Anger Was Only the Tip Of the Iceberg

My inability to regulate and express my emotions was something that started very early in my life. I expressed one emotion and that emotion was anger. Saying that I expressed anger is probably an understatement. I threw temper tantrum after temper tantrum. Most of the time it was when I didn't get my way. Yup, I had control problems that started when I was about 5 years old.

One story that stands out is one time my family went to a steakhouse. When I was younger, I didn't like steak. The truth is though, I don't think I ever even tried it. This was an opportunity for me to go against the grain of my family. I pleaded and pleaded that we don't go to this steakhouse for dinner. My temper tantrum before we got there evidently didn't work because I found myself sitting in this restaurant absolutely miserable. This episode continued while I was sitting in the restaurant. The way I thought was that if my pleads of anger didn't work in private, I could surely embarrass my parents enough in public to make it work. Eventually, we settled on my dad going next door to get me McDonalds chicken nuggets that I can eat while the rest of the family was having a gourmet meal. It worked, I got my way.

In reality, all I ever wanted was attention. I wanted to feel seen. I wanted to feel heard. I'm not sure where this strong desire to be validated came from. I was not neglected as a child. I grew up with two loving parents. If I had to dig deep and figure out a reason why, I would attribute it to all of the emotions that were underneath the anger that I didn't know how to express. Since I didn't know how to express them, they were never seen. Since they were never seen, I never felt seen.

This lack of emotional regulation and lack of ability to express emotion drove my parents off the wall. My brothers fed off of it though. Of course they did, they were 3 and 5 years older than me. They saw me going nuts and instead of helping to soothe me, they instigated it even more. That was when the famous line that my dad would always say to me came up. "Get a backbone Jay."

Of course, this added more fuel to the fire. My brothers took that line and ran with it. They would slouch over as if they didn't have a "backbone" and pretend to be me, someone who according to my dad didn't have a backbone.

As I am sure you can imagine, I didn't like that very much and so I reacted back to it.

These reactions followed me everywhere I went in life. Whenever anyone teased me, I would always give them exactly what they wanted. A reaction. And so with that reaction, these people would continue to tease me. I was an easy target. This exacerbated my feelings of being alone and feeling like an outsider.

I realize now though, it wasn't that people didn't like me, they just liked being able to evoke a reaction out of me more. When this continued, I would usually lash out in anger. That was what drove people to distance themselves from me.

When my mom passed away, the emotions that really wanted to come out was sadness but still, I never learned how to express this emotion. Instead, all of that sadness came out as anger again. I was angry at the world. I was angry at my mom for leaving me. I was angry at my dad. I was angry at my brothers. I was angry at my friends who had moms. I was angry at everyone and everything.

My whole life, my solution to this anger was reacting in an expressive way. Swearing, yelling. It was rarely ever physically violent, but often verbally violent.

Finally, I had found a new solution one day. Drugs and alcohol. When I first started consuming, I would feel good. I wouldn't need to express that anger. As the night went on though, all of that anger that I pushed down would come out sideways. It was like a beach ball that you push under water, you can't predict which way it's going to shoot out.

Finally, by going through treatment and talking with other people who had been down a similar path, I learned that I needed to actually feel my feelings in order to heal from this. I could no longer push them down and push them away. While it may be uncomfortable to feel the sadness, the fear and also the anger, because anger is a valid emotion, it is still better than it coming out sideways on those around me. I also needed to find my own validation from within, which wasn't an easy thing, but now I have the tools to be able to do this. I needed to reparent myself. I needed to see myself and no longer search for it from others. When I say reparents, it is not because my parents did a bad job, it is because internally, I was living with emotional turmoil.