Rage against the dying of your light.

So, I’ve seen this somatic therapist (Rosen Method) now about 4 times, and each time I plan to go, I wonder if we’re “doing” anything, if anything is “happening,” especially if anything is “changing.” I want results to long-harbored ills, and I want them now. Or at least evidence that we’re heading in that direction.

Damn this woo-woo laying on of hands, heal thyself bullshit – gimme the Rx, gimme the fix, and let’s get on with this “life” business. Or more accurately, let’s get on with the happy life business. Enough processing. More doing, more getting, more fulfillment, more joy, more security, more ….

She told me that if I keep on trying to skip over my emotions, they’ll still just be there. Waiting, licking at the back of my throat, causing the tension in my shoulders I’ve carried for decades. If I put a lid on them, feel them well up, and force them back down, … well, I could finish that sentence with, “Then you might get cancer.”

But I’m so good at emoting. I’m an emotional wreck! No, I kid, but I am an emotional person, I feel things, deeply, often, sometimes. So, where am I not feeling what needs to come up and out?

“Anger wasn’t an allowable emotion,” I told her. I know I’m not unique in that. But anger was modeled as a way to impose, control, terrorize. Anger, I interpreted, is bad. It causes people to behave badly, meanly, poisoned.

Anger, I also surmised, is consuming. When you are angry, you are nothing else but a hot, raging ball of ferocity. No humanity, no compassion, no faults.

I’ve worked on anger before; I’ve read Julia Cameron saying, Anger is a call to action. It shows us where our boundaries are being crossed, and calls us to take action in their assertion. (to paraphrase.)

Anger is healthy. Anger is right.

Anger is totally not allowed.

This isn’t to say I don’t get angry, anyway. Ask my coworkers! But I feel it as a place where my veil of self-control has slipped, instead of as an integrated part of my expression. I feel my anger as a failure. Something to be overcome, overruled, rooted out.

But, that’s simply not the case, and the more I keep it separate from myself and an integrated whole, the more compartmentalized and dissociated I will be.

It’s not like I want to be the Hulk, or a crank, or someone who’s angry all the time. I just want to allow it to be a part of my emotional range, just like compassion or amusement, and like boredom or fear or apathy. I don’t quash with visceral force even these less “comfortable” emotions; I don’t feel shame over feeling them. Positive or negative ones.

But Anger. And grief. Get the cold shoulder. The taut one. The tense, clamped down, forcible shoulder.

Being a somatic therapist in this way of working, it’s sort of like reiki, only she’s not "sending me good vibes;" she's observing how my body tenses or releases, acknowledges “true” things, or asks me to rephrase, since that didn’t “feel true.” I don’t know precisely what polygraph she’s plugged into in my body, but when I do rephrase to something less "proper," I do feel the difference.

She can feel very acutely when, this week, I began to talk about my disappointment around work. And I began to say that it feels like I’m just giving my dad more evidence that I’m the fuck-up daughter. He’s the Dudley Do-Right (his words), beyond reproach and reproaching everyone else – can you feel my anger, too? – and that I don’t have a firm career track, a “successful” life, feels like more evidence for him that I’m the fuck-up. She asked if I felt that way about the career stuff. And I said, no, I simply feel like a failure. Which I interpret through all the lovely filters of his I’ve internalized as a fuck-up. Which I suppose is the same thing, come to think of it.

You’ve heard this before from me. The antipathy toward getting better, or simply seeing myself as better because it would change the entire nature of my relationship with him. There wouldn’t be a relationship – certainly not the one we’ve had, at least. And so for now, in fact since cancer, there is no relationship. Yell at your sick daughter while she’s getting chemo, and you stop getting the right to shame me. Sorry, Pops. I’m sitting on the bench right now.

But I haven’t walked out of the park, have I? I still want revenge. I still want to pain him. I still want him to see the error of his ways then and now, and be the father I want that I’ve never had. I still have that hope. And so my anger kicks in when I recall him to others. My frustration. My deep deep disappointment.

But only for a flash. As soon as I let myself have a moment of anger, even now, I have this impulse to say, Well, focus on yourself, Molly, and what you can change, and your expectations; you’re living your life away from him, and yadda yadda bullshit.

I need to feel angry! I need to feel betrayed. I need to rail against the fate and circumstance of it, and I need to let it pass.

I never let it pass. Pass through me. Through my red, pumping oxygenated blood.

She asked me as I lay (clothed!) on the massage table, Can you feel that? Can you feel when you got angry how much energy there was? Your voice got loud, your body got hot.

And then it was gone. And then my shoulders tense, my gut constricts. I’m not allowed to be angry. I’m not supposed to be.

I don’t want to let it flow through me. I’m terrified of being consumed by it like they were.

But, I have had the experience a few years ago around grief. I was terrified that if I began to let it out, it would drown me. If I started to cry, to feel it, it would overwhelm me, and I would be lost in it. In the psych ward in it. So, I held it back. (I do still.) But during that time, maybe 5 or so years ago, in the presence and care of another therapist, I let myself feel some of what I needed to. I let it pass through me, out of me, I let it disorient me.

But it didn’t dismantle me. I wasn’t wrecked by it. I felt it. It was hard and sad and wracking, but it wasn’t annihilating.

I will try to remember that as I go forward here, because it feels really old and really sad to hold my body in fight/flight/freeze all the time, and to interpret my life and myself as anything other than brilliant.