Tag Archive for: anger

A Thanksgiving Blessing Rose Out of a Thanksgiving Rejection.

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One year and nine months after my sister Sherry’s death, I was rejected by those I had once considered family. I was the only one my sister’s family excluded from the Thanksgiving guest list.

Sherry was my only sibling. Being excluded from the holiday table we’d shared my whole adult life was an abandonment from family that I knew too well. It triggered the childhood wounds surrounding paternal sexual abuse and maternal abandonment around it.

The blessing is, my mother rejected their invitation to be with me.

While she couldn’t, and still can’t, discuss my challenges around dad’s pedofile advances in my direction. She could choose me this Thanksgiving. A choice that has lifted a dark cloud that has hung over us for the last 40-years.

What I’ve learned is: my joy is more valuable than anyone’s anger, including my own.

A meaningful life is a coming home to yourself. It isn’t about being a savior to others or being patient and kind at your own expense. It’s about being your own hero. Only then can you be free to create the life you’ve been given.

My REACTION to my brother-in-law’s anger was calm rational. But my underlying TRUTH was tormented confusion about how he could be so aggressive toward me when we’d always been allies. My REACTION to my dad’s pedophilia was silence. But my actual TRUTH was terrified confusion about how he could be a caring father by day and scary monster by night… and where was mom night after night?!

I believed that my cloak of calm and silence were acts of love.

But I now realize, my passivity was not love at all. It was fear. Oddly, love and fear have a similar vibration, only opposite sides of the spectrum.

Difference is, love wants to resolve fear and fear wants to perpetuate anger.

My REACTIVE calm has created tremendous conflict within me. I became, by my own embodiment, the sacrificial lamb (so to speak). I have felt irrelevant by my brother-in-law’s accusations and unimportant by my mother’s absence. But, while it’s true I am a victim in this story, I also accepted the role.

I questioned my own relevance and importance, and coward to their anger and shame. I gave them permission to continue treating me wrongly. And, as the saying goes, people treat you how you let them.

Silence has been my REACTIONARY response, not screaming or blaming or fighting. It‘s time to change my REACTIONS into RESPONSES that reflect my inner truths.

This Thanksgiving I give myself permission to give my mom a second chance at motherhood. Just like she said over our holiday meal, “you kids gave me a second chance at childhood.” And, I also give myself permission to walk away from a brother-in-law who’s ruled by anger.

My mother’s love has been shown through her RESOLVE to stand with me, no matter what her limits may be. My brother-in-law has only showed a unquenchable anger that uses fear to perpetuate it’s destructive wake.

Answer life’s call! Keep your story moving! Be your own hero!
Happy Thanksgiving.

Do You Manage or Resolve Your Pain?

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We all cringe when assaulted with hurtful words.

Angry daggers spew from desperate mouths in an effort to pacify their underlying fears. These sharp daggers puncture holes in relationships; and, they bury the respect and care that once created unity.

A silent scream contracts my neck as I sleep. I wake up to the physical pain of emotional struggle brought on by those daggers, my own and of those closest to my recently buried sister.

They accuse me of making their life harder than it already is. A series of insults are screamed at me, followed by a phone receiver’s click. None of their angry rants express a rational violation, so I’m left bewildered.

Another interaction isn’t an interaction at all. I’m dismissed and ignored. My bewilderment turns to belittle-ment.

Then in their final act, I’m told that they’re sorry for the last text or call, and that they still love me, BUT…. and again and again, the cycle goes round.

While I understand they’re in pain. I don’t understand the BUT!
BUT WHAT? What have I done?

Perhaps this is where I get off track. Am I asking the wrong question?
Perhaps the right question is: What have they done?

They claim to love; yet, their accusations are far-fetched assumptions mixed with complete untruths. The story being told is false and the love they profess is feeble.

What I know is: until we own our stories, our stories own us.
What I’ve learned here is: until I own my story AND love myself, my story is written by others.

To resolve the fight rather than manage the pain, in my neck and my heart, I have to surrender my defenses. I have to fully appreciate all that I AM and fall in love. Accept myself. Show up for myself. Love myself unconditionally. And stand relaxed and strong in ownership of who and what I am.

Only then can I live in peace, no matter the circumstances.
And, align in my power, to change my circumstances.
And live in love.

I am not to blame for my sister’s death, nor do I need to defend my love for her.

Defending oneself or blaming others protects the dagger throwing beast that perpetuates pain. A beast that would rather be angry at life, than vulnerable in it. A beast that will sacrifice everything to be right.

