Anger - Part Three
Anger - Part Three
Purging the Polluted Adult
This is the final part of the series on the subject of anger and if you have been reading; thank you for taking time to do so. This series of articles has been a useful reflection for me, and today I have a sense of arrival as I face and embrace my truth. What that truth is we will come to. First I want to explain what “Letters from the X” are about.
I was born in 1972 and am therefore referred to as Generation X. For years I only knew Generation X as a punk band fronted by Billy Idol, because back in the day we were not exposed to so much marketing terminology. A niche was a place over the fire place where you put small ornaments. They were more innocent times of veiled child abuse and acceptable levels of misogyny fueled by alcoholism and violence. But then again don’t believe everything you hear, or see, or read, or think, or feel. Smell on the other hand is an entirely reliable sense.
I digress.
Generation X saw massive social change. We saw a rise in divorce rates, the growing threat of the Cold War as the USSR fielded a long line of drunk fat men and the US gave us Reagan - a kind of Trump v1.0. We saw the introduction of home computing, changes in education, medicine and technology. Microwave ovens, McDonalds (I’m in the UK by the way), Atari consoles and foreign holidays. We knew the world was changing and we wanted to be a part of it, but, for my part, I never really knew how. These were times of political change, increased activity in the Middle East after the US changed the currency base from gold to oil after the Vietnam War. Increased terrorist activity in Northern Ireland and in the UK.
In America Fred Trump was buying up New York slums and putting people on the streets. The City itself was bank rolled by corporates and organized crime (thank god that doesn’t happen anymore). It was exciting, dangerous, sexy, powerful, driven and colorful. Generation X were the children of the boomers who had prospered in the post war years.
But not me. My parents were from the previous generation, the silent generation. They had lived through or been born during the Second World War. My Mum was evacuated to Wales during the London Blitz. Her father was killed in action in France, and so I never met him. In fact I never met either of my grandfathers. My Dad’s father was a coal miner who lost a leg in a mining accident. He became more and more frustrated by this loss of ability and identity, and took to drinking to dull the shame of a working man who could no longer work. He slipped into drunken rages and so the path was set for infidelity, domestic abuse and eventually death.
My father left the North East and moved to Kent when he met my mother. They were together for 50 years before my Dad died. I grew up the youngest child in a nuclear family of four. I knew I had a big family in Newcastle - uncles, cousins, aunties, second cousins and even nephews and nieces. But we saw them seldom. My dad had cut many ties to escape the violence of his childhood, but he never really dealt with his own pain.
I remember the seventies being exciting and full of people, gatherings, parties, new things and Christmas with my Mum’s brother and my cousin, both of whom lived in Essex. My Uncle was divorced and I remember finding this exotic in some strange way. My parents were bound for life and I could never imagine them not being together. It simply wasn’t up for question. I saw my Uncle as being more modern. My mum and Dad were war babies, they lived by different values. So even though this time seemed exciting to me, there were restraints, rules, morals and values that keep me from feeling a part of the big wide world.
Having unravelled so much, I now recognise conflict as a common theme for me: struggle but don’t succeed - keep smiling but don’t be happy - love others but don’t be loved. I do not share these things for a sympathy vote, I share them to demonstrate that we all carry these things. Often they are resolved in young adulthood, or they are over written by useful learned behaviours. But unresolved and left to fester, these are the things that can make the difference to, not just one life, but many.
Back to the truth
Now let us get back to that ‘truth’ I mentioned at the beginning of this confessional. I have lived hand to mouth for most of my life. I have never had a successful career, I have lived in financial poverty for most of my adult years and I do not have much to offer in the way of security for the future. Why? Because I made a choice when I was about 18 years old. I made a choice that set me on a path of struggle and fail, struggle and fail. I even developed behaviours to ensure that I would fail. Because I am clever and creative I would generate elaborate scenarios that guaranteed failure. It is fair to say that there has been a fair amount of foot shooting in my life. The outcome of this was that I became increasingly frustrated, and FUCKING ANGRY.
