Anger After Thawing Out From the Freeze State
After years of having your boundaries crossed in many ways by many people and after playing the “nice girl” for decades, once you heal from your trauma, you are bound to feel angry.
For the trauma survivor, anger is quite justifiable. As women and as pleasers, we are told in countless ways that anger is a “bad” emotion and that we should never, ever feel it. In fact, abusive people will tell us that we should please and cater to everyone, like everyone, and always be kind and in service to everyone, no matter how blatantly offensive, sexist, emotionally, verbally, physically, or sexually abusive someone is toward us. We are “selfish” and “mean” if we have a reaction toward having our personal space violated.
The above picture sums it up. After you heal from trauma, you really don’t give a rat’s patooty what anyone deems acceptable or not. You simply DO NOT CARE anymore what Aunt Petunia or Pastor Carl or the old ladies who you book club with think. Anger is what our bodies offer up when something unsafe or offensive to our nervous systems comes into our personal space. It is our body’s way of protecting us, but when we decide to cry out in anger or threaten to tell someone about how we were harmed, we are often met with threats in return. We are met with laughter, mocking, and dismissiveness. We are told that we are overreacting and making “too” much of something that is obviously very harmful for us. Even if it is “only teasing”, if it hurts, then it hurts. It may not hurt someone else, but if it hurts you, then your boundaries were crossed. It’s about trusting yourself when trust in yourself was stolen from you. But now you can reclaim your self-trust.
When we have been traumatized or abused and are shamed into not fighting back in some way, our anger, fear, and fight or flight reaction is frozen in place. We were not allowed to fight back, to protest, to scream, or to be angry at all when we were mistreated and we had to instead put on a happy face and pretend everything was okay. In that pretending, our nervous systems learned to find a way to maintain homeostasis. Pleasing and fawning or even shutting down were protective measures we used in order for our bodies to maintain some kind of calm inside of a massive storm. These are adaptive coping mechanisms we learned to do to feel at least a little better. We learned to be perfectionistic, organized, to be a serving person, a great student or athlete, a drug addict, a compulsive liar, a depressed person, or a binge eater. Any of these coping strategies, although some of them more socially acceptable than others, helped us find a livable way to manage and cope with toxic environments where we felt alone and where things were unpredictable and scary.
Personally, I have had people literally siding against me with the people who abused me the most in my life. I have been shamed into being “nice” to people who battered, controlled, betrayed, cheated on, and verbally abused me. I have been told that their behavior was my fault and that if I would only do “X or Y” they would not treat me that way anymore. I definitely bought into this line of thinking for a long time. I thought everything was my fault and that I had control over people’s behaviors toward me and toward others, and that if I was a nice girl, they would stop abusing me. They didn’t. I was always nice and always good. I was definitely resentful much of the time and my anger did come out at times, but I maintained my “good girl” presence in order to hopefully affect change in some way. All it did was make them think I was weak. It did nothing to help me feel safe. I have also been told by siders of my abusers that they feel sorry for the ones who have abused me. While I have also felt a lot of faux compassion (it was a trauma response, a pleasing reaction in order to make sure I was not hurt again) for my abusers at times, I wanted people in my life to validate and confirm for me that I was the one who was hurt. It wasn’t about hating anyone in particular. It was the acknowledgment that I had a right to feel sad, scared, and angry for what had happened to me. Abusive people come in clumps, though, so they all sort of ban together in this silent agreement that they are just fine with how they act and that you or anyone who sees otherwise is the enemy.
Once healing from trauma begins, that justifiable anger and fight reaction arises with forcefulness. It in itself can be scary since we have been conditioned to think we are mentally unstable when we express these “extreme” kinds of emotions. People will often tell you right to your face that you are losing it or too emotional. Don’t worry. This is your overt anger hitting on their hidden anger or other buried or frozen emotions and they are projecting their shame about their own anger onto you. Anger is a fine emotion. It is necessary or we simply wouldn’t have it. We need it at times. It is what we do with it that determines if it becomes a “bad” thing or not. If we scream in our cars while driving, there is no harm in that. If we choose to beat someone up or to yell at strangers or close friends or family members, that is not so good. We can direct our anger in a healthy way. Expressing it and getting it out of the body is very important and very healthy. In fact, it’s when we keep it bottled up, like it is while it is frozen or when we choose not to notice it or express it, that long-term health consequences arise.
When anger is frozen due to our trauma, there is still a lot of stress happening inside of us. We just can’t really feel it because we distract ourselves with so many other things in life. As I mentioned up above, the coping mechanisms we put into place at a young age help us to avoid our emotions and to make us believe that we are “just fine.” This is because we feel a sense of “peace” when we get a good grade or we can check off something on the to-do list. When we eat for comfort, it calms our nervous systems so we continue to do that to avoid painful feelings of anger, sadness, fear, and shame. The same goes for shopping, sex, alcohol, sleeping excessively, and even suicidal ideations. If our bodies feel like they need us to get back into emotional balance so that they can do the job they are designed to do, they will “sabotage” our best efforts at staying sober, losing weight, or even staying awake. The truth is that these are not true easeful, calm, and peaceful feelings. These are diversions at best. There is still so much stress underneath the frozen anger and impulse to fight and that stress is the killer. Stress that is unhealthy is what leads to all the chronic illness, disease, and to death in our modern world. We are always under stress and we continually pile it on every day in a multitude of ways. It is compounding moment by moment and unless we heal the trauma underneath, it’s very hard to help out the life stressors that keep coming at us.
When you heal your past, you can heal your present and future. Digging into the painful wounds and liberating yourself from the stories you created from your trauma is the best way to find true inner happiness in your life. By knowing that you are worthy of good things instead of replaying the old limiting beliefs that trauma created, you are able to access a brighter future based on the truth of who you are instead of shame and lies.
