Is my anxiety masking my rage?

What developmental trauma literature proposes about the sense of impending doom :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED May 1st 2024

Dear soft heart,

When we are abused as children in a chronic way, and we cannot hate our care givers as we depend on them for survival, all that rage is something we dissociate from.

If you want to read a really great book about this, read healing from developmental trauma by Aline Lapierre and Laurence Heller- a book I’ve read cover to cover at least a handful of times by now and refer to a bunch.

We dissociate from our rage because our rage puts us in danger. If we are actually enraged, we risk breaking an attachment that we need to survive - all of that makes sense. But what’s really interesting is that the high arousal that rage causes - after all, fight is a stress response that goes toward a threat to try to get rid of it, can create chronic anxiety if we must dissociate from it.

It makes sense- if all of that is dissociated from, the high arousal of rage often turns into anxiety, as it has no where to go and did not complete its initial mission.

If we are analyzing folks who live with a high level of anxiety from a developmental trauma lens, according to Lapierre and Heller, they tend to have dissociated from their rage at some point, about something.

They say,

When early life experience has been traumatic, the trauma lives on in the form of ongoing systemic high arousal states. Unresolved high arousal becomes the source of a relentless, nameless dread, a continuous sense of impending doom that never resolves.

Typically, us folks need to reconnect with our anger slowly but surely, connect with it as a vital part of life force for ourselves, and let it out and discharge it in safe and constructive ways (that don’t bring more harm to ourselves or others) in order to decrease anxiety levels.

Most times when I feel intense fear, I have to remember that the fear often masks pure hot rage for me.

My fear takes so many forms at this point, and if I don’t put like actual post it around me that say HEY if you’re scared beyond belief, check if you’re mad underneath too, I will forget that I am actually dealing with aged rage and/ or current rage.

I wrote in my memoir that I had a ritual when I lived in Encinitas, where I would go to the beach every morning and discharge the massive amount of anger I had in my life. I wrote in chapter 24 Gaslit…

I’d yell and yell and yell from the deepest wounds I could locate. I’d let all the sounds out I couldn’t make when all of it was happening; I was scared and shocked, immobile, worried, having to get on with it and just be okay with yet another unfair thing happening to me because there was nothing I could do about it. I’d let the things I was ashamed about be seen too, and I’d douse myself in compassion, twirl in empathy, and land in buckets of sweat I’d deem holy after it was all done.

If you want to read the whole chapter, you can buy Can You Turn Off The Lights? Here

A still of me at the beach at 7 am from a video I must have taken in those days. INSTAGRAM EMILY WAS SO ON IT.

There were so many instances in life where I could not have a reaction to the present as it was happening, and I’ve had to play catch up to process all of it. In those years living by the beach, I was able to release and bring myself back to the present a whole lot.

It’s not random that during this time period, the time where I did primal screaming on the beach every morning, was the time I was the least anxious and the most healthy. I often refer to this time as the best time of my life, and if I try to pin point why, it becomes clear that it was because I was actually expressing myself and I wasn’t so scared of punishment for it. I knew actually deep down that I would not and could not be punished for expressing my rage.

I started to wonder the other day, faced with a lot of anxiety as I wrote about here, why I stopped doing rage ceremonies. Where did I lose contact with the fact that I would not and could not be punished for feeling and expressing my rage in healthy ways?

So now, I am back to doing an anger discharge practice. When I went to begin it, I met my system that was very much in freeze and I had no authentic rage charge accessible to me.

This meant that my first priority was to reestablish some safety with myself and for myself.

I’ve had a pretty bad injury since November, yet it took me about 3 months to actually even admit that to myself. I’d keep on going enduring the pain, without actually turning toward it, telling myself it was just a wrist sprain. The world was on fire. Who cares about my wrist sprain, you know? I was still not allowing myself to cry when I needed to cry because it hurt so much for example. I hated that this even happened to me, on top of a lot of symptoms I was already dealing with, slowing down everything, making me even more dependent on others, and therefore, I was not giving it much emotional attention. I was mad that it was reality.

I went to the doctor’s one time at the beginning of this, falling down the stairs and spraining my wrist, and I wasn’t sent to get xrays because it was seemingly not broken, even though very badly sprained. I just started going to treatment appointments for it regularly, 5 months and a half later, and all the practitioners I’ve been seeing are stunned that I even am coping without pain killers based on what’s going on in my wrist, arm, elbow, and especially my shoulder. High Pain Tolerance Problems. Or is it… Used To Having To Keep On Going Even If In Pain Because Of Systemic Issues In Life That I Was Born Into Problems? I am probably going to have to get xrays in the upcoming week or two, to check out what’s going on.

Not validating your own feelings and your own experience is internalized gaslighting. Trauma imprints are generally internalized or externalized as I wrote about here in 2022. If you’re an internalizer, whatever was happening outside ends up happening inside.

I got super good at internalized gaslighting as an autistic person who had to function as a neurotypical for their whole life - until a little over 3 years ago - when I got diagnosed with autism. The world told me it was not that bad, and even if it was for me, I had to follow suit with the fact that it wasn’t. This meant, I couldn’t trust my own experience and be believed when I said I was struggling with things others (schooling systems for example) would expect me to not struggle with.

Still in various settings, allistic people have a hard time understanding the severity at which I am impacted by stimulus such as noise.

Not being understood and or believed about your own experience does make one angry at some point. And when we feel we can’t express that anger, in healthy ways, or use our fight response to get rid of the situation that is crossing our boundaries, we might consequently dissociate from our anger. And that may turn into anxiety.

Anxiety is a complex beast, with a lot of root causes I cannot claim to know in entirety. I also think anxiety happens when we aren’t getting our needs met very well, internally or externally, or sometimes, it creeps up in very intense ways when we aren’t being authentic. Anxiety can also be holding empathy and tender emotions like care. After 16 years of living with diagnosed anxiety disorders, I know that anxiety is usually a messenger of something. And it’s not always the same message every time. For me specifically as an autistic person, fear and anxiety can be a main emotion that contains a multitude of other feelings that I don’t feel immediately. When I, and when we get curious when it shows up, we usually get pointed to what we need I have found out. I like to explore when I am very anxious if I could also be needing to reconnect with anger and digest some anger too.

If you need a good song to discharge to, may I suggest The Bug- Angry feat Tippa Irie.