Using Our Anger for Good, Not Evil

True power lies in our willingness to question the beliefs we swallowed along with allowing ourselves to feel the rage ... while staying present and not acting on the desire for revenge. It's possible to feel the full range of our feelings, even hatred; we can see where they are lodged in our chests or throats or faces and we can allow them to get so big that we are towering with them and breathing fire. If then we keep sensing, feeling, allowing the effects of the past to unfold in us now, we can take ourselves back.
~from This Messy Magnificent Life by Geneen Roth

It might seem like I'm beating the same drum lately with all my focus on releasing anger, receiving the shattering and getting ourselves unstuck. But clearly I have something to learn about this because every time I open my computer, or stumble onto a book, or have a conversation with a friend, the theme is the same: Unfelt anger is a boulder that holds us in place. We might feel magnanimous for our ability to hold in our rage but it becomes toxic to us. Only by recognizing it and allowing ourselves to feel it are we liberated. 
If we feel rather than repress or act out our rage or hatred, says Roth, the feelings dissolve like a night-monster when you turn on the light. The self-righteous – and righteously felt – fury fuels us toward action. Healthy, positive action that comes from a place of worthiness rather than fear. Action that comes from a place of self-respect and a determination to minimize the damage done to ourselves rather than a desire to inflict damage on others. 
I often reminded my children, when they were younger, of Barbara Coloroso's explanation of the difference between "telling" and "tattling". Telling, she says, is about keeping someone out of trouble (though you might get them into trouble in order to do so. An example is a friend who has begun to use drugs, for instance). Tattling, on the other hand, is about trying to get someone in trouble.
I'm reminded of that as I struggle to outline the difference between anger expressed to keep ourselves safe and anger expressed to make someone else unsafe. It can be hard to care if we jeopardize someone else when that someone has been party to so much pain inflicted on us. And yet... If our sole motivation is to inflict harm on someone else, then our anger becomes a weapon rather than a spark igniting our own power. Weapons can be used against us. 
And that has been my experience with anger. What starts out directed at others ended up consuming me. I would find myself having constant arguments in my head with my imagined foes, I would wake up furious in the middle of the night, I felt brittle.
Freeing myself from that creates so much space in my head, in my heart, in my life. Letting go was like removing a millstone from around my neck. 
It's not like I don't get angry now (just ask my children!). But I am far better at directing my anger at the specific situation responsible and expressing it calmly. Anger, I've learned, is usually my first clue that I'm betraying myself by not enforcing my boundaries. That I'm not keeping myself emotionally safe. It's an important emotion that carries with it valuable information. But it becomes toxic when we simmer in it rather than processing it.
Geneen Roth advises us to pay attention to where the rage shows up in our body. By noticing it, feeling it and then sorting through what to do with it, it makes its way through us, rather than creates a poisonous home in us.
And that's how we take ourselves back.  

Our messy, complicated, magical lives

Our stories are not carved in stone.

"After a while, the stories from our past begin to feel like poems we memorized in fifth grade, or Beatles songs we learned by heart. They evoke memories, feelings, possibilities or the lack of them, and if we believe them we are defined by them. It's as if we draw a circle around ourselves and say, This is me. This is what I'm capable of. This is how it will be forever."
~Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life

My childhood was miserable. And it was magical. When I was five years old, my mother read 2001: A Space Odyssey to me and my eight-year brother, passing along her passion for books and stories. My father spent freezing nights flooding our back yard for an ice rink so we could skate through the Canadian winter.
I would wake to the sound of my parents fighting. Slurred accusations. Loud threats. 
As I've grown older, my story seems more complicated. As my parents grew older, they seemed more complicated. I adored my mother, who died after 25 years of sobriety, the same mother who routinely called me selfish in my teens and insisted I cared about nobody but myself. My father, who celebrated his 89th birthday last week, is one of my favorite people in the world. He's kind and generous, a true gentle man. But he's also the dad who, when I was 14, left me to cook and clean and tend to my alcoholic mother, while he sat in his chair with a glass of rye and a cigarette, consumed by self-pity.
Stories from our past, as Geneen Roth says, can become so rigid that they might as well be bars, locking us behind them. 
"If we believe them we are defined by them," writes Roth. She isn't suggesting that our stories aren't true, of course. Our husbands cheated on us. That is indisputable. No, what she's suggesting is that the stories we attach to what happens to us can become shackles. And that they are much more open to interpretation.
Take for instance, this familiar story: My husband cheated. He couldn't possibly love me and do such a thing. I mean nothing to him and that isn't going to change.
Maybe you're telling yourself this story. I certainly did. And I believed every word.
I clung to that story as gospel truth.
And it stopped me from doing anything other than stewing in my own misery, even as a tiny part of me doubted its veracity. Yes he cheated on me. But was it true that he couldn't possibly love me or was that part of an old story? Was it true that I meant nothing to him? Was it true that our marriage was never going to change? 
The story of my parents' betrayal of me had kept me in bad situations for years before I realized that I had the agency to change my own life. My husband's betrayal of me was such a familiar one, I knew it by heart. And underscoring every word of it was this: There is something wrong with me. I am unloveable. This will never change.
Because I believed that story, I was defined by it. And it paralyzed me. 
But our stories do not predict the future. They tell us nothing about "forever". Our stories have something to teach us, absolutely. But the lesson might just be what's written between the lines. The stories we tell ourselves about our stories.
My mother got sober. My father got saner. My husband wrestled with some old demons. I got clearer about what I will and will not tolerate in my life. I treated myself as lovable and began to see that it is true. 
The story I'd been telling myself about my miserable childhood wasn't the whole story. There was magic there too.