I’m reading a psychology book called The Emotional Incest Syndrome by Patricia Love and I just came across an excerpt that reminded me so much of this article that I decided to hunt it back down and share it:

“The anger response, like the fear response, is a frequent target for repression. Imagine a 6-year-old girl who is angry at her 10-year-old brother for teasing her. In response, she might make an angry face, yell at her brother, and strike out at him with her fists. It’s an instinctual, energizing reaction designed to protect her from danger. Someone is violating her sense of well-being, and she’s afraid that if she doesn’t stop the intruder, she’ll get hurt.

“A wise parent would validate the girl’s anger — it’s infuriating to be teased — and help her find a verbal rather than a physical way to express it. ‘You are very mad at your brother for teasing you,’ says this model parent, ‘I would be, too. Tell him in words how angry you feel. He needs to know.’ This way, the girl can protect herself from her brother and purge herself of her anger without having to resort to physical violence. Her self-protective anger remains intact. It has simply been given a ore ‘civilized’ form of expression.”

I don’t know about you guys, but my self-protective anger is largely not in-tact. To the point where, I had a drunk guy lurching out of the dark at me one night recently and tried to grab me, and I was so worried about checking my instinctual response to harm him, to de-escalate the situation without violence or anger, that it never occurred to me that this was actually a potentially appropriate moment to respond physically. I got out of the situation Ok with verbal assertiveness and putting my hands up to convey my physical boundaries repeatedly, but as I proudly told my therapist how I handled the situation and how I didn’t get violent, he was bewildered. It took him pointing it out for it to even occur to me that the situation at hand, if needed, would’ve justified any number of angry responses including yelling at him, screaming for help, calling the police, using his drunkenness against him to push him down and get away. Honestly, I’m saying all of this intellectually. My emotional response is still, I can’t let my anger hurt my fellow human being.

Anyway, food for thought, and maybe it’ll resonate with someone else.