However, because I am clever and creative, I found ways to use this energy to perform, to make, to manipulate and persuade. By adopting these maladaptive behaviours I ensured that every relationship I had would be problematic and doomed to fail. Struggle and fail, struggle and fail once again you see. So what was the choice? What terrible choice could I have made, just as I was crossing the threshold to full adulthood? What dire decision did I make to fuck myself for the next 25 years?
I gave up.
It was that simple. I loved art. I loved literature. I wanted to pursue these things, but I gave up. Something inside me just stopped caring about what I wanted and become more and more concerned with what other people wanted. I began thinking that I had to please people, I had to give people what they wanted in order for me to be happy. The more I did this, the less happy I was, so, because of the values handed to me by my father and his father, instead of trying things differently, I just “tried harder.” So the path was set for the struggle and fail script to run and run.
Now I should be clear at this point, I do not blame my father. In therapy I have hated him, cursed him and wanted to tear his head off. But that is not an expression of intent, it is an expression of intensity of feeling, and this is what is so often misunderstood about anger. Rage, fury, passion, these are all valid emotions and and they are expressions of an intensity of something pain, or fear or injustice, because anger is a secondary emotion.
It is a response.
It is a choice.
Why did I give up?
There were multiple reasons why I gave up. One was the amount of bullying I was subjected to at school. It was never overt bullying, more like ridicule and being made to feel outcast like. I have one remaining friend from school and we were always close. We both did the outcast thing and by being that together we formed a powerful bond. You can read a little more about this in an earlier Letter from the X called “Friends.”
Another reason for me ‘giving up’ was a comment made by one of my teachers. This particular teacher was a huge inspiration for me. His humour, his knowledge and love of English I found infectious. He was known throughout the school to be both clever and witty and capable of a superb John Cleese impression. I loved his classes and his method of teaching, which was to inspire and draw out the talent within you. As my A Levels approached (age 17-19) there was a fervor amongst the higher performing English pupils, of which I was one. We would be called to Mr G’s office for a kind of prep talk. I was excited to discuss my favorite subject with my favorite teacher. I felt respected and treated as an equal. I was becoming an adult with a purpose and real future. I wanted to succeed in something I had a real passion and ability with.
In retrospect I was possibly finding a connection with my English teacher that I did not have with my Dad. The generation gap at this age was feeling more and more insurmountable. In four years time my life and my father’s life combined will span 100 years. This difference has been a key factor in my life. So forming a relationship with influential adults who were closer to my own generation by a clear 25 years meant a great deal to me.
This is why the worlds of my English teacher had such a profound and demotivating effect on me. What he said was well intended, but the phrase “Unless you get an A I will consider you failed,” came like a body blow. As soon as he had said this something died in me, something important had been stolen from me with that statement. It felt cruel and unkind. Just like I found some of my father’s old world, war time values. Just as cruel and unkind as so much o fly father’s own childhood. Of course I wanted to make him proud, but this felt like a threat, I felt bullied.
So I gave up.
Are these the reason’s why I gave up?
Not entirely.
These were responses to feelings. These were secondary emotions, just like anger. To understand this we need to go back to the playful resistor profile from Part One of this series. For the playful resistor the injunctions that are out likely to be enforcing beliefs and behaviours are:
Don’t grow up - always be dependent on your parents and your family will look after you because the world is scary and you might not be strong enough to cope.
Don’t feel - because this will make you vulnerable. Its better top not feel and survive (especially if you grew up in a war.)
Don’t make it - ideas above your station my boy, its better to know your place and not take to many risks.
Don’t be close - people will let you down or they will disappear, or they will hurt you. Better to not form to many close bonds.
Don’t enjoy - You will only be disappointed and it’s probably the wrong thing to do anyway - best to be safe.
You can begin to see how these injunctions interfere, contradict and event enforce one another, all at the same time. Unravelling this is no small task.
For me feeling like an outcast was a trigger for the “don’t feel” injunction. This is a powerful parental belief handed down by my war baby parents. They came from a place in history where ‘feeling’ was a luxury most could not a afford. I also believe that the ‘don’t grow up’ injunction is connected with their old world values that, for me, felt oppressive in a changing world full of colour and progress.
