurt, others will know and take advantage of my weakness. At times I am so afraid that I shake. It is far safer to show anger because anger can frighten people and make them stay away.

Either way, it is lonely, but anger provides a rush that makes me feel energized and gives me the hope that I can control others and prevent them from hurting me. As long as that adrenaline is flowing, I feel safe and protected.

At the same time, my anger  frightens me. I am not sure I can control it. It could go beyond protecting me into attacking others tooth and nail. It’s tricky. Too little anger and nobody would take me seriously. Too much and I might do real harm. I don’t like destruction and I do not want to kill or maim somebody or throw furniture around wantonly.

I know that these are old, old feelings. My anger, at best, could hurt somebody’s feelings. My body is no longer in shape to toss furniture around the room or do serious physical damage to a person. Rationally, I have nothing to fear from my anger, but not all of me knows that. Anger sure talks a good line, though! It’s got me fearing it could destroy the entire city.

Sadness – what am I sad about? Mainly death. The deaths of animals and children in the cult. Deaths in my family before we could resolve anything. Deaths of so many survivors, so many friends. The passing of still another year and knowing very few more are left to me.

I’m sad about lesser things, too. The cat I had to give away because he started to act viciously toward my other cat. The fact that it is raining and I cannot go do things in my garden. (Except I am glad for the rain.) I broke my favorite necklace. And the list goes on.

Now that I know what lies underneath my anger, I get angry much less often. Its as if the genie has been let out of the bottle and doesn’t want to go back in again. Anger just doesn’t work very well as a distraction – I am on to myself. And that’s okay with me. My sadness can’t hurt anybody, and grieving my losses lightens my burden in time. I feel calmer…and more real.

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Upcoming Holidays

January
1/20 St. Agnes’ Eve
1/20 Full moon
1/21 Martin Luther King Day
1/20 – 1/21 Total lunar eclipse. (Super Blood Wolf Moon) Visible in all of North and South America and partially visible in Europe. See https://www.space.com/42830-supermoon-blood-moon-total-lunar-eclipse-2019.html The first moon the year is called the Wolf Moon because wolves howl at the moon with hunger. For information on Super Blood Moons, see  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/the-september-28-2015-super-blood-moon-full-eclipse/

February
2/2 Candlemas/Imbolc/Satanic Revels
2/14 Valentine’s Day
2/18 President’s Day/Washington’s Birthday
2/19 Full moon
2/25 Walpurgis Day

March
3/1 St. Eichstadt’s Day
3/5 Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
3/6 Ash Wednesday/Beginning of Lent
3/17 St Patrick’s Day
3/20 Full moon
3/20 Spring Equinox
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
1/20 – 1/21 Tu B´Shvat (Celebration of spring)
1/30 Hitler named Chancellor of Germany
3/20 – 3/21 Purim (Deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman in Persia)
(Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes)

My Father’s Birthday

My father’s birthday is tomorrow. If he were alive he would be 108 years old. I simply cannot imagine that. I don’t think that’s odd; I doubt if anybody can imagine a parent living to 108.

I had a consistently unhappy relationship with my father.

For the first few years of my life, I hardly knew what he looked like, even though we all lived in the same apartment. He had not wanted children, and when my brother or I entered a room he was in, he was, he would get up and walk out. He just couldn’t bear to see us.

Years later, I understood. He had been abused like I was, and by many of the same people. Although he wasn’t aware of this, unconsciously he didn’t want to pass on the abuse. And I give him a lot a credit for that. But my mother yearned for children, and so my brother and I were born despite his wishes.

When he returned after the war, he showed interest in me. He thought I was bright and talented and that it was his position to correct the mistakes my teachers were making. If he saw something I wrote, he covered the page with dense red annotations. I had to rewrite it including all his corrections.

He also did intrusive sexual things to me. Dancing with me (and dancing too close). He instituted a formal kiss when we said hello or goodbye to either parent and held me really close when kissing me. Kisses on the cheek turned into kisses on the mouth and then to French kisses. As I got older, he did things like ask me to go to “Deep Throat” with him. He had never before suggested we go to a movie together.

That was the day life. Night life was, to say the least, not as delicate.

A the end of his life, he called me to him and said I was the only one he could trust to follow his wishes. He did not want extraordinary measures taken to prolong his life. However, he felt I needed to know that if I did what he wanted, it would be considered murder in the State we lived in. So I was given the choice of murdering him or of torturing him on his death-bed. Thanks, Dad! I did nothing, and he died shortly afterwards.

For many years I was enraged and wished he would die. When he actually did, I panicked. It felt like the world was about to end. I was afraid to go to his funeral, but my cousin gave me some tracks and I managed to get through it. I was a wreck for about two years afterwards.

Later, I figured out that he had wanted me to take over his role in the cult and that I needed to kill him to do so. No wonder I was such a mess.

As the years passed and I got more and more information about the hidden part of my life, I came to a different understanding of his behavior. In my mind, he changed from my persecutor to just another person who had been horribly harmed from childhood by the cult. Just another victim. My hatred diminished as my understanding grew.

Today, I feel really sad that he did not have the chance to remember and change his life. He tried, I know he tried, but he could not break the amnesia. There was no knowledge of the effects of childhood trauma, even severe trauma, in his life time. Nobody talked about it, nobody was aware of it. Nobody was a “survivor” — e.g., aware of their abuse. Nobody could meet another survivor and realize that they weren’t the only one.

