Can’t Sleep

And it’s 6am again and I’m still awake and not at all sleepy.  I was awake until 4:25am yesterday morning, and 6am the night before.   I don’t know why I can’t sleep.   I don’t think I’m feeling particularly stressed but then again, anxiety is part of my ‘normal’,  so may have be slightly peaked without my awareness.    I haven’t done much again today and once again,  feeling guilty for being so lazy.

 

Anger

 I realized that I don’t really lose my temper with people.     I don’t express anger.    I’ll feel irritated and annoyed but I supress anything more than that.   I think it goes back to never being allowed to express emotion/anger as a child.   But I also have a fear of totally losing it.   Of losing control.  I’ve felt a surge of anger that is frightening.    And I worry that if I ever were to walk that path, I might cross the line into violent behaviour.    I don’t know why I feel this fear.   It’s got to have something to do with core beliefs.   Like there’s a part of me that thinks that deep down I’m a bad person.    I wonder, does ‘not good enough’ go along with ‘I’m a bad person’?    Or maybe it’s just that anger has been supressed for a lifetime in an emotional pressure cooker and feels too scary to embrace .   

I also realized that I generally think of anger as being that state of having ‘lost it’.  The point at which one yells and has a tantrum of sorts.   I do lose my temper at times.  The dogs sometimes push my buttons by misbehaving, and cause me to start yelling like a banshee.   It happens when I have too much bottled up inside.   Too much stress.  When the cap comes off the pressure cooker.   It’s that lifetime habit of suppressing emotion.  The pressure builds up and then I’m yelling to blow off steam.     I remember an incident at school when I was in either grade three or four  (grades 3 and 4 were in the same classroom with the same teacher).   I don’t remember the particulars other than that we were looking at photos of I think butterflies or bugs of some kind.  I have this strange phenomena where I get a very strange feeling in the middle of the palm of my left hand  (and sometimes the right).   It’s hard to explain but it’s like something is pressing into the palm of my hand.  It’s not painful but it’s excruciatingly ….. I can’t explain it ….. suffice to say it’s intolerable.  Anyway,  things like bugs or dead things can trigger it.   And I remember that being part of the scene.   I think I may have become antagonized because my hand was bothering me, and I suspect I was told there was nothing wrong.   Well the lid came off the pressure cooker that day.   I lost it.   I remember throwing the book with the offending pictures on the floor and screaming and screaming and trying to get away from my hand.   I don’t remember what happened afterwards.   But in retrospect it astonishes me that no one stopped to think,  ‘this child is troubled’,  ‘this child needs help’.   How could no one recognize that I was a traumatized child?    Shy.  No friends.  Poor student.  And then a meltdown of epic proportions.   Why didn’t anyone care about me?   Was I that unimportant?

I was talking with Sean about anger and was somewhat taken aback with the notion that anger can be an appropriate emotional response.   In fact,  a normal response.   Huh.  I always thought of anger as something to avoid.    Sean pointed out that if someone violates my boundaries,  the appropriate response is anger BUT sometimes we are not in a place where it is safe to express that anger.   For example,  if as a child, I had expressed anger towards a parent,  how would that have been received.   It would have triggered aggression directed at me.  We were not allowed to express anger.

There was a weird conflicting message though.   I can remember times when my Dad was shutting everything down  (No More Discussion  >  Case Closed) and my mother saying,  “let her speak”.   But at the same time she would dismiss my concerns if I came to her for emotional support.   I think she said,  “let her speak”, not to support me, but to bug him.   It was a passive aggressive way of criticizing him.   Of making herself better than him with the “suggestion” that he was the ogre.    What did I learn?   I learned that  MY emotions caused conflict between my parents.  I think this is where the core belief of “it’s my fault” comes from.   And the keep everyone happy,  be the moderator,  keeper of the peace persona was born.

Anger Vs Aggression   >>>  Acting on anger is aggression.   Anger is the emotion and aggression is the behaviour expressed.    I frightens me that I can understand a crime of passion where someone is so angry that they lose control and cross the line.  It makes me think that could happen to me.   What does that say about me?   Do we all have the capacity of crossing the line into violent behaviour?    Thinking back,  I think I  felt that my father could lash out, even though he never did.  Except for one time that I can recall.  My sister and I were playing with a toy and arguing over it and my Dad totally lost it and grabbed the toy and smashed it.    I think in my family anger was always expressed as aggression of some sort.    Smashing the toy.   Yelling.  Parents arguing.   Verbal assaults.   

 I learned that conflict leads to anger which leads to confrontation which leads to aggression.   And thus my fear and avoidance of all confrontation.