When my teacher said those awful words to me, the ‘don’t make it’ script was triggered. This too came from my father. He had worked in theatre and had been a talented sketch artist. But he saw creativity as a luxury, not something to be pursued by the likes of us. His aspiration was to shake off his working class roots and join middle England. But I believe he sacrificed much in the process.
Also, I distanced myself from people who would have been positive connections for me. I saw myself as incapable of meeting their needs and therefore surrounded myself with people who were just as dependent as I was. The punks, the goths, the roustabouts, the outcasts, the junkies and wasters. These became my tribe. We were the broken and lost together and for a time that met my needs, but this is not sustainable, so when it came to being a parent myself, I had to learn fast.
The good bit
There is light in this darkness. In fact a guy I used to live with said to me once “The brightest lights are found in the darkest corners.” A beautiful sentiment with a clear poetic to it. However, he had turned up in the area in a taxi with a bag of cocaine and shotgun. He tended to hang around in all kinds of dark places. We all did back then. However, there is an Italian phrased used in the Steven Fry article on AI:
se non e vero, e ben trovato.
This translates to: If it is not true, it is well founded.
So I think the point my friend was making is fair, we were damaged and struggled and made mistakes and fucked up every way imaginable. But we were bright lights and I have many happy memories from those days. Furthermore, we understood what it meant to be angry. We understood that sometimes we need to shout and scream and howl and beat our fists. I was never a fighter, but I had a temper and in this place of outcasts I could finally express myself and my true feelings.
But this was a chapter in a story that is still unfolding. The story I share here in these Letters from the X. These observations, tales and reflections are to provide some kind of guidance I hope, or at the very least the realization that we all have these feelings, that we are all okay, even when we are not, because there is always a reason. There is always that which sits behind.
Consider the moment I realized all my struggles had been the result of that single decision to give up. To fail when I was so close. I was standing in the living room of my friends house. All of these things were processing in the back ground but suddenly it all came to my conscious mind like an arrow shot from a bow that had been drawn over thirty years ago. What erupted from me was a mixture of grief, love and sorrow. Remember I have been working on this stuff for five years now, so I know that when these things come one must let the grief run its course. If you are going to cry then fucking cry, don’t try and be brave (like “mummy’s little soldier.”) It takes courage to feel that pain and to let it course through you.
But when the physical reaction had subsided I felt something new rising, a kind of positive warmth. A hope. A feeling of trust and renewed belief in myself. I have done a great deal of work on the maternal side of my childhood trauma, working on the paternal is where I am going now. The foundational work that has been done has set the scene for growth. Perhaps that’s a good way of looking at this: addressing the maternal was healing (nurture, the feminine), addressing the paternal is growth (active, the masculine).
My exploration of self created a place of nurture where I can open me to feeling the root causes of my anger. That frustration I have felt for so much of my life has frequently been expressed as anger, but this was always just the protective layer. What sat behind that anger was a hurt that spanned three generations. From my grandfather’s shame of loss of potency, to my father’s loss of family and my subsequent feelings of inadequacy and confusion.
Over the years, when I have been in crisis with these feelings, some have seen I was in pain. Some have blamed me and some have walked away. Whatever the reaction, I do not blame anyone, and nor do I carry any guilt. Okay, I do still carry some guilt, but that will be dealt with. “I am okay as I am right now.” It is important to tell oneself that.
Anger is a poison in the system, but identifying the cause of that anger, the scripts, injunctions and drivers that sit behind it can be life changing. It has been a privilege to write this and I am forever indebted to my therapist for being such a brilliant teacher, mentor and critical friend.
I have just finished reviewing this for publication and I am surprised at how candid I am in this account. I did not intend this to turn into a kind of confessional piece (not that it feels like that, but I suppose it might read as such.) As I have mentioned throughout, these Letters from the X are shared reflections. We are all connected in life and there is a responsibility to make it acceptable to share and learn from one another’s experiences.
Thanks for reading.
Be sure to subscribe also to the brilliant
, who will be collaborating on some of these pieces. Please comment, restack, share and subscribe.Big love from Driftwood Studio.