I am so very grateful that ritual abuse is talked about today, even though it is often mocked and denigrated. If it were not for the influence of twelve-step programs and the women’s movement, nobody would have permission to talk about taboo personal experiences. They fostered an openness, a willingness to speak about previously unspeakable things.

And so, when my first memories came crashing over me, others were already talking about ritual abuse and multiplicity. On television, even. That gave me permission to take my memories seriously and gave me, instantly, a welcoming community. If my parents had lived to experience a community of ritual abuse survivors, who knows, they might have been able to renounce the cult and become survivors themselves.

If my father’s spirit is in a better place, I only hope he now knows he is no longer alone, has forgiven himself, and knows that my feelings toward him have changed completely.

That psycho b*tch in you?

I want to take a break from writing about therapy before plunging into discussing the therapy process itself. Boundaries, transference, counter-transference, termination; all those good things.

But for now I want to share this entry from Anna Kunnecke’s blog with you. Anna is a life coach who writes like a bandit — she makes me laugh and think at the same time. She calls her blog “Declare Dominion over Your Beautiful Life.” You will find it at http://www.annakunnecke.com/

Here she writes about anger, that fierce, scary, protective emotion. She talks about inviting anger to the dissociative table — an immensely useful concept for everybody, not just ritual abusive survivors or other multiples.

 

That psycho b*tch in you? You need her.

Good girls don’t get angry.
Just be kind.
Try to see their point of view.
Have some compassion.
Anger won’t help.
Just move on.

Any of these sound familiar? Well-intentioned bits of advice.

And totally misguided.

Imagine a great banquet hall inside yourself.  You’ve called a council.

All the various aspects of you are there — there’s the smart savvy you surveying the scene, and the frazzled you checking her phone, and there’s the tender little-girl you dreaming dreamy things.  The cackling crone is waving her cigarette wildly. The mom with the kind eyes is passing out snacks.  The snarly adolescent is ready to tangle.

All of these versions of you are ESSENTIAL. When we’re whole and healthy, all the different aspects of us are welcome at the table because they bring their own brand of wisdom and insight. But for most of the women I talk to, there are quite a few aspects missing from their inner council.  Maybe parts of you went into hiding because of trauma, or maybe parts of you just weren’t ever nourished or recognized so they’re standing shyly behind a curtain waiting to be welcomed in. Maybe pieces of you got fractured off in a time of great fear or shame, or maybe they just drifted off to contemplate peonies and they forgot to come back in from the garden. 
But you know who’s most conspicuously missing?

The powerful, loving, bad-ass presence of anger.

Too many little girls are taught to lock their anger away in a cage or in a closet.

Use your inside voice.
That is not nice.
No one will like you if you’re like that.
Use kind words.
Oh come on honey.
Be the bigger person.

Hang out on a playground and watch how grownups talk to little girls.  In a thousand subtle and blatant ways, girls get told that they are not allowed to be angry.

That their anger is dangerous.
Shameful.
Embarrassing.
And unattractive.

The messages continue into adulthood:
Shrill.
Nag.
Bitch.
Ballbuster.

And so the angry part of them goes deep into lockdown.

Anger is a powerful ally. It’s a signal that a boundary has been crossed, that something is happening that needs to be addressed.  It is there to keep us safe.  Just like fear, in its purest form, is always trying to keep us safe.

She is there to protect us.
To speak out against injustice.
To break the chains that need breaking.
To stand up for the little ones.

Without her, we agree to things we shouldn’t agree to.
We enter into contracts that rob us.
We put up with behavior that is abhorrent.
We make excuses for twisted patterns in ourselves and others.
We turn our eyes away from things that need to be seen.
We swallow truths that need to be spoken.

Anger is a loving guardian at the table, and she carries a big-ass sword.  We need her there, integrated and listened to.

The problem is, imagine taking any healthy loving human being and locking them up in a cage for 20 or 50 years.  Think how contorted she would get.  How desperate.  How filthy and furious and twisted.

This is what happens when we lock away our anger.

Instead of being a benevolent ally, our anger can feel like this evil force in us that makes us crazy or mean or spiteful.  (Not surprising — anybody would roar out of that cage with an unholy fury.)

And so my kind, loving, evolved, beautiful clients whisper to me that they’re so horrified when they find themselves getting so furiously angry.  Even with ALL THE yoga and meditating, dammit!!!

How they scream at their kids out of nowhere, leaving themselves appalled and shaken.
How they unleash on a rude customer service person.
How they nearly sabotage months of negotiations with a cold cutting comment.
How they take it and take it and take it and then they just explode.

They want to know how they can stop being angry.

But actually the way to feel better isn’t to avoid the anger — it’s to feel it all the way through and LISTEN to what it’s desperately trying to tell you.

The problem isn’t that they lost their temper.

The problem is that it took them SO LONG to lose their temper.

That anger is trying to show them where things have gotten out of alignment.  Our task isn’t to exile our anger even further — it’s to integrate her, to welcome her back to the table.  To give her a bath, and a safe place to sleep for as many days as she needs, and a return to her rightful place among the council.

Because with her benevolent protection, we’re infinitely stronger.  Safer.  Quicker to set boundaries and say no.  Quicker to cut cords that need cutting and keep dangerous people out of our inner circle.

And when we’re protected in this way, you know what happens?

We are kinder.  Clearer.  More loving.  All of our tenderness gets to bloom because we’ve got Anger standing there watching over us.  And the world could use more women blooming like that.

much love,  Anna

6/5/2015