Tool of the Month - Grateful Rage
Ever get into the habit of throwing things in anger, screaming at people, driving recklessly, slamming doors, flipping people off, or punching holes in the wall? Congratulations. You’ve got rage. Chances are you’ve tried to cope with this by beating yourself up (yay! more rage).
Assuming you’d prefer less mayhem in response to life’s insults and letdowns, try this after your next rage:
Step 1: Close your eyes and put yourself back into the situation where you lashed out in rage. Feel the rage coming up, and notice that it creates a sensation somewhere in your body. Focus your awareness on that part of your body and make it more spacious. Now invite the rageful energy out of your body and into the room with you. Let it take full form as a person or creature. Regard it more fully with the benefit of a little distance. This is your Rage Shadow.
Step 2: Without judgement. Get Curious. Ask your rage-shadow to show you in vivid detail what it REALLY wanted to do in that situation. As the movie directed by your rage plays out, feel the horror of the violence it was capable of combined with how powerless you feel to control it.
Step 3: Catch that horror and transform it into gratitude. Realize that something far worse didn’t happen. Give your rage-shadow full credit for not making worse things happen. Tell it you realize now that you are at the mercy of its superior power. Of course, not everyone gets to feel the tremendous relief that you are feeling right now. Other folks landed in circumstances not nearly as tolerant or forgiving as yours. Beg your rage-shadow to lend you even more mercy going forward. Ask your shadow if there is anything you can do to help out with the massive burden it feels to protect you with its rage. If you catch a glimpse of something you can do tonight or tomorrow to share the load… promise your shadow you will do it.
Step 4: Take the action you promised in the previous step, and when you do, tell your rage-shadow, “See? I did what we agreed. I hope you’ll trust me more and more to shoulder your burden.”
You can read more about how this tool came to be in Parade of Shadows below.
Testify!
This edition of Testify! is contributed by Hanni S. For years her rage would overtake her during the vulnerable stages of love relationships, often with demoralizing attacks of self-criticism and self-harm. After taking time to build an inner recovery-team of parts that included her rage, Hanni made the following discovery:
Picture this: You’re single, you have your dream job at your local ski resort, a new apartment, and you’ve had 16 months of blissful self-determined single-dom. After 20+ years of wrestling quite dramatically with the ins and outs of romantic relationships, you finally feel somewhat content and the only thing you wrestle with lately is the vintage furniture you’ve decided to fit into the aforementioned brand new tiny apartment.
Along comes a man.
I was surprised that we seemed to genuinely be on the same wavelength, and the fact that he makes me laugh (sure, a simple, yet deceptively evasive trait in a man), plus, he’s not too bad on the eyes. So for a little while we flirt, I pretend to be interested in our chairlifts’ power-station (he’s an electrician), he pretends to have hurt his wrist a little so I can “check it” (I’m a patroller).
One day, he shows up at my station and proceeds to tell me that actually, he has a girlfriend of 6 years, who he lives with, but there’s trouble in the relationship, that he never felt like she was the one, and that he never thought he would ever talk to anyone the way he can talk to me, someone who happens to have the same dreams in life as he does.
At this point I should also mention he’s technically my boss.
Any alarm bells going off yet?
Well ...to me, before I learned to talk to all my parts, and not abandon one or the other, it wouldn’t have been alarm bells but a big fat green light! An invitation to have an intense, intoxicating, wild yet romantic, take-no-prisoners affair.
Unavailable? Check.
Imminent work hierarchy power play? Check.
A few months of excitement followed by a dramatic ending? Check.
The fact that he has a habit of eating yoghurt during work breaks (We ski for a living. Skiing is cold, yoghurt is cold...why double down on the misery?) Weird and cause for concern? No...quirky and adorable: Check.
As he was talking, I could feel my parts stirring:
My little, quiet, young part, who learned that receiving love was contingent on how well we could cater to the unpredictable and dangerous moods of our caretaker. She would have run to him and said “if I love you hard enough, will you protect me and love me back and not abandon me?”
My defiant part, who rejects Little One and her neediness, (I call her “Mustang”, ‘cause she’s a runner). She would have sensed the danger and started booking a long-haul flight to as remote a place as possible, immediately after he had left.
My managers and my firefighters would have been in overdrive trying to keep it together, getting busy arranging my face and posture into something resembling an image of “normal, mature, person listening”, rather than “animal cornered, panic raging and fear stricken”.
