Anger, Rage, and Change
Adulthood comes with a host of responsibilities that you are (supposed to be) prepared for throughout childhood. Learning how to “adult”, that is to say, be fiscally responsible, have a home, manage a healthy work-life balance and more, is a difficult process for any young adult master.
For those completely starved of autonomy in childhood, it’s an almost impossible task to even begin. Some people in this position end up joining the military because it provides them with the reassuring self-same top-down control over their lives. Others struggle through a long series of failures, hoping to eventually get it right.
Blindly following instructions actually never really worked for me. I always needed to know “Why?”.
I needed reasons.
Not giving me reasons why, often lead to frustration and punishment. A “Why?” related incident at school resulted in me being sent to a child psychologist when I was nine. This psychologist provided my parents with a detailed report about my emotional needs, my learning needs and two official diagnoses, for ADHD and an ASD respectively.
My parents responded by threatening to “beat it out of me” and calling for an intensive prayer meeting. The whole congregation had to be notified and involved. My problems were obviously the devil testing their faith and not the result of their abuse nor the neurodivergence that I needed support with. Looking back it was just another moment for them to perform their faith to an audience, at my expense. I was paraded around, like a particularly interesting zoo animal and the few church friends I had, were forbidden from spending time with me.
I didn’t understand why, and no one would tell me.
I know now that not being told that I was autistic, did untold damage to my psycho-social development. I was naïve. I was blissfully unaware of sarcasm, hyperbole and all the niceties of the social contract that I was meant to adhere to. Coupled with the sheer amount of moving we did during my formative years and the isolation of the church environment I was in; it became abundantly clear that I had not been adequately socialised, post disfellowship. Knowing now, that my parents were given this information and chose to double down on their behaviour, fills me with a deep sense of disappointment, today. Later, as a teen, they chose to send me to religious ‘Therapists’ to “fix my behaviour”, and latterly “fix my sexuality”.
As an adult my secular friends often pointed out strange social interactions. I remember them excusing things I did with sentences like “oh it’s just because he’s foreign”. As time went on, my questions were answered with “actually that’s just something everyone does” or “that’s part of growing up”. I grew frustrated.
I needed to know why. I wanted to know and understand. The more aware I became of the layers of social interaction invisible to me, the more frustrated I got.
The lack of control, the sheer amount of work I would have to do, just to be a functioning part of society, ate at me. Frustration turned into anger, anger into rage.
The rage started to consume me.
Being cut off from my sister, the only consistent emotional support I had in my life, before disfellowship, made everything worse. We had relied on each other entirely for socialisation and emotional support. The lack of emotional outlet was also just added to that ever-growing sea of rage.
It was traumatic.
More so for my sister because everything that belonged to me was thrown on a bonfire the night I was kicked out. My mother expressed a need to purge any memory of me from their lives in order to cope with her “loss”. My sister squirreled away a couple of things in the chaos. A book, a hair brush, a bag I knitted. I had been in her life one moment, and excised the next, leaving her all alone. She was mad at me for that.
She was able to reach out to me by email after she left home for university. We tried to work through our shared trauma, but we have never been able to shake off the separation anxiety we experienced. While in time, my sister and I were able to regain regular contact, my disfellowship had changed her, just as much as it had changed me. It gave me pause to consider how closely intertwined our lives were.
The complete conditionality of our parent’s “love” for us had left a deep scar. It made us both reticent to form attachments and made us cling more closely to those people we already had in our lives. It made us mourn the loss of each other and made us angry.
As the years passed though, my anger smouldered. My life had to go on. I had to go on. My relationships and friendships started to suffer from of all of the repressed anger I carried within me. It was like a slow poison bleeding into every part of my life.
I started experiencing blackouts during stressful situations. I attacked inanimate objects, punching holes in walls and doors. I started reliving the more traumatic events of my childhood vividly. The most minor inconvenience would lead to a tirade of hate frothing from my mouth like some sort of demonic incantation.
The rage I felt wasn’t normal.
It had become pathological. It was the result of things that happened to me. Things that were never addressed, never acknowledged, never resolved. It was caused by things that shouldn’t have happened. Things that woke me up, screaming at night. Many of my earliest childhood experiences had become completely lost in the sea of rage. The exact events had become too nebulous to exactly recall. All I felt was the blood rushing in my head and rage.
It was scaring me.
The blackouts were the most concerning, and I was forced to speak to a doctor about them. Change wasn’t easy. Changing aspects about myself was even more difficult; asking for help wasn’t something I could just do.
This wasn’t something I could keep ignoring.
After several tests I was told that I was suffering from extreme blood pressure changes during moments of distress. My GP said that it was a “maladaptive nervous system response, probably caused by PTSD”. I would need to see a Psychiatrist to confirm the diagnosis and manage my symptoms. I was shocked.
I was also immediately angry. I couldn’t reconcile the idea that I had PTSD. There had to be some mistake. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t need to see a psychiatrist, I wouldn’t. I realized at that moment that I was afraid.
I was scared of engaging with any type of mental health support.
My previous experiences with “conversion therapy” and religious “counseling” had made me vehemently against seeking any kind of therapy. I confided those experiences to my GP, expressing the very real reservations I had. Expressing my fears. He assured me, however, that any referral he made to a psychiatrist would be secular. That they wouldn’t dream of bringing up their own faith, never mind imposing it on a patient.
His tone was completely matter of fact, almost dismissive, like the very idea of religion was alien to the practice of medicine. I remember being startled, lost in thought. I wondered if I could believe him. In the three years I had been in his practice, he had never given me any reason to doubt him before.
I became momentarily aware of the world outside of my inner turmoil.
My GP was speaking to me. He was asking me if I wanted him to write the referral. It dawned on me that it was up to me to make the decision. That I could choose to say yes. That I could choose to ask for help. Certainty washed over me, at once quelling the rage.
I decided to take the chance.
I decided to change.
