RAGE
The Incredible Hulk, but with boobs and long hair
Once I freed myself from the metaphorical prison state, I allowed my feelings to actually rise up to my conscious state and feel them, I mean really feel them. I was fully immersed in dissolution by this time – the vast ocean of my emotions. It was often overwhelming because I became enraged, not angry, enraged.
The Incredible Hulk type of rage but with boobs and long hair: the“Hulk smash” archetype. Incredible Hulk me screamed, cried, yelled, and destroyed the people who had hurt me as a child – smashing the memories over and over again against the walls of my brain. At many points during this time when I was so furious and blaming God/Divine Source, and buying into the belief that Divine Source was the “source” of all that had happened to me, I yelled, “Fuck You” to the entire universe.
I remember freezing, stunned at myself, and wondering if I would be punished for it somehow. Those Christian beliefs: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” hellfire, struck down by lightning, pillar of salt, and all the other fear teachings that I had learned popped into my head accompanied by a bone deep, soul deep fear.
Obviously, none of this happened. Intellectually, I knew those thoughts were beyond ridiculous, but a very real part of me totally bought into them. Dang it!
As I systematically worked through the memories, these myriad violations that I had suffered to my person, my internal pressure cooker would fill with steam and sometimes the steam control valve let out just enough steam to keep the lid on, but at other times during the more painful memories and realizations, the pressure built to the point that the entire pressure cooker would explode in violent upwellings of fury, impotent fury. The silent screams, strangled sobs, and fetal rocking witnessed only by the walls of my bedroom and bathroom.
What I was so impotently furious at were the violations of me, the people, who had perpetrated them upon me, and the fact that I was a child and unable to defend myself or be protected and defended from those who hurt me over and over again. I would feel guilt about these feelings because I was taught to forgive and forget, but that Christian belief was not nearly enough to cool the fires of rage: goddamn men, goddamn the patriarchal bullshit, goddamn all the fucking pedophiles, goddamn God because He was male, too.
Fuck the universe and whoever designed it.
Those vicious fantasies of hurting those who had hurt me – I blamed myself for not being a warrior child and beating them, stabbing them, knocking them unconscious, taking my brother and running away.
I often felt guilty after these fantasies, but I couldn’t forgive them, and I couldn’t make the rage go away no matter how hard I tried. And I tried so hard over and over again because I didn’t want to be that person. That non-Christian person, who doesn’t forgive and forget because to forgive and forget is divine.
To forget is simply another lie.
Just as I could not forgive men and forget, I could not forgive my parents. My feelings for them were tangled and myriad. I hated and loved them, was so angry with them, and felt guilty because I knew that they had suffered trauma and abuse, too. None of that helped me to get over it.
When we suffer trauma, our conscious minds might forget, but our bodies don’t and that pain torments us in countless ways. So, we should remember, and we should heal because it’s when we don’t remember, and we aren’t aware that allows the perpetuation of the cycles of abuse and neglect to continue generation after generation.
My parents and my grandparents never forgot their hurts, they told stories. Painful memories of terrible abuse. I could feel their hurt and their rage. Those memories and those feelings stuck within them for decades upon decades, never healed.
Some of my own decades old memories were laser etched, embedded, and entrenched in my mind and body, too. During this period my right side hurt so horribly at times I literally writhed in pain, a pain that despite the amount of Reiki I gave myself, I couldn’t heal. I also suffered intense burning pain, like jellyfish stinging me over and over in my bladder at odd times that left me breathless or wincing.
I didn’t connect the physical pain with my emotional pain – the rage and sheer pissed off-ness until my Holy Fire Reiki class when a fellow student, who performed Reiki on me said it wouldn’t heal until I loved myself.
All the hate and rage I had felt for most of my life, I had turned inward rather than outward, and as I learned in my Reiki class, we store our emotions in our bodies: rage in the liver and pissed off-ness in the bladder.
The worst part was to come because I hated myself the most, more than any of the people, who had hurt me; I just didn’t consciously realize it yet.