Nobody in that scenario feels safe or heard. Not me, not my parts, and probably not the man making himself vulnerable in that moment.
In therapy I had learned to listen to all of my parts, but until now, I could only do it after the fact. Never in the actual moment. It always felt like a debrief in a room full of hardworking dedicated peers who “weren't angry ... just disappointed“. I wasn’t their leader. I was their ill equipped, overwhelmed, promoted-beyond-her-abilities consultant, who happens to know the owner. My parts felt like they were forced to play a rigged game, usually resulting in revolt, driven by such intense inner pain, the only way out was to beat me up. So they (I) did. Figuratively and literally.
But something changed. This time, I led us all to safety.
As the electrician commenced his confessional, just like I had been taught, I took a physical step back and announced to all my increasingly frantic parts: “Alright fam. Let’s gather round. Thank you for joining this shit show. Now let’s do this in real time: You tell me what you need, why you think you need it, and no matter what it is, I am just grateful for all of you trying so hard”.
Oh boy were they ready to talk. In my head, it became louder, messier, scarier, braver, more conflicted than ever before. As I tried to listen astutely internally, my external nods were interpreted by the electrician as encouragement to keep talking, and I’ll be totally honest, I missed most of what he was saying. I think we (my parts and I) were all collectively surprised at the sudden show of leadership, and as their chatter died down, they quickly huddled around each other and ensued to tell me in unison “tell him that words mean nothing and we need action” So that’s what I told the electrician. That even though I genuinely appreciate his honesty, at the end of the day, it’s action before words. That he owes this conversation to his girlfriend, who after 6 years of enduring his yoghurt habit, can’t be too bad a gal. And though I like him back, the fact is, that I am single and he is not. Mind you, it didn't come out as smoothly as this reads, but the message was conveyed.
Most well adjusted adults would say “well, of course that is what you said. It is the only correct, respectable, yet kind answer”. Well, to me, this was no natural or easy feat. It was a huge, HUGE, accomplishment. I know this, because all I felt after, were the cheers and clapping by all my parts, who, for the first time in their lives had their needs and wants respected and protected in real time. They cheered for what now had become an equal footed negotiation, rather than an emotional drive-by shooting.
If you had told me 5 years ago I would walk out of a conversation with someone I could potentially love—who’d just told me he has a girlfriend—feeling joyous, I would have asked to buy whatever magic drug you were on …in bulk.
This was not achieved after a couple of clever books about family systems or a podcast by some ex navy seal, but by working with a therapist who patiently shows the way and never judges me. In part, it also took the stability of that relationship to see that I could trust myself. Because if nothing else, at least I kept showing up and he kept supporting me.
So who knows where we’ll go from here, but if rage is where you’re stuck at, talking to your parts is essentially an invitation to an even greater adventure.
Parade of Shadows
I discovered Grateful Rage when I came as close as ever to wiping out my family in a road rage incident. If you had been there, you would have simply seen me flip someone off as they passed me on the highway. It’s something I never do. And to do it at 55 years old and into my 10th year practicing emotional regulation skills, the gesture made me ashamed. What kind of therapist acts like this? The darker truth was, the rage I felt just before the finger flew was so intense, that I could see and feel an alternate timeline unfold in which I slammed on the brakes and set the world on fire, ending forever the discourtesy of the person tailgating me at 80 miles an hour. It scared me. And it was in that moment of violent clarity and self loathing I discovered a part of myself that wanted my gratitude. He wanted me to be grateful that he didn’t do something far and away much worse than what happened.
As soon as I saw what he was capable of, I realized that he had tremendous mercy on me that day. It was clear HE had control, not me, and that if he wanted to, he could have made my life a hellscape of regret, and yet he didn’t. I trembled and thanked him for sparing me. And from that moment forward I began to feel a trust arising. The deeply violent part of me was the most “for me” force in the universe… and willing to be so to a fault. And if I wanted to increase my chances of peace and calm, it would behoove me to return the favor and get on his side just as much as he’s on my side.
You would think that the least likely moment to generate gratitude would be when you are raging. Well get used to this pattern. Become a connoisseur of dissonant days like this, where you bridge, like some kind of corpus callosum, two states of mind that clash in paradox. If you can hang in there with the dissonance long enough (maybe only a brief moment or two) you will synthesize a new reality. In Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) this skill is called Holding Two Truths.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
May we all transform this century’s Roaring 20s (Raging 20s?) into the next Jazz Age.
Thank you for indulging me. Cheers!
-Denis