Rage, Yelling, and Tears

If we had lived in an apartment, or if the houses on our street weren't so well insulated and spaced apart, I suspect the police would have been called out to our home more than once. If not for the screaming fights NM had with my father when I was a child, for the yelling and slamming things NM did when she raged at E-sis and me.

It was as if every mess, every act of non-compliance, even a dirty spoon not put in the dishwasher, was a personal attack against her by us. Her rages over the dishes were the most terrifying and that drama merits its own series of posts later. In general, NM had two types of rages - the angry lecture and the pure rage. Sometimes one would lead to the other and the words were often the same for both, it was just a matter of what level of volume she spoke them at.

"How could you do this to me?"
"Do you like me when I'm angry?"
"Do you like making me angry?"
"Don't cry! I should be the one crying!"
"You made me angry!"
"Why can't you behave?"
"Why can't you do what I tell you?"
"I'm angry!"
"If you would just behave this wouldn't happen!"
"Why did you do X!?"
"Why would you do that!?"
"It's your own fault!"
"I'll give you a reason to cry!"

The list could go on and on. The specifics don't matter and I can't even recall them. It was all the same in the end, we were bad and we were responsible for her emotions. Heaven forbid I start to cry, as I often did, that just incited her more. Sometimes she would cry while she raged at us, because we had apparently hurt her so much by simply being children! Being around her was aversive and so whatever it was she wanted us to do was aversive by association. We just tried to avoid it and her and keep our heads down. But of course she would yell at us for not doing it then, yell at us for something bad we did, and so on. We would sit there or stand there, forbid from speaking, forbidden from fleeing while she lashed out at us. There was no escape, and when one cannot fight or flee, one freezes. That is when trauma typically occurs.

When people around me raise their voices, even if my friends are just debating a movie, I flashback emotionally. I become silent. I try to make myself physically smaller. For example, if I am sitting on the sofa next to DH, I curl my legs up and under my body, and press against him and hide my face. I feel unhappy and scared. I have returned to the way I felt in childhood, small and powerless, hoping it will stop soon and unable to leave the room, unable to speak up. Having learned this about myself though, I have started to get up and go to another room to do breathing exercises when I feel the flashback starting. I'm an adult now, I can leave an uncomfortable or unpleasant situation. It's slow, but I'm making progress.

In spite of my attempts, I (thankfully) never learned how to stop myself from crying, how to control it. As an adult I frequently apologize when I cry. though Not if I cry over a movie or something like that, that's okay. But if I'm sad or angry and cry I apologize, because I was not allowed to be sad or angry and cry unless NM thought I had something to be that way about, which she never did. She might make a token effort to console me, but when it failed she would become irritated or mad. Over sensitive is probably her favorite description of me. Anyway, it's taken many years with DH to not feel like a bad person, an inconvenience to others, for crying.

In closing, it seems NM has a desperate need to yell and rage. She couldn't yell at us so much once we were adults in college as we weren't home much and usually did our chores, and by then my father had learned to avoid setting her off. So NM yells at politicians, pundits, and other idiots on the news. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. Certainly I talk back to them myself sometimes, but I never yell. It's not like the people on the TV can hear me anyway.