This looks like would fit also in general, but this is a big element in reconciliation, possibly even a turning point more often than not. For both sides.
When your innermost self, the thing that makes you human, sociable and capable of love gets hit hard by a traumatic event, is the emotional equivalent of being blown to shreds by a bomb.
And I can identify at least two forms of ordinance:
- a mortar blow, coming from an outside threat, that you could more or less spot or sometimes expect.
- a landmine. Completely unseen, unexpected, hitting its victim sneakily when they’re defenseless.
When a person gets wounded badly by such a threat, they usually go through a shock, followed up by some emotional response.
One of these is anger, which is very common and has a survival role in our lives.
Anger is the natural response to being wronged by someone, or sometimes by ourselves.
In case of an outside threat, like the mortar shot, you will hurt immediately and will be dazed in shock, stunned by the aggression or abuse, momentarily frozen. That’s you making sense of what just happened.
Then right after the damage control system ran its duty on your wounds, your emotions will start to emerge. There will be many, including fear who is a close companion, but the one who is usually overwhelming all others in the moment, is anger.
It is a powerful one because it’s role is to unfreeze you from the shock you suffered, and let you identify the threats who just attempted to destroy you, and neutralize them, or give you clarity on what to do, to get yourself into safety.
Because whoever shot you have decided to be your enemy, has clearly shown intention and willingness to destroy you, so there is no room to think and assess and conflict resolution if you want to survive, only a split moment to determine if you can take down and neutralize this threat, or if you can’t and then need to run and hide.
Fight or flight. That’s why fear may be a close companion to anger.
This is almost universal, and its variations do depend upon how aware you were of the risk of the threat hitting you.
When you get to "safety" anger is usually replaced by relaxation of your system, adapting to your new normal, when you see there are no further consequences following this up.
If you spotted it just before or fromfar away. If you were having intuition of something being off. If you actually provoked it first.
Those are variations that determine how long you will be in shock before turning to anger, and eventual fight or flight.
Even if you were the one causing the conflict and the attack first, you will still suffer shock and anger because you hurt, but you will be likely quicker in choosing between fight or flight because you were at least "prepared" for it to happen.
In this last case, depending on how unwarranted or not was your causing the conflict, you may feel other emotions once the fight or flight put you in relative "safety". It could be regret, remorse, shame, or you could feel entitled to have started the conflict and completely justified.
Whether that’s true or not, is irrelevant, is how you feel.
But usually you do count your losses in this case, before deciding if to escalate or withdraw, for deep down you know you were the one starting it all. So very rarely the anger does transform into rage. You generally know that if you didn’t do something, this would have never happened.
And you might even have already a plan b in mind…
When you could spot or "feel" the threat incoming, your shock will be longer, because you do know that you have not done anything to warrant such violent abuse against you. So your system will review as fast as it can what possibly could be the reason for this behavior. Still you are kind of prepared to some extent or the other, you saw it coming or you felt a potentiality hostile environment.
Is still a shock to receive such an offense when you didn’t deserve it, but at least you had seen red flags 🚩 and you will not be blocked to process it into anger, fight or flight, even if it takes longer.
What follows that, it depends on what you chose, fight or flight. If you chose to fight, neutralized the threat Athena you are likely to go into relaxation. The thing that hurt you without reasons is no longer able to harm you. You might be grieving your wounds but the tragedy is over and buried.
If you chose to flight, then the following reactions can be different. You could become set in fear, because of the risk of going back outside and being assaulted abused and wounded without reason. Fear will always accompany you now, for a good part of the road at least, because you have been proven that what you thought was safe, it wasn’t, it can try to destroy you for no reason at any time. The threat is still hanging out there. You run, but wasn’t neutralized.
Or if you see this as an injustice, the anger and fear might mix into a much more explosive concoction, you may start to experience rage. And rage demands compensation, retribution of any kind. It refuses to run from the threat, the abuser, it rather charges head in to face it, confront it, and obtain retribution or a compensation, apology, compassion.
Unsatisfied rage can become hate, or a vendetta.
