Читать книгу Shadows Of Acceptance - Nancy Inc. Rockey - Страница 8

Does anger come easily for you? Can you feel it rising within you at the slightest provocation? Do you hand it out to others or do you bury it deep inside you, allowing it to seethe and build as you continually rehearse in your mind the injustice you feel you have received?

Anger can be both healthy and destructive to the human mind and body. Healthy anger feels an injustice either received personally or dished out to another, and responds by taking some positive action to remedy the injustice. Destructive anger either reacts, lashes out with negative action or it is repressed, and seethes within causing internal stressors that are harmful to both the mind and the body. Built up resentments and bitterness create nasty dispositions!

Remember that the brain is designed to see to it that the mind and the body will survive? Anger is a survival technique. When anger rises in the human, the adrenal glands produce adrenalin to give the body needed energy to fight or to flee. The adrenals also produce nor-adrenalin and cortisol, two additional stress hormones needed for the body’s reaction to a threat. However, when the adrenal glands produce these hormones in large amounts and when there is no need to actually run or physically fight, they are destructive to the body.

Danny's anger had raged inside of him from years of physical and emotional abuse received from his father and from repeatedly seeing his mother physically abused by the same perpetrator. When his mother’s death was eminent due to breast cancer that had metastasized to numerous parts of her body, Danny blamed his father for her illness. His rage prompted him to threaten his father’s life, planning his murder in detail. Not heeding the counsel to get psychological help to eradicate his rage, he contained it until it exploded internally and destroyed his physical body. What a loss! A thirty-two year old man, drug and alcohol free, a powerful athlete, executed by his own anger that hid in the shadows of his daily experiences, and showed itself whenever he felt rejection again.

On the other hand, Anger can be valuable. It can cause the needed adrenalin rush to combat a threat, but when it is contained, the overload of adrenal hormones can destroy a life.

Anger and the Brain

It is very helpful to know that the computer-like brain stores experiences and the emotions produced by those experiences. When an event occurs in the present that has within it elements reminiscent of past anger producing experiences, our reactions are not just from the present situation, but from all similar, anger-producing past events. Let’s offer an example: Let’s say that you have had years of being called derogatory names by your father. Now you are working in a corporation where your boss has a short fuse and frequently demeans you, calling you names. You have responded by retreating and absorbing blame. However, one day, he is on a toot and doing his usual raging, and seemingly from nowhere your rage breaks out. You yell, scream obscenities and finally stomp out, quitting your job. You were reacting to all past injustices received from him plus those from your earlier experiences. It was not just the emotions of the day that you were feeling, and that’s why your rage was “over the top!” You were carrying old baggage with you, and it exploded along with your current anger. You see, the mind works that way. It’s designed to remember, not to forget, and when a stimulus comes from either inside you or from an outside source, you automatically go into your memory bank and very rapidly file through your memories, tagging each one that in any way reminds you of the present stimulus. Then you react from the current injustice and every other injustice you have experienced. That’s why it’s so easy to “blow a gasket!”

Rejection and Anger

One of the most common and explosive anger-producing experiences is the feeling of being rejected. If you experienced rejection early in childhood, especially from an intimate relationship such as parent-child, it becomes a filter through which every other relationship is seen, and it lurks in the shadow of your history. Rejected people look for rejection under every rock and usually find it. If they do not find it, they tend to manufacture it – conjure it up in their minds. Much anger stems from the feeling of being unjustly treated. Rejection is unjust, so when it is experienced it produces anger. The anger can be displayed outwardly or buried deep within the mind. What happens, however, is that the anger usually seeps out in nasty digs or comments directed toward the one who did the rejecting, even if it is buried deeply. One way or another, anger gets expressed, even if it’s expressed in the development of illnesses and in the attitude of an individual.

Anger can be a beneficial emotion as long as it is expressed in an appropriate manner. It can create healing, harmony, and/or reconciliation if it is not expressed with the intent to cause injury or harm.

Sadness or Depression:

If you were the victim of childhood abuse, if you were ignored or unwanted, put down, beaten or sexually violated, it would be normal if you would consider yourself to be the cause of all that happened to you. According to you, you are the problem or you could have/should have prevented the problem.

Children, being at the center of their universe, either take the blame or the credit for all that comes to them. If you blamed yourself for the abuse you received, this would easily create sadness or depression within you. Depression is basically anger turned inward toward oneself. “If I weren’t so bad, these terrible things would not befall me.” A sense of hopelessness ensues. A black cloud hovers or a shadow follows wherever you are.

A mother who cannot recognize the needs of her child or fulfill them, is no doubt in need herself. She, therefore, endeavors to fill her own needs through the child. What the child needs to receive, the mother cannot give, and so he doesn’t develop the framework in which he can develop, identify and feel his own feelings and emotions. This can easily be the cause of a child not “being himself” for the rest of his life. It becomes easy for this person to live in the past and to respond to today’s experiences as if they were in the past. Decisions are made based on what his mother would want him to choose. This person can easily lose his sense of self.

