Last night I had a dream. Before I tell you about it though, for context I would like to briefly narrate what happened in my life last year. That year was an extremely difficult time in my life that was filled with the loss of a beloved family member that was the closest one to my heart, a few big life changes and a very volatile situation with my downstairs neighbor. This situation escalated from her complaining about the noise that was coming from my house to her shouting, swearing, calling me names, lashing out in anger and venting to other people. So coming back to the dream that I was in a house with two big chambers. In one of those chambers there was my neighbor, when a group of people that were on my side came over, chased her and killed her. The other chamber of the house was full of tourists and people that were blissfully unaware of what was going on, swimming in a bubble of light and fun.
Waking up in the morning I took a few moments to understand what was going on. The dream, still vivid in my mind, was coming through my consciousness along with the morning light that was traveling through the beige curtains and was illuminating every corner of the room. And then, like an epiphany that was waiting to happen, it came to me. I understood what this neighbor represented for me in real life. She was blunt, confident, loud and very angry. So openly angry. Her anger, so outspoken and so unapologetically powerful, made a part of me freeze. I wanted to run away and hide in a soft blanket of safety.
Her anger that I so eagerly killed in that dream was me. That suppressed part of myself that was never allowed to come to the surface and be seen or acknowledged. You see, I was always the good girl growing up. Praised for my soft and quiet demeanor. And I Iearnt to be in order to keep myself safe. But the fact is dear reader, that every part of us that lies unseen and unacknowledged in the dungeons of our psyche will become a ghost and eventually haunt us. We will project it outwardly and it will manifest in various ways in our lives until we wake up to what’s going on.
Anger is one of those feelings that has been so demonized in our society. Us modern humans don’t know what to do with this primal emotion that is like a burning fire on the inside and is very much part of who we are. Our parents, chased by their own deamons, are trying to choke it to oblivion or overpower it. Our teachers are silencing it. Our society is demonizing and is acting shocked in the presence of violent acts. Our spiritual practices are trying to bypass and shame it into a low vibration emotion that has no place in our oh so divine humanity. We make anger our enemy. A dark shadow that is only allowed to lurk in the dark corners of our consciousness. And like an enemy it’s going to haunt down our dreams, our bodies with its various illnesses, our minds with all the manifestations of mental illness, our collective human body with violence and atrocious acts.
At this point, you are inevitably going to ask me what to do with it? My answer is, I don’t know. I, like you, don’t have a fully informed satisfying answer to this. Aren’t we humans extraordinary? All I can do at the moment is sit with it, locate it in my body and allow it to speak to me. Make space for all those ancient messages anger can carry to the surface of our consciousness. What are those messages?
Don’t come closer
Respect my boundaries
See me
Hear me
Listen to me
Protect me
Love me
The way you treat me hurts
I feel small and powerless
I don’t feel safe
Etc
Writing all this, makes me realize how powerful our anger is. It is us. It is our powerful selves that want and deserve to claim their space fully on this planet. Anger is power. It brings a gift that if decoded and listened to openly and empathetically it adds all those layers to our human skin that were taken from us in all the small and big violations we were exposed to. It is our claim to our value and our wonderful, perfectly imperfect humanity.
As a therapist that uses the human relating in the heart of my practice, I work a lot with anger. The safe relational therapeutic space is inviting it to come out of the dungeons and claim its voice and space. Today, I am inviting you to think. What is your anger trying to communicate to you?
Comments