Hooray for the fight response. I have a certain amount of gunpowder in my constitution that sometimes made me an asshole to people in my youth but also got me the hell out of my family. A little bit of love-avoidance is a small price to pay for being averse to stuckness.
So important. It reminds me of a piece of another essay of yours where you say that while there's so much focus right now on slower, down-regulating, delicate methods, having a big impactful experience can also be helpful to some people. Maybe those more plunging experiences wake up the fight response, allowing to get out of freeze or collapse.
Kimberly Ann Johnson works a lot with activating the fight response in women. She's giving a "Mobilize freeze" course this month, but her way of thawing is accessing fight. Her signature work is called "activate your inner jaguar", it's also about accessing fight and the predator (as a jaguar) energy. Haven't been able to take it yet but I admire her work a lot.
But yeah, we definitely need more healthy, helpful, and functional ways to feel and express anger. It's so important yet so difficult to express it.
I needed to hear this! It all resonates and I know it deeply to be true :') In spite of the pain, I laughed out loud when you said the rage you've shown barely scratches the surface of what's inside.
I heard a "upper middle class" girl once say confidently that anyone who yells first in an argument is surely "the one who's wrong." What a flattening of emotion, power, and morality -- all at once!
PS: The next book club happens on my birthday :) ❤️
That was amazing. That's me- the one who gets attacked because I won't shut up, because I can't just shut up about things. Someone called me "a lightning rod" because of that (and elements of me/who i am that- draw things out of people).
I was like this before, but this self is very much who i see my/our teenage self as. and i've felt tired, felt forced to shut up more now- and it doesn't do me good. it's like it's not who i'm meant to be.
I've seen other survivors get self-hating or retreat from triggers or people (an example is FMSF crap and disbelieving hierarchies). They make me blazingly angry, instead. Instead of hitting shame, they made me memorize a fair amount of why exactly each one of those assholes (who created it) weren't credible, and were in most cases pedophiles.
I also learned how to stand up for myself by standing up for other people first. (And animals. Very much so). The scapegoat story got to me so much, too.
Hooray for the fight response. I have a certain amount of gunpowder in my constitution that sometimes made me an asshole to people in my youth but also got me the hell out of my family. A little bit of love-avoidance is a small price to pay for being averse to stuckness.
So important. It reminds me of a piece of another essay of yours where you say that while there's so much focus right now on slower, down-regulating, delicate methods, having a big impactful experience can also be helpful to some people. Maybe those more plunging experiences wake up the fight response, allowing to get out of freeze or collapse.
Kimberly Ann Johnson works a lot with activating the fight response in women. She's giving a "Mobilize freeze" course this month, but her way of thawing is accessing fight. Her signature work is called "activate your inner jaguar", it's also about accessing fight and the predator (as a jaguar) energy. Haven't been able to take it yet but I admire her work a lot.
But yeah, we definitely need more healthy, helpful, and functional ways to feel and express anger. It's so important yet so difficult to express it.
I needed to hear this! It all resonates and I know it deeply to be true :') In spite of the pain, I laughed out loud when you said the rage you've shown barely scratches the surface of what's inside.
I heard a "upper middle class" girl once say confidently that anyone who yells first in an argument is surely "the one who's wrong." What a flattening of emotion, power, and morality -- all at once!
PS: The next book club happens on my birthday :) ❤️
That was amazing. That's me- the one who gets attacked because I won't shut up, because I can't just shut up about things. Someone called me "a lightning rod" because of that (and elements of me/who i am that- draw things out of people).
I was like this before, but this self is very much who i see my/our teenage self as. and i've felt tired, felt forced to shut up more now- and it doesn't do me good. it's like it's not who i'm meant to be.
I've seen other survivors get self-hating or retreat from triggers or people (an example is FMSF crap and disbelieving hierarchies). They make me blazingly angry, instead. Instead of hitting shame, they made me memorize a fair amount of why exactly each one of those assholes (who created it) weren't credible, and were in most cases pedophiles.
I also learned how to stand up for myself by standing up for other people first. (And animals. Very much so). The scapegoat story got to me so much, too.
You keep inspiring me to want to write.