Dear Gaia:

Maybe your anger is up these days because you are stuck with your parents and sister in the same home, not being able to leave the house because of the coronavirus scare (are you not allowed to take walks outside?)

Here is what you wrote about your anger recently: “extra intense feelings of hatred and rage… crazy how intense it is, it’s almost homicidal. I imagine myself beating them or say them very cruel things… I’m very aggressive and resentful.. I wish I had the chance to beat someone or seriously hurt someone emotionally, at  least finally someone else would hurt the same and I shouldn’t be the one carrying all this”-

– notice this: the intensity of your anger is equal to the intensity of your hurt underneath the anger. Can you imagine being this hurt? That’s a whole lot of hurt.

I know this intensity of hurt, I can now feel how it felt early on, the hurt. For the longest time I was aware of my childhood (and onward) anger, but I was not aware of my childhood hurt. What a surprise it was for me, to become aware of that early-life hurt. When we are children we are literally and figuratively soft, so when a parent/another hurts our feelings, it hurts a lot. A punch, be it physical or verbal, goes very deep into us, creating a huge bruising.

We get angry to protect our softness, to not get hurt anymore. Eventually we don’t feel soft anymore, and so, we don’t feel hurt, we don’t feel love, we feel mostly angry. We lose our softness and our loving nature; we become hard and hateful.

anita