Instead, can we surrender into the underlying fear, sadness and hurt. Empathize with what’s under our rage and learn to love.

May we have the courage to meet the beast within our own stories and tame it.

Dog with questioning head cock

Selfishness is a Good Practice

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Dog with questioning head cock

I sat on the arm of a client’s couch while she took a phone call. The call was extensive; long enough to change my training plan for her.

Rather than getting agitated, I aligned my body with gravity and relaxed into a deeper experience of Self. With each breath I could feel my emotional tension patterns unraveling.

Rather than feeling my worth in question, I aligned with our separation. I relaxed in what is, instead of what I was afraid of. Being replaced doing.

My client and I were equally selfish. While she used selfishness to take care of her business with this long awaited phone call. I used selfishness to take care of me.

Selfishness is an aspect of self-care.

 

Pain is Wisdom’s Cry

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Find love, freedom & compassion through pain.

Let’s face it, pain S-U-C-K-S! It robs us of our vitality.

But I trust my body’s wisdom. And pain is it’s only way of letting me know I’m out of alignment. It’s my body asking me to listen to its message. And I’ve learned it will continue to escalate until I face it’s insistence.

Trauma, overexertion and tension are the culprits of my pain. While trauma requires therapy and overexertion requires rest, tension requires that I listen.

What you may not consider when listening to your tension is, it’s often rooted in another time and is multidimensional in its nature. It simmers unnoticed until something triggers it into expressing; and when it does, your mind and body unite in its tantrum.

On the day I gathered my courage and composure to utter for the first time about dad’s nighttime visits in my bedroom, mom’s reply was, “It’s not MY fault, I didn’t know!” My body had been holding onto this sexual abuse story in silence for 25 years!

The anger, fear, confusion and sadness that plagued my body as tension, was trying to find a pathway out by voicing my longstanding secret. But the pathway out was blocked, so now every cell became engorged with rage! I felt like I was being annihilated by electrical shock waves. My body shook as my mind ranted! “It’s still all about you and your needs––I don’t really matter?!” From my view at the time, I wasn’t worth protecting, I wasn’t lovable, not then and not now.

Sometimes it’s just too painful to listen to our feelings, so our mind steps in to reason with the pain—blame it away. But we can’t think (or blame) our way out of tension, we have to feel our way out. And here’s the clincher, allowing the body to feel goes far beyond its physical tweaks, it’s crying out our emotional wounds.

Here’s how the mind and body relate:

  • The body’s soft tissues (muscles, sinews, organs) archive every emotion you experience, while the mind remembers the details around the emotion. Your body feels; your mind thinks.
  • When a disappointment or trauma happens your body’s soft tissues tense up and your mind creates a belief to help you make sense out of the happening or survive its immediate danger.
  • This belief, though useful at the time, was made under duress and its usefulness is likely short-lived. But there you are unknowingly operating under a misaligned belief well after the incident. At least until you’re triggered back into it, like a time warp!
  • The physical tension and emotional distress that lives in the body reactivates. Its painful grip is either out of per portion with real time events or creeps in as a low grade persistent whine. Meanwhile the mind spouts its misaligned belief with so much certainty that you miss its lie.
  • Anger, worry, sorrow, fear plague your body causing dis-ease. Pain in the form of poor posture, emotional distress and sickness follow, until the mind’s belief and body’s tension change the story—together creating a new experience.

It took another 15-years to address my nighttime story again out load. Mom went into denial, forgetting what I had shared, and I set out to unravel my body’s tension and mind’s unlovable belief using posture and movement, and changing my relationship with resistance inside and out.

I found ease through mind-body alignment.

I listened to the layers of trauma when challenged, experienced as tension’s pain. I then decreased the challenge intensity to where the pain wasn’t triggered. This gave my tension space to expand, express and exhale. As the tension disentangled itself, my strength was renewed and redefined.

Strength is now an alignment between my inherent innocence––mental curiosity—and my wisdom––emotional/physical truth––keeping me genuinely interested in each moment of connection and discernment. It is a posture of wonder.

Once we recognize our body carry’s our emotional baggage, our pain becomes our teacher. What we feel, physically and emotionally, becomes meaningful to our future and we are inspired to listen.

Our body’s posture is our first defender against chronic tension; and, it’s crucial to being proactive in our search for happiness and well-being.

As we deliberately improve our posture we learn to distinguish between our strength and our tension. And we unravel our tension and unlock the misaligned beliefs that hold us hostage to the pain of our past.

 

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