A “poor me” attitude -- feeling despair because the world will not devote itself to making you happy -- keeps the individual-you- the victim. The one who has in the past or currently is causing wounds is in control of the individual and his/her emotions. Living “under the circumstances” or in the shadows, rather than being in control of one’s life and decisions, assigns the power to the perpetrator.

Granted, a victim of abuse has a right to be sad regarding the treatment received, however each person also has the responsibility to rise above the circumstances, to take control of his life and his future, and to insure that those close to them live in peace. No one else can do it. This is where a decision and a determination to escape from the haunting shadow is necessary, and one has to know what is in the shadow and how it controls the present. Then, and often with help from a professional, a decision to escape can be made.

Depression is a state like being on a merry-go-round that revolves faster and faster, making one dizzy and totally out of control. The more pondering of the past and the abuses experienced, the deeper the depression and the sense of hopelessness gets. This is why so many people need recovery from the past hurts they’ve endured as well as a determination to move ahead. It is an intervention designed to turn off the tape recording in the brain and to slow or stop the merry-go-round so that your sense of stability and equilibrium can be found. Recovery is the light directed toward the shadow illuminating the darkness.

Depression hijacks the ability to think in a logical or positive manner, and, sometimes, chemical intervention is necessary to redeem chemical balance in the brain and body in order to return the ability to think logically and positively. Often, a well qualified and experienced therapist can assist by helping someone with clinical depression to regain the ability to think in a realistic and positive manner. In such cases, chemical intervention may be needed for a time until old issues can be safely resolved. In a recovery process, identifying the real causative element of depression and removing the negative emotional charge lurking in the shadow from old memories of pain, brings relief.

Attachment Influenced by Abuses Received:

All of the wounds received in childhood, especially in the first two years, carry with them the after-effects of worthlessness, fears, anger and sadness and form the shadow that follows you. The shadow exaggerates your reactions to other abuses received. If you have been abused early on in life, you may avoid close interactions with others or will cling desperately to one who feels safe to you. You may also be disorganized in your attachment, avoiding at times and clinging at other times.

In the first two years of life, we unknowingly choose our style of attachment, and that choice is powerfully influenced by what we have experienced during the early months of life. The steady or frequent absence of a parent, compounded by abuse, leads a child far away from being able to securely attach and toward one of the three dysfunctional styles of attachment. This choice is a survival technique as well.

Why do Parents reject their children?

Mothers:

1.Maladjusted marriages–the poorer the marriage, the less acceptance of the child

2.Arrival of another (perhaps more attractive or preferred-gender) sibling

3.Infant closely resembled a self-loathing parent

4.Children resembled “the other side of the family” whom the parent resents.

5.Untimely pregnancies -- infant considered an unwanted or unjust imposition

6.Child became a “stand-in for the other parent, rather than receiving affection in his own right

7.Latent hostility was unconsciously displaced from parent’s own rejecting parents to the child

8.Parents employed a hands-off policy with their children – to the point of neglect - due to being over-dominated by their own parents

9.Immediate identification of the child with the child’s father – especially true for unwed mothers

10.Mother couldn’t afford the emotional risk involved in loving a child, especially in cases where another child had been lost in death

11. Child was viewed as anchoring a couple to a difficult marriage

12. Viewed the child as an intruder with whom she was forced to share her husband. This is especially true if the mother had experienced rejection

13. Felt that the child had deprived her of a job or career that she enjoyed – having a child felt like a loss of freedom

14. Mother had major emotional or mental issues, that have been inadequately addressed.

Fathers:

1.Maladjusted marriage

2.Child was physically or psychologically unattractive

3.An untimely pregnancy

4.Close resemblance to their loathed selves

5.Close resemblance to their mate’s despised relatives

6.Jealousy

7.An inability to love

8.An unconscious repayment back to his own parents

9.Feeling of personal inadequacy

10. Promiscuity that cannot be satisfied with only one partner- feels tied down.

11. Questioning whether they had married the right woman.

12. Man had mental or emotional issues that have been inadequately treated.

*These lists were taken from Dr. Joseph Evoy's book, The Rejected. (25-31)

Of all the recorded abuses, rejection seems to carry the most pervasive and detrimental effects. Keep in mind however, that even after recovery, the memories of rejecting experiences remain, but the negative emotional charge, which drives feelings and behaviors, will be removed from those memories. When a slight occurs in the present, it can bring up a rejection you experienced in the past, but your response to it will be mitigated because of your recovery. It’ll be entirely different! You will just notice it and move on! Without recovery, only the Shadows of Acceptance are our norm.