So the next question in our discussion was  ‘what does anger look like?’,  to which my inside my head voice said,  ‘why does Sean ask such difficult questions?’   I think I don’t know because I think I only see it when it’s the blow up.   So that brings us to the realization that we may not recognize anger in ourselves until it reaches a certain threshold.   And suddenly I had one of those dog/human behaviour cross-over ah-ha moments.   “I know this “.   I wrote an article years ago about how we as society have become immune to the early signs of aggression/violence.   The subject of the article was positive vs punitive training methods.   In the article I ask the question:  “Have we become so entrenched ... so tolerant .... so desensitized .... so brain washed ... that we can't even recognize violence anymore? Has our definition of violence become so diluted that we only recognize violence in its most extreme examples?”   I go on to say, “We've become so desensitized to violence that we don't even recognize it most of the time. Only the most extreme, gruesome crimes against animals & humanity register as violence in our minds. There is a big difference between yelling at someone, pushing/shoving them, a fist fight, and pulling out a knife and stabbing them. ALL of those things are aggressive acts, and yet, we only really take notice when it escalates to a major fight or a stabbing (shooting etc. ... fill in the blank). And sadly, the same is true for violence/aggression towards our animal companions. Choke chains, prong collars, shock collars, yank & jerk training techniques, suppression, intimidation, dogs working out of fear of punishment .... it's all varying levels of aggression to which we have become so desensitized, that we no longer recognize it as violence” …… “Perhaps the problem is that we live in a very hectic, frustrating world. Many of us experience some level of agitation and frustration on a daily basis. Perhaps this underlying agitation has lowered society’s threshold to violence. Perhaps too many of us are walking the fine line between frustration and aggressive outbursts. Perhaps this is why so many are eager to embrace punitive dog training methods.  But there is a danger .......”    I conclude the article with the statement that if we live in a place where aggression is not the norm,  then when/if anger is triggered we may escalate our behaviour into the less intensive forms of aggression such as yelling, pushing, or with our dogs, physical corrections.   But if we already function in that space where yelling, pushing, verbal assaults (or in the case of our dogs … physical punishments) are the ‘norm’,  then where will we escalate to when our buttons are really pushed?     Thresholds.  We need to be sure that the threshold at which we recognize anger is early enough for us to intervene and use its motivation in a positive way.   IOW before we lose it!

For me I know that if I’m tired, or frustrated/agitated,  if my patience is worn thin,  I’m closer to the threshold for anger.   As always,  the more I think,  the more I question.  Could this be related to a boundary issue?   Is my patience worn thin because a boundary has been crossed?    Sean says that when we feel violated or pushed to the limit,  this is where anger can be triggered as a response to an injustice or something that isn’t fair.   Anger is a motivating emotion and most people when they feel anger, feel a need to do something.   And to that end we can use anger to motivate assertive behaviour.  

There are different behavioural responses to the emotion of anger >  aggressive;  passive;  assertive.   Aggressive = respecting ones’ own rights, but not the rights of others.   Passive = I only respect your rights, but not my own.   Assertive = I respect your rights but I also respect my own rights.   This is where I fall down in the process.   It’s not that I don’t respect my own rights ….. I don’t think I have any rights.   I fall squarely into the “passive” definition,  and as such become a doormat for people to walk all over. 

Sean says the goal is to use anger to motivate assertive behaviour such as setting a boundary.   And that once we set a boundary and someone listens to it and respects it, the anger dissipates.  In this way, anger can be a helpful emotion. 

Being the recipient of a lot of anger growing up, and not being able to stand up for myself and say,  “Hey don’t speak to me like that”,  taught me that I had no recourse against anger.   It taught me to be passive.   In response to anger aimed at me, and anger felt inside of me.

I think I still have a lot of emotion tied up in not being able to undo the past.  It was what it was, the past is the past, I can’t change it.   I have a lot of emotion tied up in this sense of being deprived of the opportunity to be whoever it was that I was supposed to be (born to be),  or to be more emotionally stable.   Sean suggested that some of that emotion might be anger.   And when I think about it, I think he may be right.   In the  past I have  hypothesized that my depression might be an expression of grief.   Grieving a life lost.   Isn’t anger one of the stages of grief?

Sean says the challenge with trauma is that it’s like someone is holding you back > like there’s a rope attached to you and holding you back only you don’t know the rope is there so you think,  ‘what’s wrong with me?’,  ‘why can’t I keep up,  move forward,  fit in’.     An a natural response to this would be to feel anger.   To  feel that what I went through wasn’t fair or right.   And ….. I should be angry.    The question is what do I do with that anger that lurks beneath the surface eating away at my soul.