Trying to Kill Anger
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I’ve had psychological fantasies of killing my father.
Fantasy of my Ideal World
These fantasies differed from actual fantasies where you think of something that you really want to happen, like winning the lottery or taking a vacation etc.
The psychological fantasies are merely a look into my psyche to kinda see what’s going on. I look into them the same way I look at dreams, not literally of course, but trying to see what the image or scene that played out in my mind was trying to tell me.
For the record I never ever wanted to kill my father or anybody else really, but dreams and psychological, exploration fantasies can be very useful to see what’s going on inside.
For those who’ve been following this blog for a while you’ll know why I’ve had these fantasies in the past. For those who are new I’ll just say the quickly that I grew up with a father who was very angry and used to yell at me a lot. If you look back at some of the previous posts you’ll get a clear picture of what I’m talking about.
I should say the fantasies weren’t always about my father. Sometimes they were about evil characters from movies or really bad guys that I could conjure up in my imagination. In other words they were what my father represented to me in this one particular way – via anger.
My father had lots of different aspects to him like everyone else, but it was his anger that marked me for life and so it was his anger, and anger in general that took up a lot of space in my psyche.
One of my fantasies was about the Emperor in the Star Wars movies. He was pure evil and intimidated me when I was younger. I’ve had fantasies of not only killing him, but of really trying to stamp him out of existence so to speak.
It wasn’t enough to just merely kill him. I needed to annihilate him. And for the longest time I never really knew why. But for some reason it wasn’t enough just for him to die. Oftentimes I’d have to kill him a bunch of times, and kill him even more once he was dead just to make sure that he was really gone.
But the most important part of the fantasy was that after I was through with beating him up, that he no longer had that look in his eyes that intimidated me.
Anger Within
It took me several years to figure out that I wasn’t really trying to kill these characters, or my father in these dreams, but that I was trying to kill anger itself.
I have a fear of anger, hence the theme and title of this website. This fear has been a source of much of my pain and many of the problems for most of my life.
Because I fear anger, I have a very difficult time dealing with it. For most of my life I actually didn’t deal with it, I avoided it.
So I could say more accurately that I don’t know how to deal with anger. It’s too overwhelming for me and feels way too dangerous.
So my dreams and psychic fantasies were basically about me being so enraged about the emotion, the idea of anger itself, that I wanted to rid the world of anger through my father and through other authority figures (or powerful figures) that my father represented.
My ideal world was a world that didn’t have any anger in it, whether it was my own or somebody else’s anger. I remember being younger and always being mad at people who got angry and who rocked the boat that way. To me they were “bad” people who were letting out the dark side of themselves and creating problems for everyone else around.
I remember thinking too that there was never any reason for anybody to get mad at me, because I never got angry and I worked hard at being codependent, so I never gave anybody else the reason to be mad at me. And if they did I would get frustrated inside as if to say, “God dammit I’m doing everything I freaking can to make you happy and you’re still getting angry with me! That means that you are the bad one.”
So without knowing it I wanted a world that didn’t involve anger whatsoever because my experience of anger with my father was very negative and I formed the belief that anger was extremely harmful and hurtful to people, so it must be bad.
I put my own anger away (unconsciously of course) and I expected everybody else to as well. Those who didn’t were bad.
I wanted the world to change to suit me.
Of course that’s an unrealistic expectation. To demand that the world simply suppresses an emotion or at least pretend it’s not there is not only not a good idea, it’s actually impossible.
Anger is needed for many positive things in this world. Even having an argument with your best friend or your spouse can be healthy and lead to a more open, and honest relationship going forward.
What do I Need
Anger is only bad when it is expressed in a hostile manner – yelling, screaming, physical violence, threats, passive aggressiveness, abandonment and neglect. Those are all unhealthy ways of expressing anger which do harm other people.
Anger is positive when it is expressed in a way that is good for you and good for the other person. For example if you need to stick up for yourself, or communicate something that’s bothering you deeply to your boss, or feel that you can’t be yourself in front of other people, then anger is very useful.
But because of my trauma with my father, it was very difficult for me to see any of that. All I knew was that I wanted anger gone and that people who were angry, whether it was in the positive or negative sense (obviously the negative sense was worse), were bad.
Also because my trauma, I have a very hard time trying to integrate my disowned anger which makes it difficult for me to handle other people’s anger.
I worry that I will become just as bad as my father. I know intellectually that that won’t happen, but the traumatized inner child of mine can’t make the distinction between healthy anger that is okay to incorporate and express, and the unhealthy anger that hurts people.
My task now is to try to accept anger as much as I can and cultivate it within me to become someone who is an angry guy, but just not my father.
Think about one of your favorite heroes in the movies you’ve watched in the past, like Harry Potter for example. He’s an angry guy but nobody would say he’s a bad guy. He was hostile with his anger on a few occasions but for the most part he used his anger in a good way.
He used it to right wrongs, and to get what he needed. The character that wasn’t angry enough was Neville, at least until the last two movies or so.
So I need to be more like him (Harry), and not be afraid to let that part of me into my being because right now I’m still shutting it down like I have been since I was a kid.
What do I need? What is my anger telling me I need? What is it telling me to do? All questions I need answered daily by learning to tap into my anger again.
– FOA
*** If you’re going through something similar then I hope this helped. If you are, I invite you to share it with me and everybody else who visits here by typing it up and emailing it over. I’ll post it on the blog which would benefit everyone; you for writing it up – which gets you in touch with your unconscious more and with this issue of yours specifically – and us for relating with it and perhaps seeing our own issue from a different angle
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