Andrea’s story is familiar to many child abuse survivors:
Personal Perspective: For the first 40 years of my life, I avoided anger at all costs. Then, two events forced me to face my terror.
Many of us avoid anger for various reasons, including growing up in a household where anger was met with violence, feeling like we don’t have enough value to be angry about being hurt or avoiding negative emotions entirely.
For others, we used anger to hide fear, mistrust, depression, anxiety, etc., because anger was the one emotion that was acceptable to express.
Whatever that looked like for you, we know that survivors often have difficulty feeling emotions, let alone expressing them. None of this is good for our long-term healing, and I hope you’ll read Andrea’s story and how she approaches anger now. I think we need a reminder that we can heal to the point where we feel our emotions and live with them in a healthy manner.