Fear of anger
I just joined Instagram.
I followed Nate Postlethwait. He had a post up that really hit home. The first image stated, in part, “The person who is always afraid someone’s mad at them has often grown up focusing on others’ needs being met out of their survival. They were shamed for needing help.”
It occurred to me that this is me. I am always afraid people are mad at me. I walk on eggshells around my partner, thinking they’re mad at me. I assume that people I know aren’t speaking to me or responding to my messages because of something I did to anger them.
The reality is that even though my parents, particularly my mother, taught me that I had the power to make her angry, and that I was always making her angry, I don’t really have that power.
Can I do things that anger my partner? Certainly. But it’s not their baseline emotion towards me. Instead, their baseline emotion towards me is love.
Can I do things that anger my friends and acquaintances? Sure. But in reality, I’m probably not on their minds 100% of the time, and their baseline emotions towards me are usually positive, or they would not be friends with me.
Instead, my fear of anger is poison that my mother fed me for eighteen years. It poisoned my thoughts. It poisoned my emotions. It poisoned my self-esteem.
Also, I don’t tend to get angry very often. Irritated, yes. Frustrated, yes. Fed-up, yes. Angry, not so much. It takes a lot to truly anger me. I am angry at my parents for the abuse they rained down on me in childhood and for the neglect and abandonment they perpetrated on me. Other than that, I don’t really get angry, except when someone has violated my trust in some way. I have been thinking about this for a while, and I really can’t think of any other situation in which I have gotten truly angry in years. Usually, it’s anger at my partner for violating my trust by disrespecting my ownership of my belongings. Other times I’ve been angry in the past were for similar violations by a person or an entity, like a business.
There are, of course, some times in the past when maybe I should have been angry, but wasn’t. Instead, that potential anger turned into guilt, self-recrimination, depression, and anxiety. Times like when I was demoted or when I was expected to do the impossible at work and was punished for not being able to deliver. Also, it took my father dying and some spectacularly poor treatment by his second family to rouse my anger at him and my mother.
I think maybe I need to work on my anger, but not in the “anger management” way most people think of working on anger. Instead, maybe I need to allow myself to get angry when it’s appropriate to do so. That’s going to require me to recognize when I should be angry, though, so it’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to require me to work on not feeling guilty for feeling anger.
Breaking the cycle
A later image in the same post said, “A cycle breaker is one who received the same trauma their parents did and chose to face it head-on so they don’t repeat it. They’re wise enough to recognize the potential to do what was done to them and tender enough to sacrifice their comfort in order to break the cycle and heal.”
I have also been painfully aware that what my parents did was not right, and I have promised myself from a young age that I would not do the same things they did. Somehow, I grew up to not only know right from wrong, but I also managed to not absorb my mother’s inherent bigotry. I am not sure how I evaded that, except that I read widely. My mind was opened by books.
I have always wanted children, but I never became a parent. In some ways, I’m glad that I didn’t have the opportunity to visit horrors upon another human being, all unwitting, but in other ways, I think I would have made a good parent. Some of my siblings have had kids. I don’t know them or their kids, but I feel very sorry for those children, knowing what I do know of their parents. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to act as a counter-example, but I can’t carry guilt about not being there for people I don’t really know.
My partner often acts as though they are still a child, but they’re old enough to be on Medicare. I recently had a long discussion with them about my CPTSD, and I told them I think that maybe they have CPTSD, too. Their response was something along the lines of, “Probably, but it’s too late for me to change.”
This makes me sad and it also makes me a bit hopeless about whether our relationship can really improve. I have been working on myself for decades, and I don’t feel like the work will be done any time soon, but I haven’t given up. My partner, on the other hand, thinks they’re too old to change. They’re profoundly uninterested in changing.
I know that some things that negatively affect our relationship are things that I need to work on. Whether or not that will be enough is still yet to be seen. I hope it is enough, but I can’t help feeling that I can’t carry the burden alone. But I’m also afraid of leaving and losing.