Increasing anger about childhood

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Asking for a friend 

Have you experienced anger about your childhood increasing years or decades later? Possibly without the parent even being around or at least not adding mich fresh hurt?

If so, why do you think that happened?

Also, the past can't be changed. How does an adult manage when their childhood was fundamentally unsafe?

[alphaomega]

Ohhh yes.  Very much yes.

IMHO, once we step away from the abuse, we can see it so much clearer.  Rather than being enmeshed, we become free.

My NPDM wasnt that horrible of a "mother" when I was little.  But as I grew up and matured, her true colors spewed out and I became public enemy number 1.

Such a sad sad experience.

[JustKeepTrying]

I am in treatment for PTSD.  For the past three years.  It became so great that I had daily seizures and aphasia.  Reduced my immune system and my neuropsychiatrist couldn't find anything physical yet after days of intensive psychological testing - traced it back to abuse stemming from my narcissistic siblings - and my parents not doing anything about it.  It led to behaviors that resulted in a suicide attempts, date rape in college and a decades long marriage to my xOCPDh.  My mother even told me that I wasn't having enough sex with my ex and that is why he was unfaithful.

So yeah I get angry.  As an adult who is healing, coming Out of the FOG, and experiencing authentic relationships I can see how I wasn't a great mother - I embraced her parenting tactics and my children were at times not safe - and I get angrier.  The older I become - the more experience and distance - the wiser.  I can now reflect back and see those mistakes with greater clarity. 

The only saving grace in my anger is that my mother and father are a product of their environment.  You can only make the best decisions based on the best information.  If you don't know, you don't know.

How does an adult manage?  I wish I had an answer.  A lot of therapy.  A lot of patience with myself.  Journaling.  My parents are both gone so I can't confront.  I can't talk to them.  All I can do is live with the trauma and try to move emotionally beyond it.

I have a sticky note on my cabinets that say "I am not my emotion."  That helps.

[Cat of the Canals]

Ohhh yes.  Very much yes.

Ditto. And I agree that at least part of the reason is now being able to name and recognize the abuse for what it was. So many of those feelings went unprocessed because we were:
1. probably living most moments in some form of "survival mode" (i.e. doing whatever we could to keep our PD parent(s) satisfied) .
2. too young to have the words to describe what was happening or to even know how wrong it was.

I've personally found journaling to be very therapeutic. On the days I feel the most anger, the thoughts have a tendency to swirl around in my head, and it's very distracting. Writing it down helps clarify what I'm upset about and why in a way that makes me feel like I can let it go, at least for now. I doubt I'll ever be fully free from the anger, because like you said, the past can't be changed. The things that happened are set in stone to that degree, and I won't ever feel good about them.

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Alphaomega, yes, it seems like when people get older, more mature, and more experienced, they look back and see more clearly what happened. And I guess having children can make it even more visible. And in your case, a hidden dynamic can be shifted to the open, maybe because you are no longer as vulnerable to your mother for your survival.

I wish you peace.

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JustKeepTrying, I am sorry to read of your difficult struggles but glad you were able to identify the source and maybe start to shift some of the burden.

Reading your post, I started thinking that maybe anger miight at least partly be about the victim being denied.

If someone is harmed and everyone around that person agrees it happened and it was wrong, the harm still happened but there can be some closure. But if the message is largely/primarily/solely that it didn't happen, it wasn't that bad, the person deserved it, etc., it gets stuck.

If the person has a feeling about the memory, the feeling is countered in the mind with the programmed external messages: didn't happen, too sensitive, etc.

The person thinks, no, it DID happen and it was wrong! More anger to push past the messages, to drown them out. But the messages just get louder, too. And round and round it goes.

Maybe processing these things is like stages of grief. So ideally you could have these feelings and experience them and eventually, on your own time, move to acceptance. But if every attempt to process is met in the head with the programmed messages NO NO NO, it's stuck.

So maybe the goal is to get new messages in, maybe with the help of other people. YES it happened. YES it was wrong. YES you are allowed to feel what you're feeling.

I don't know if the NO NO NO voice ever fades, though.

I wish you peace.

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Cat in the Canals, good thoughts about journaling. Maybe part of it is allowing you to have your own voice be louder, as it is being expressed outside of your head (onto paper or computer file).

And I do take your point that you will never feel good about the past, that makes perfect sense.

I wish you peace.

[Call Me Cordelia]

Absolutely. There are layers and layers of anger and they come up one at a time, at seemingly random times or when I'm reminded of events that had been long forgotten.

Even if we could recognize that things weren't right, it wasn't safe to be angry at our parents until we WERE safe. For many of us that means physically away from them and/or have a lot of time pass. That anger didn't just not happen, it got stuffed down for later processing.

There's a line from Isaiah that I think applies to this: "Behold in peace is my bitterness most bitter." It's not enough to just be away and say ok time to move on, forget about the past. It needs to be dealt with. It won't always be so intense and certainly not all the time. But it does feel good to be honest about what happened and feel what I feel, once I learned how.

