Guided Writing Sessions

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Guided Writing Session: April 20

Thanks to all that joined the session.

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Writing Prompt 1: How do you respond to envy and jealousy when they arise in personal relationships? Be specific.

Writing Prompt 2: Can you communicate anger skillfully with the people you care about? If so, how, when, and with whom? If not, why not?

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  1. Can you communicate anger skillfully with the people you care about? If so, how? If not, why not?

Speaking my anger authentically and well is hard with anyone.  It’s more difficult when I care what they think of me.   If I fear losing them, showing my anger seems dangerous.  I numb my anger when this sense of peril overwhelms me, 

Doing so requires no consciousness or thought.  It’s a gift from my amygdala.  It makes survival possible, but has a hidden user’s fee.  Dissociation keeps me stuck in limbic system limbo, feeling separate, not only from others, but from myself.   This reactivity adds to my pile of unprocessed feelings.  

Blocking my emotions doesn’t stop them— they just go underground, resurfacing when life recalls them for me.  Life keeps giving me chances to recall and understand my anger.

When I was four, a confluence of factors caused me to conflate anger and abandonment.  I watched my mother caught up in a praxism of anger. She was the person I looked to for centering.  Instead she was in chaos.  I understand now why she couldn’t function.  My younger brother was trapped in the fire.  

Developmentally, I wasn’t capable of empathy.  I wanted her attention. I saw her hands, fisting themselves.  I sensed she wanted to hit something.  Her face contorted into itself, puckered.  Her eyes wore a shine.  She was shaking. Tears streaked her face, as snot dripped from her nose.   She bolted wild-away, to where I couldn’t see her.  There was the sound of breaking glass and screaming. 

She’d tried to get to my brother and they restrained her, as I understand it, now.  She was taken away in an ambulance.  I didn’t see her for nine months.   I was placed in fostercare.  I didn’t understand.  I felt abandoned.   

In retrospect, I see that I was angry, but not conscious of it.  I didn’t know how to identify my feelings, I just felt them.  I had thoughts, but they were limited by my being child.  They told me my sense of flailing and snarling was too dangerous to mirror.  Anger took all my knowns away, leaving me motherless. 

I see this childish thinking in most of my failed relationships.  I have a habit of abandoning my feelings when they approach anger.  This has been my modus operandi —a strange dance of appeasement, done in unfelt-fear and anger.

Anger’s the emotion I’m the most afraid of .  I try to smother it with my shame.  I distance myself, seeing anger as alienness.  I need to release these defenses, and see anger as my own.  That owning grounds me.  It roots me in adulthood, so slower is possible. Time turns around; I parent myself with grownup skills instead of child, pretending.  

I can relax into my anger, feeling grounded in myself even as I open to it.  When I’m in this state, which some call the ventral vagal, I have a sense of flexibility and flow.  I speak with a sense of being grounded in my own agency, capable of engaging with others.  I feel both safe and social. My anger isn’t overwhelming, it’s simply energy.  This sense of connection, to myself first, then to others, makes all the difference.   

When I pause, noticing my sensations/feelings as I slow my breath, I can step out of the reactivity I often live as.  Without this simple practice, I operate out of my amygdala as a survival reflex.

When I’m present with anger consciously, I see its impulse to protect me.  I admit I’m feeling threatened, expressing this as words rather than acting-out.  My ability to verbalize varies with my sense of safety.  

I find a strange humor in my history.  I’ve taught anger management for Child Protective Services clients.  I presented the cognitive/behavioral interventions I learned in grad-school.  I wasn’t rooted enough in my life-lessons to integrate my heart and adult awareness into my teaching.    I intellectualized my content, as protection from my history.  I lived as distance,  

The curriculum  I taught couldn’t change me, if I didn’t connect to my anger.  I expressed its energy in a dissociative way.  Any appeasement I offered grew out of overwhelm instead of authenticity.  I wasn’t aligned with, or within myself.  

Part of my early training was gestalt, designed to free my anger.  I yelled at empty chairs, beating at them with foam bats. Sometimes I was able to be present as emotion, but I couldn’t do it consciously, as intention.  Any release this expression gave me soon evaporated.  It felt unconnected to the whole of my life.  I had no idea how to integrate it. 

This practice of spiritual writing brings me that sense of integration.  It is a pause of gathering my many selves, and listening to them.  It lets me carry my compassion to the relationality of me as well as towards others.  It merges my body, mind, and the betweenness of them I call spirit.

Relaxing into anger (Gabor Mate’s term) seems possible when I step into connection.  To do this I must notice my separateness as body.  This is easiest to do with breath, or as the first qigong practice I learned, embracing the tree.  In this position, my spine feels in a line, with my coccyx tucked under.  My legs are shoulder-width apart, with my knees bent, each slightly pushing outward while my hips mirror this opening.  I feel energy, spiraling from the earth into my feet and up my legs.   It unites, rising up my spine.  

Doing this, my shoulders relax.   My arms mimic hugging a tree so large, there’s gap between my hands.   My palms are heart-level while my elbows hover near my ribs.  I have a sense of opening.  My chin slightly tucks under, a smile across my lips, and my tongue touching the palate of my mouth.  I feel rooting, and connection.  I stay in balance, anchored as this posture ecosystem, even if larger, stronger people try to knock me over.  I’m rooted both externally and internally.  I can feel and think at the same time.

 

RUBY has reacted to this post.
RUBY

Thanks for this, Devon!  You hit the mark in this passage:  "I can relax into my anger, feeling grounded in myself even as I open to it.  When I’m in this state, which some call the ventral vagal, I have a sense of flexibility and flow.  I speak with a sense of being grounded in my own agency, capable of engaging with others.  I feel both safe and social. My anger isn’t overwhelming, it’s simply energy."  That is the practice, as difficult as it can be sometimes. Stuffing it only results in sickness (emotional, physical), as you know.  I am glad you are moving toward "owning" your anger as part of what makes you authentic, and less afraid.

M   

DevonB and RUBY have reacted to this post.
DevonBRUBY

 Writing to that question was so helpful in connecting consciousness to my experience.  Anger feels like such a different emotion as when I identify with it and my overtones of fear fade.  What a difference in perspective!  It’s a real incentive to practice. Thanks so much, Mark.

RUBY has reacted to this post.
RUBY