Re-evaluating Anger
Today I was talking to my mom on the phone and found out that the unique place that illness has in our family actually came from the way both her and my dad were raised and was common to her generation in China. My parents grew up during the Great Leap Forward and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, during which an estimated combined total of 57 million people died of starvation, work conditions (that were near the point of slavery), and violence. As you can imagine, the only objective at the time was to survive. Families did the best they could to get by, almost never having enough food to go around. And the only time children were able to receive extra attention and care was when they were sick. As my mom described it, many children actually hoped to get sick, because it was then that they could have special food they didn’t usually have access to, special toys, and most of all, attention from their parents. They were living in survival mode, and the only time parents were able to slow down and pay attention to their children was essentially there was a “crisis.” And the special food and toys were really just a showing of love from their parents, a rare commodity, perhaps more accurately considered a luxury, at the time for the children.
When I heard this, I felt confused from a mixture of feelings – a combination of sadness and empathy, with the desire to be angry. Talking about this with my group in therapy today really helped me tease out what actually I was feeling. I felt sad for my parents for having had to go through such difficult times, but at the same time, I still wanted to be angry at them for the way that they had treated me. It wasn’t until my group leader pointed it out that I realized that actually, the reason I felt confused was because I truly was sad, but I wanted to be angry so that I didn’t have to feel sad. As I reflected on this, I realized the truth was that I didn’t want to be sad because growing up I had often justified the way my parents treated me based on the fact that I knew that they had a tough time when they were children. I knew that they had been through such impossible circumstances, and it made me desperate to please them and make life as easy as possible for them. And when they argued and fought, I did the best I could to try to help them calm down and stop fighting because I just wanted to them to be happy. I thought that they deserved it after so many years of difficult turmoil and distress. They had fought tooth and nail to get out of China alive and provide me with food and shelter and opportunities that they didn’t have, and because I knew of all those experiences, I wanted to be worthy of their efforts and I wanted so desperately for life to make it up to them that I tried to fit myself into repaying the debt I felt that the universe owed them.
As I grew up, I realized that I had allowed myself to excuse my parents for too much, and that just because they had lived difficult lives growing up didn’t mean that I was supposed to make it up to them as their child. Having that realization, as well as dealing with the history of pain and trauma and neglect that I had gone through at their hands, left me bitter and angry and resentful, and at some point I told myself I would stop using my empathy for them to excuse their behavior. Somehow along the way that got twisted in my mind into not allowing myself to empathize with them at all, probably for fear that I would fall back into the old habits of excusing them and denying my trauma. I didn’t want to allow them to get away with what they had done to me, so I ended up shutting off the part of me that felt for their past and their context entirely.
My group leader pointed out that actually, I can do both. I can still hold them accountable, while understanding that they had a context and a history and trauma in their past too; they could have done their best with the circumstances they had AND their best could’ve been not good enough; I can empathize with them and still know that they mistreated me. And he helped me realize that being angry at them is really just me trying to cover up and not feel the sadness and grief over the pain I endured as a child. Anger tends to be an easier emotion to feel and sit with than sadness. Anger makes us feel big; sadness makes us feel small, and if not that, is painful. I don’t think I had ever realized before that all my anger at my parents might really just be pain and sadness and grief getting covered up, and I’m glad that now I know because now I can have the choice to decide whether and I how I want to face the emotions I’m really feeling.