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Call Me Coredelia (reminds me of Anne of Green Gables?), that is a really good insight how, in addition to not having the maturity and perspective to process trauma as a child, it often isn't safe, either.

And I can see how the necessary distance can include decades. And possibly VLC or NC to boot.

I will look up the Isaiah reference, thanks.

I wish you peace.

[11JB68]

I've been NC for years. Still angry. Sometimes it flares. I especially get angry that the way I grew up helped to create the unhealthy choices I've made that now I feel trapped by. I think if my upbringing had been healthy I might have made better choices for myself.

[notrightinthehead]

For years and years I vented about the abuse I received from my mother.  With every therapist I processed my childhood. In every life crisis the anger about my childhood and the damage it had done to me boiled up again. Even after she had passed, I still talked about her in therapy. Like 11JB I believe that the unhealthy choices I made were a direct consequence of my childhood.  I feel that I am crippled emotionally.
One day I was bored with it. I felt - not my mother again. It was over. By then I had changed so much that she no longer could harm me,   and I know now that I have truly forgiven her. 
My husband treated me just like she had done, minus the physical abuse, and after I left I used to wake up in the middle of the night, boiling with rage, unable to go back to sleep for hours.  Three years later I hardly ever think of him anymore. The anger is gone. I know that I am safe now and that I will never again allow someone to treat me like this again.  I believe all the suppressed anger needs to come out and I had to feel it. It also served as a warning to not get myself in a similar situation. 

[alphaomega]

I have had nothing but anger since NPDM died 7 weeks ago.    As I am able to extridite myself further and further from the abuse, and allow every single emotion to come up without judgement, I had a tender rememberence a few days ago.

I had pulled a just washed, dried and still warm blanket out of the dryer and snuggled into it.  Memories came flooding back of when she would put towels in the drier for when I would come out of the bath when I was little.  I had forgotten about that.  It was one of the most nurturing things she had done, that gave me so much comfort. 

She wasnt always a monster - was the thought I had. 
I felt almost as if her spirit was begging me to forgive her. And perhaps for a moment I did.  But it didnt last when all the trauma came rushing back.

A brief respite indeed.

Somewhere between my sister dying and my getting my first first real boyfriend at 15 years old (husband of 25 years now)
I became her enemy. 

Or her "project" ?

DH and I were talking yesterday about all the anger I have.  It as if for the first time in my whole 51 years, I have allowed myself permission to feel all the pain, all the horror, all the anguish, all the abandonment, all the picked-at scars, all the ill-fitted attempts at giving her happiness.  Its all coming flooding in, for what I have decided is a final release from this albatross once and for fucking all.

And it will take how ever long it takes. 
And its going to most definitely require full sobriety to process.

I have never known freedom.  Ever.  Since every single move I made in life had to have her stamp of approval or I would cause myself to become physically sick.
I also havent known what life is like sans addictions.  But I'm about to learn   

I cant quite quantify yet, just how far the damage reaches, as I have only just begun to walk to path of letting it up.  And, out. 

But I know for absolute sure, karmatically she fucking OWES ME BIG TIME. 

And the recollection of a warm blanket might just be the start of her dharma...

[AlisonWonder]

I haven't read anything I don't agree with here.  I'd just like to observe though, that it's not true that the past can't be changed. It changes continually.  One simple example, I used to have a happy childhood, with the exception of finding my father creepy.  Then I found out I was parentally alienated and the creepiness belonged elsewhere.  I don't know where my childhood will end up, but I am certainly interested!

alphaomega our mothers must have died within days of each other.  I am sorry for whatever loss is foremost in your mind.

[JenniferSmith]

I found that these feeling increased a lot for me after I went NC.  I had done several years of therapy prior to going NC, but I returned to my therapist and started doing EMDR and that really cleared the anger and other feelings such as fear out.  It was extremely liberating.  I felt the EMDR helped me resolve things that no amount of talking would have. It was a fascinating process.

[MamaDryad]

I've experienced this. For me, there have been two catalysts. The first was when I made the decision to become a parent myself. That's when I started thinking seriously about what kids need and realizing how deeply messed up my own childhood was. I already knew to some degree, but I had always shrugged it off as something I was strong enough to handle (spoiler: I wasn't; my body took on all the stress and started attacking itself).

The second has been getting gradually healthier in terms of self-trust and self-compassion. The way I survived as a kid was by doubting my own perceptions and blaming myself for my mother's behavior. As I have begun to untangle that mess, I find myself getting angry sometimes on behalf of the kid I was.

As for how to manage, the way I'm going about it is by trying to build a sense of safety for myself. I think everyone has to find their own way to do this. For me, what has been helping lately is meditation, with a focus on grounding. Other people find a lot of value in various types of reparenting, whether that is by conversing with their child-selves or just consciously taking care of themselves as they would a loved child.