Machine Against the Rage

I mow my lawn in much the same fashion that I shave my legs—very rarely and then, in a sudden burst, hacking at the overgrowth with the surgical precision of a drunk toddler attempting to give a preschool classmate a Jennifer Aniston bob with a pair of safety scissors. When I do mow, it is with an electric push mower with a mind of its own, and not a particularly healthy mind—it is prone to frequent breakdowns. Considering my front yard is about ten acres, this strategy is not optimal. As with painting the Golden Gate Bridge, the job is never finished. 

For me, mowing is less about aesthetics and more about what I call Machine Against the Rage— sweating out the poison when fury consumes me. The less stressed out I am, the more out of control my lawn is. In July I experienced such joyful clarity of mind, such a notable absence of anxiety, that there was an explosion of grass. The butterflies and grasshoppers were thrilled. 

This week, the lawn is pretty well trimmed because recently my CPTSD got seriously triggered, leaving me wildly enraged. The details don’t matter. Four times over six days, I found myself in situations that reminded me of my lifelong status as an outcast, starting with having been exiled from my family of origin as a teenager. It’s an excruciating pain with lifelong echoes. I have strived mightily to deal with these terrible feelings using techniques and strategies that have run the gamut from teenage alcoholism to block the pain to a variation of EMDR to release that pain. I have had long stretches of remission from this emotional cancer. I have also had long stretches of lingering in deep blackness. 

The good news is that the remissions seem to grow longer the older I get, thanks to all the work I’ve done to stay in the steady zone. The bad news is that when The Triggering does happen, it can feel very much like no progress was ever made, that I am doomed to suffer forevermore, that there is no hope. Fortunately, there is more good news, which is that I now know the absolute necessity of taking immediate action when the darkness descends, to not allow the attendant lethargy to get the upper hand. 

Hence the mowing. When Gut Punch Number Four arrived right on the heels of Gut Punches Numbers One through Three and rage consumed me, I knew what I had to do. Though I continue to hold there is tremendous value in sitting still with difficult emotions and making space to examine them, and while I continue to meditate every day, I also understand there are times when nothing but hard physical labor will provide some immediate respite. 

My recent mowing, much like my recent mood, was entirely erratic, very much all over the place. I’d start in on a poorly executed crop circle in front of the chapel, then zigzag over to the chicken coop area, then over to the path leading to the goat yard. Really, it didn’t matter. I just needed motion as my brain looped and looped on all the things that hurt. 

Upon being driven back into the house by drained batteries and triple digits, I extracted from a shelf a book I’d meant to start reading much sooner, a gift from one of my most compassionate friends who has had plenty of her own demons to wrestle. The book is called No Bad Parts, written by Richard Schwartz. It’s about Internal Family Systems (IFS) which is a psychological framework designed to bring relief to those of us whose adult lives are far too often hijacked by the childhood trauma we endured.

IFS is too complex to encapsulate here, but I’ll offer some broad strokes. The practice encourages you to tune into various parts inside yourself that “carry burdens.” These can be personal or legacy burdens. For example, a personal burden springs from some specific abuse visited on one directly—say a violent parent. Legacy burdens are more broad—for example my eating disorder is connected in great part to the ubiquitous false and dangerous ideas the media foists on girls and women that one must be anorexically skinny to be “attractive.” 

These burden-carrying parts aren’t bad—hence the title of the book. But they are misguided. The key is to isolate them, listen to them individually, talk to them, ask them why they do what they do, and then redirect them to positive tasks. 

Doing the exercises in the book, I was able to very quickly zero in on how being The Outcast often takes me down. I could see, with far greater clarity than in the past, a deeply embedded pattern of mine. From the time I was very young I was always looking for another family that would have me. This might be an actual biological family or it might be a club or a group. Time and again I would find acceptance. And then, eventually, I would be “kicked out” or I would run away because somehow everything managed to go to shit.

Simply blaming myself for being the common denominator in these situations is reductive. Only now am I very clearly seeing how some of the families and groups I ingratiated myself to appealed to me because my Dysfunctional Spidey Sense responded to the familiar. I recognized an opportunity to try to recreate my family of origin shit in the hopes for a different, more cheerful outcome. The problem was, I kept stepping into families/groups that were just as fucked up as my own family, and so failure was inevitable as eventually I would fall into my old family roles: scapegoat, protestor, bomb dropper and, as a result, be forced to leave. In therapy this is known as Repetition Compulsion. In sobriety groups it is often referred to as the definition of insanity—repeating the same mistake, seeking different results. 

Using the IFS approach, I started zeroing in on parts of me that stopped serving me a long time ago, but to which I have stubbornly clung. There’s the Inner Critic, the Guilt Meister, the Shame Distributor, the Anxiety Monster, the Judge, the Competitor. The list goes on. Of all of the parts, the one currently receiving the most attention is the Rager. I so did not want to have that conversation, to ask my rage why it exists, what it wants, and why it tortures me. I knew doing so would necessarily involve revisiting moments in my life where I completely and totally lost my shit—on others, on myself. I don’t like these memories. They hurt so much. 

But when I forced myself to get in there and really dig around, I could see how, just like so many other parts, the Rager has always engaged in a misguided attempt to protect me. Schwartz explains that since these parts typically develop and take on their burdens when we are very young, they get stuck and fail to evolve. So let’s say the seed of my rage took root when I was a little child with absolutely no control over my life—I was perpetually abused and there was no recourse. Of course I felt rage in response.

My job is to reassure the Rager that I do have recourse now. There are better tactics. I don’t shame the Rager. Instead I say something like, “I really appreciate that you want to protect and defend me from feeling rejected, I get where you’re coming from, but maybe a better response would be to help me learn to avoid leaping into toxic situations in the first place, can you do that?” And I might add a gentle p.s. later, pointing out to the Rager that being raged at as a child is what got me here in the first place, so why would I want to inflict that on someone else?

Another way to look at it is to consider these buried parts like a room full of tired, cranky children who might each be yelling something different—“You suck!” Or “You’re so stupid!” Or “Everyone is better than you.”—but who are all really saying the same thing: “I’m scared. I’m so scared. I’m scared the bad shit is going to happen again and I’m trying to stop that from coming true.” Each in turn must be soothed, reassured, and offered a better job. The Critic can become a cheerleader, the Judge can be taught to become the Acceptor, the Competitor might be convinced to let go of useless comparisons. 

This Ship of Fools is a large one, hard to steer sometimes, with so many different parts grabbing for the wheel. I’m determined to turn it around though, no matter how long it takes, to put an end to the cyclical attempts at mutiny by the misguided—but not bad—parts within. Convince them we’re safe now, let’s all get cleaned up and put on some new outfits. I’ll measure my progress by the grass growth. 

NOTES:

Y’all—my Kickstarter has another 2.5 weeks. I came out of the gates very strong but now book pre-orders have slowed to a trickle. It would please me so much if you would go and pre-order a copy. I’ll start shipping in early September. Thanks! 

CLICK THIS LINK TO PRE-ORDER MY NOVEL.