I’ve been seeing the same therapist for over five years now, and sometime during my first year of treatment, we were talking about anger, seeing as how that has always been my primary issue.  He made the statement that anger wasn’t an emotion, it was a behavior.  Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, my first reaction was to get angry.  😆  I thought he was nuts.  “Of course anger is an emotion,” I thought (angrily), stalking to my car.  In my head I was screaming a line from one of my favorite NIN songs, “I Do Not Want This”:

DON’T YOU TELL ME HOW I FEEL!

It wouldn’t be for another two or three years and a substantial amount of ego-reduction and non-judgmental analysis on my part to understand that he was right.  Anger itself isn’t an emotion per se: it’s a defensive reaction that is the result of other emotions.  It’s the psyche’s way of attempting to prevent further emotional harm by scaring away the source of that emotional harm.

I understood both mine and other people’s knee-jerk response to the assertion that anger is not an emotion.  A friend gave the example of being angry after the hypothetical scenario of having one’s car keyed.  At first I agreed that that was a situation in which pure anger was appropriate, expected, and not covering up anything else.  My therapist’s words sat in my subconscious, though, and I found myself picking at that situation to see if, just maybe, there might be some other reason a person would be angry about having their car keyed.  It took place in the form of a hypothetical inner dialogue:

(discovers car has been keyed) Fuck!  What the fucking fuck?  Who fucking did this?

What are you angry about?

Somebody keyed my fucking car, what do you fucking think I’m angry about?

Why does that make you angry?

Because it’s a shitty fucking thing to do and now I have to pay to get my car fixed!  Why would someone do that??

It sounds like your feelings are hurt and you’re confused, and maybe scared about how to pay for things.

Well yeah!  (begins to cry)

It’s okay, I’d want to beat the shit out of someone right now too.

That’s probably an oversimplification of what might actually go down in someone’s head were they to discover their car had been keyed, but it’s a valid breakdown of what could potentially be going on in their heads that would be driving their anger.  Most people aren’t aware enough to have this kind of prescience regarding their inner processes, though, and it takes hard work to cultivate that awareness, as well as the inner dialogue processes necessary to analyze one’s inner workings.

Having had this realization, however, required me to analyze virtually every instance of anger in my life, both past and present.  What exactly was it that I was angry about, and why?  Asking myself those questions unleashed a flooding cacophony, the overall message of which was, “WE HAVE SO MANY REASONS TO BE ANGRY AND IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS, WHY ARE YOU EVEN ASKING THIS?”  I recognized I was dealing with a part of myself that had largely gone ignored most of my life and had become the equivalent of a painful, infected boil that burst on occasion because it wasn’t being tended to.  It needed acknowledgement and validation, because it had been told all its life that being angry was bad, and therefore it (me) was bad.

That would be a tender proposition, because it meant actually taking a good hard look at all of the completely valid reasons in my life why I would be angry.  In doing so, anger revealed its many faces to me.  Fear.  Sadness.  Grief.  Pain.  Bitterness.  Resentment.  Violation.  Confusion.  Hatred.  Panic.  Frustration.  Loneliness.  They were the feelings I have no doubt that the people around me as I was growing up were feeling, but because they had no coping skills, all they ever expressed was anger, often violently.  So that’s what I learned.

Seeing Anger’s face morph into the face of the other emotions it was disguising enabled a level of self-understanding, and therefore self-compassion, that was impossible as long as all I saw when I looked at myself was Anger.  That resulted in the suspension of self-judgment, which reinforced the understanding and compassion in a positive feedback loop.  Once I understood what I was actually feeling regarding any given situation, past or present, and why, it became easier to defuse potential anger and address the real source of emotional distress.

This is an exercise that has taken a lot of practice, which means making mistakes sometimes, mistakes that require the patience and forgiveness of the people around me.  They seem willing to give this to me so long as I apologize by repairing the damage and continuing to improve upon myself.  People are often willing to forgive a great deal from a person as long as they’re actually trying.  However, I live in perpetual fear that, due to the nature of my c-PTSD, someday I will be accidentally triggered into anger by something and wind up alienating someone close to me, simply because they’ve had enough.

Fear of abandonment is a major driving factor in my quest for self-improvement.  I know what it’s like to stand on the other side of a fence separating yourself from someone with profound, unaddressed mental health issues.  You know nothing they do is truly their fault, and yet you just can’t take it anymore, putting you in the position of leaving them there to wallow in their pathos, as a matter of self-preservation.  I don’t want to be that person.  I don’t want to put someone I care about and who cares about me in that position.  It would be tragic and would probably mean a quick death on my part, as it did for my own mother.

As such, I put a great deal of effort and energy into addressing what I know are my flaws, knowing that is an ongoing process that will never end.  I strive for progress, not perfection.  I also strive for fairness, which means being honest with myself about not just my flaws, but my strengths.  Honestly evaluating my strengths is just about as difficult for me as honestly evaluating my flaws, because focusing on the latter for so long has left me with an abysmal sense of self-worth.  In fact, this honest evaluation has left me with something of an inner division between what I rationally Know is my True Self, and what I feel emotionally about my Poisoned Self.

For that is how I now see the Old Me I am still trying so desperately to lay to rest: as having been poisoned by many sources over the course of my life.  Poison that changed my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors into something the Universe never intended.  Poison I am still trying to withdraw from my various wounds so that they may be healed.  Every time I identify bad mental programming and work to unlearn its lesson while learning a new and better one, I become more purified and stronger: like tempering glass.

As I purge myself of this inner miasma, my so-called true colors are beginning to show.  I am not always comfortable with this process, as people are attracted by those ‘colors’, and I am not used to the attention.  In fact, distantly past experience has made me wary of attention, for it sometimes came in forms that were traumatizing.  While part of me is happy for the process of becoming my True Self and wants to show themselves, another part of me just wants to hide.  I’m having to learn how to balance these two halves, allowing myself much-needed attention, but in limited and filtered doses.

It’s a struggle to show the faces that lie behind Anger’s face.  As much as most people dislike anger, it seems to be the one negative emotion they’re the most comfortable with expressing.  Show something else that isn’t positive, and most people seem to become quite uncomfortable.  As if they can’t handle your ‘realness’.  Personally, I no longer have a choice as to what face I show to people.  I am far enough along on my healing path that it’s painful for me to be disingenuous about how I feel now, or to express anger unless it is truly called for (which it almost never is).

Yet I still lack confidence when it comes to emotional expression, so I still have a tendency to hide.  Until the world is a more accepting place of people’s emotional states, that may just be how I live.  I will continue endeavoring to unmask Anger, though, if for no other reason than to make sure it no longer dominates my life.