The last form is the unexpected threat, the one coming from within, when you are reassured of the peaceful and righteousness, the beauty of life, trust in yourself and the others, and then suddenly step on a mine, and blow up into pieces.
This time you don’t have awareness of what happened, you are stuck in shock because this was an unthinkable, impossible situation that you never imagined could happen to you.
You don’t realize how, what, why. You can’t react with fight or flight because you can’t see the threat, all you see is your familiar and safe environment, but it was there you were shred to pieces.
The emotions of anger and fear that should unfreeze you cannot trigger properly because it’s all so ambiguous: your safe space becomes your destruction, your protection becomes the abuse, everything that your system ever learned to be sacred and safe, suddenly turned around you, but it still looks the same…
You short circuit your emotional response, and until you can’t make sense of just what happened and what was the threat, you are stuck in shock, that crystallizes into trauma.
That state itself instead of useful to assess damage and survival response, becomes a trap caging you into a spiraling loop. Emotions designed to restore your center like fear and anger misfire continually bouncing back and around the pain you feel trying to assess "this pain was caused by this enemy = react with fight / flight" and since there is ambiguity, there is no recognizable enemy or abuser, they keep misfiring and spreading the pain and suffering into branching more emotional traumas, so those emotions check those, find nothing, misfire again, repeat the loop.
That’s neither fight or flight. That’s freeze response.
And slowly but surely your system realizes this is unsustainable, is going to shatter you more if you can’t stop the loop. This is where it starts to becoming paramount to know the truth. What happened. When. Why.
Once you gather enough truth, it is when your emotions of fear and anger can finally find an outlet, and you can at last break the loop and resume the process towards fight or flight, with eventual relaxation and return to normalcy.
There is a worse layer on such situations, when the abuse came from your inner circle, the pillars of safety of your world and existence, this is when even gathering the truth starts to slash with your attachment.
And it’s a big one. Part of you knwo that the truth exposes the person closest as the origins of the abuse and the threat. The rest of you rejects it as preposterous because your entire existence was built around the certainty that these people who you placed there in your world are your safety, the beloved ones.
This ping pong is the cognitive dissonance that causes an inner war on the abuse victim, because it’s a lose lose situation. You either acknowledge the threat for what it is and pulverize your primordial attachment. Or you reject the reality tomprotect your attachment, thus allowing the threat to persist, close to you, ready to blow you up again at a whim.
And fear and anger dance around this chaos tenfold compared to the pervious example.
This is no longer just a landmine, this was a bomb implanted in your innermost heart and detonated on purpose. Nothing is safe or nothing is true: these are the only two options this trauma dysfunction juggles around until you stay in shock.
And in this situation the fear can no longer lead to safety. Only anger can jolt you out of this ruins strong enough to start digging your way out to breathe again. Fear will keep you buried for the rest of your life.
When anger comes it might set you free for a moment, but in this case is not followed up from relaxation, the injustice was too deep, it will almost unavoidably transform into rage.
Because even the anger that will bring you initially into fight will be pulled back into flight by the ambiguity of it all (the dissonance between attachment and threat is never fully shaken off),you can’t fully fight because it’s difficult to unsee the attachment and replace it with abuser. You can’t fully flight because the attachment holds you back.
You may first cope finding an outlet, some scapegoat to blame and discharge your anger upon, but it’s a cope, it’s not the real target even if it was participant, accomplice.
It doesn’t work. Only briefly. It takes time for the dissonance to process, to really see who the abuser, the enemy and threat truly is, to dismantle enough of your attachment that you can separate, from scared figured to real abuser.
When you finally do it, the rage in inevitable.
That’s the turning point, depending on if it gets you retribution, neutralization, compensation or escalation, this could become relaxation and peace or pure hate.
Or nothingness, irrelevance and peace are a way to neutralize the abuser as well.
Hen you confront this kind of wounds, it’s possible that the outcome of one healing depends heavily on how this phase develops and resolves.
Sure thing is, it is not a thing that accepts to remain unheard or ignored.
