You’re not angry with me?

Undoing decades of imagined anger

I think everyone is angry with me all the time.

You wouldn’t know it from the outside. I do what I want, say what I think, write what I feel. But inside I’m wrecked. Inside I’m obsessing over every word, always wondering if I should apologise for this thing I said or that—like the joke I made the other day that I thought was clever but no one has laughed and maybe they’re offended and I’ve lost all my closest friends!?

Everything I do that doesn’t immediately engender the expected response, I assume it’s made someone angry.

And the worst thing? I thought this was normal.

Anger as the only explanation

I discovered this quirk of mine, not in a single therapy session, but through the heightened awareness from months of therapy that led me one day to: This isn’t normal.

Other people don’t explain every silence with anger. They don’t stay up nights worrying they’ve said the wrong thing, made the wrong joke, alienated everyone they ever knew.

Then: why am I like this?

I once asked a practitioner of psychology what percentage of people are messed up by their parents, and they said—all of them. I can’t say if this is opinion or fact, but it describes my reality.

I was raised by parents who, in turn, were raised by parents who did not model healthy ways of expressing emotions, especially “negative” ones like anger. This led to repeated situations I witnessed as a child that could only have been resolved by healthy confrontation but because that required an expression of anger—not acceptable—were never addressed.

Instead, our household simmered with suppressed anger, soon resentment, that erupted at the smallest infraction in the form of cold shoulders and slammed doors. And enough of these instances were directed at me that I came to believe I was the problem.

By the time I left, aged seventeen, I had no doubt everything I did, or would ever want to do, was liable to make someone angry with me.

This belief dictated my life for the next eighteen years.

You’re not angry with me

It hasn’t been easy. Every time I want to say or do something, my first thought is always: will I make them angry? At work, at home, with my partner, my friends, writing this—I am always expecting to do something wrong.

I am afraid to take initiative, offer my opinion, contradict my manager. Every silence I meet, I interpret to mean anger. Mark is angry with me. Jess is angry with me. My therapist is angry with me. My readers are angry with me. That person I just requested to follow on Instagram is angry with me.

If I come across as a person who speaks my mind, it’s because for two decades I have been actively fighting this fear, each time telling myself the thing I feel the need to say is worth the wrath I will undoubtedly incur.

Never did I question the fear itself. Until now.

Years of working with the not-giving-a-f*ck guy, followed by months of therapy, and finally I realise my folly:

Every human walking this earth isn’t living their whole lives waiting to get angry at me.

It is entirely unreasonable to expect anger as the default response to everything I do. To assume every silence is a cold shoulder.

Even better: even if someone does get angry at me for something I do or say, that doesn’t mean I did something wrong. I am not responsible for their anger. I might feel bad that they got angry, but I don’t have to blame myself for it.

To decide I am not at fault for any anger I might incur—past or present—has been incredibly freeing. I cannot believe the weight I’d been carrying all these decades.

You’re not angry with me. You’re a person with a whole life I don’t see full of things to do, deadlines to meet, emotions to battle, worries to reckon with.

And once you finish reading this, I will be the last thing on your mind. If I was ever on it at all.

What do you think?

When you do something you’re a little worried about, what’s the reason?

Is it because, like me, you expect anger as the default response? Or is your worry masking something else? Please hit “reply” or leave a comment—I read every response and I’d love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this, please share it with someone who might like it too.

We’re currently on an every-other-week schedule, so I’ll see you in two weeks… In the meantime, stay thoughtful,

Val