I’ve allowed myself to be mistreated more than I’ve allowed myself the ability to release anger.
I’ve learned why.
The rage I experienced from my abusers left my deafened to my need to be able to express my own anger and rage. I believed if I let go of my anger, I would become them. If I screamed my rage, I feared it would grip my soul and never leave.
I have learned that my rage doesn’t mimic the rage of an abuser.
My rage is over my mistreatment. I have anger and grief over the injustice.
I’ve learned that it doesn’t make me bad to feel the depth of despair through the expression of rage. What do I mean?
Going back through the door of an abusive memory has sometimes left my physical body in bad shape, a left over injury lingering in my body. I had this happen with my back. It just wouldn’t stop pinching and seizing up on me. I found myself in my basement screaming out to God that I hated my father.
My father has been dead for several years now, so why was I screaming out, “I hate you!”
I couldn’t get the memory to stop bringing its horror to my days and terror through my nights. It just wouldn’t leave me.
As I watched, again, my father is calling me back into his room after I’d been forced to leave to throw up because of the stench of the act I was forced into, and he was angry. I’d made him wait through my inability to stay with the force of my parents’ darkness. When I returned, he continued his sodomy but this time with more force, clinching my sides tightly with his hands in his own desperation now to make sure his pleasure wouldn’t be interrupted again.
I hated him in that moment – HATED HIM.
Is that sin? Was I going to now become him and walk around giving into my every angry thought?
You know what happened after I screamed out with bulging eyes several times, “I hate you?” My back started releasing. I knew it was holding onto an egregious act for me until the time I could return and set it free from the agony in those moments of torture at the hands of my own father and mother.
It wasn’t sin for me to cry my rage out, it was freedom. I wasn’t abducted into the hall of anger by doing it nor was I bad.
God had brought me back to that injury – not to torture me again, but to heal me from it.
Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men,
from men whose words are perverse,
13 who have left the straight paths
to walk in dark ways,
14 who delight in doing wrong
and rejoice in the perverseness of evil,
15 whose paths are crooked
and who are devious in their ways.
Proverbs 2: 12-15
My rage was interpreting my disgust at my parents for delighting in their wrong doing. I wanted to believe something different of my past but wisdom demands that I see them for what they are.
That is God’s way.