So often victims have spent decades suppressing their emotions and emotional needs to protect themselves, to protect their connection with their abuser, to allow themselves to function in the world.
Anger allows you to own your experience, provides motivation for stepping back from an abuser, and gives you the opportunity and space to work through your emotions.
Anger can help you recalibrate your understanding of your worth and divest yourself of taking responsibility for the abuser’s actions.
Anger and hate can be important tools for stepping out of sadness, validating that what happened was not okay and that I did not do anything wrong, and helping break emotional ties to an abuser.
Anger and hate can be a catalyst for change, for strength, for standing up, for making a difference. Anger is often a symptom that something is wrong, not a disease that needs to be excised.
Anger is not ‘bad’.
Anger is a natural, NORMAL response to abuse. Anyone who believes that no emotions other than ‘positivity’ should be acknowledged, or who believes that anger and pain demonstrate a defect of character, is not someone who can be supportive of your healing.
Anger is generally a sign that something is wrong; we need to listen to our anger.
(…assuming we are not struggling with certain personality disorders or cognition errors.)
Children are innately in tune with their emotions – with no filter, or judgment, about them – but children of abuse are shown over and over that their emotions don’t matter, that they’re inconvenient, that they cause mommy or daddy to hurt them, that they are bad, wrong, ugly, mean. That child’s sense of themselves is destroyed and is replaced by the parent.
Anger can help a child of abuse find their voice.
Anger can help a child of abuse find their ‘self’. Anger can help a child of abuse realize that they have a right to be safe, to protect themselves. Anger can help a child of abuse know they are more than the use they have to their abuser.
A normal person feels angry when they see a child being abused; and it is normal to feel that anger on our own behalf.