Banishing the Anger that Banished Me
“Get out of the car!” my father said sternly.
My 6-year-old self could not compute his demand. I looked at him dumbfounded.
“Get out of the car now!” he said louder as he reached across the passenger side of the car and opened the door to the street’s median divide—a narrow strip of dead grass.
With cars whizzing by, I scrambled out and watched as he slammed the door and drove away. I sat cross-legged on the scratchy grass, red welts growing around my ankles. In a kind of sleepy haze, I waited expectantly, glancing back and forth between the streets on either side of the median, wondering from which side he would arrive. I had done something bad. I was bad. Because of this, I was jettisoned onto the island between nowhere and nowhere, waiting for him to tether me back to being good again. I have been angry about my father’s anger for a long time.
Today, there’s even more to be angry about. One of the things I’m most angry about is that anger itself has become a kind of truth. Anger is all it takes for someone to be cancelled, scapegoated, or banished. But now I know that anger is a secondary emotion, instigated by the smaller harder-to-locate primary emotions of fear, sadness, and hurt. Of course, I didn’t know that when I was 6 years old. Nor, when I was 16, and my parents, who had been divorced since I was 1 year old, decided we should all travel through France together.
We visited the places that they had loved when they lived there before I was born. It was the 80s, and to be good divorced parents you had to pretend to still be OK traveling through France together. As we left Paris and entered the countryside, I remember my father driving our tiny rental car with one hand on the wheel and the other reaching across my mother’s face in the passenger seat, pointing at the sunflowers through the window with his pinky finger, exclaiming, “Look at all the tournesols!” I don’t remember much about the trip except that at one point, my mother got completely infuriated. She clenched the door handle and yelled, “Stop the car now! If you don’t stop, I’ll get out while you’re still driving!” We pulled over on the side of the road and wandered aimlessly into a random village, with me plaintively following one or the other blustering parent, as they alternately complained about each other.
Anger is like being possessed, it takes you away from yourself. We see it on the news every day – big performances of anger by humans who are unconscious of their triggered vulnerability. The truth is that every display of anger you witness is a demonstration of that person’s smallest, most weak and exposed core vulnerability. Because anger is a secondary emotion, an activated state that is a public display of a primary inner pain. Knowing this now throws me into full-body-cringe when I remember my own first car expulsion.
I was driving across the country with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, and we got into an argument on the open road. Who knows what it was about. We had virtually no problems then. We were 21 years old, stupid, and in love. But I distinctly remember the look of the white and grey highway with its black scrub-framed offramp where I lurched onto the shoulder and ordered him out of the car. As I drove away, I watched him through the rearview mirror standing with his hands up in a questioning shrug, laughing. I was nowhere near conscious of what was happening to me when anger overtook like that. I was so righteous in my rage, and he just laughed. To this day, when we talk about that moment, he always laughs and says, “It was so funny. Like, what were you going to do, leave me there, in the middle of the country?” He saw through my performance. Maybe that’s why I married him. He forced me to look through my big show and get closer to the tiny truths about myself that lay underneath.
That wasn’t the last time I kicked someone I loved to the curb. In some kind of dysfunctional reverse redemption 20 years later, my father visited me after I had just given birth to my first daughter. He had scoffed at the way I bounced the baby on an exercise ball for hours to get her to fall asleep. “Just put her down and walk away!” He had scoffed at the way I tiptoed around the house when the baby was asleep. “She has to get used to noise!” But my father did not understand what was happening to me and, in fact, neither did I. I was now a parent myself. As his scoffing continued loudly in the car one afternoon after I asked him to talk softly so the baby could nap while we drove around, a roar within me grew into a teeth-gnashing growl. Only a few blocks from home, I peeled over to the sidewalk and told him to get out. For a few seconds he sat there, confused, and didn’t budge. My demand did not compute. Then I screamed from the bottom of my soul, “Get the fuck out of the car NOW!” I could take him obliterating me, but I would not take him obliterating my mothering. For two or three days, I heard nothing from him. By the time I got back to the house, he had left. I remember only one thing from our conversation when we finally spoke on the phone weeks later. He said, “You have ruined my feeling that I have a good relationship with my daughter.”
Now, my father is a shuffling old man. He has done whatever he needed to do to believe we have a good relationship again. On a recent trip to visit him, we sat at a picnic table at a local park, and I asked him to tell me and my now teenage daughter a story from his childhood. He began to tell a story I had never heard before. He and his family were driving to get a Christmas tree. He and his brother were in the backseat playing a version of Punch Bug, but instead of punching each other when they saw a VW Bug, they punched when they saw the road sign “Soft Shoulder.” Apparently, my father hit too hard, and his brother began to whine. My father protested that they were playing a game, and his brother was just being wimpy. “Goddam it!” My grandfather yelled at my father, pulling the car over to the side of the highway and shouting angrily, “Get out of the car!”
My father continued to recount the memory: “So, I got out and they drove off. I stood there in the cold, stomping my feet and rubbing my hands together, trying to stay warm. I figured I would hitchhike, but no cars came by. I guess my mother eventually griped at my father long enough to convince him to come back. But I deserved it. Even while I was standing there in the cold, I felt it was the appropriate disciplinary action. I was the older brother, and I wasn’t supposed to use my full strength. My little brother was much weaker than me.”
My daughter and I sat there sadly, gazing at the ground through the sticky slats of the wooden picnic table. So, was this where it all started—this generational explosion of throwing away that which activates us, then subsequently rationalizing it. I began to wonder: If my father believed he got the repercussion he deserved for being too strong, had I? He said he deserved his punishment because he should have known better—his brother was weak. Should I know better—that my father is weak, that I am weak? And can I have compassion for all that perfectly imperfect weakness?
I have sat at every chair around the anger table. I have been abandoned in anger and abandoned in anger. I have been put in timeouts, and I have put others in timeouts. I have gripped the doorknob closed with white knuckles against a raging child on the other side, and I have allowed the raging child in me to whisk up a whirling tornado of pain, sweeping up everything in its path.
I’m in my 50s now and am slowly coming to terms with the anger that was unleashed on me and that I have unleashed on my beloveds. For many years, I told myself (and was told) that my anger was wrong, but now I know that the emotion itself isn’t baseless but banishing the trigger of anger is abuse. So, at the very least, I’m breaking that one link in the chain. It’s also why I created the self-reflection and somatic journal, Tough Shit – the angry woman’s guide to embodying change to support women in understanding anger’s power and to track it through fear, sadness, and hurt toward true self. Because anger isn’t the problem, it’s what we do with it that can drive us away from ourselves.
I’m keeping everyone in the car, and when rage arrives, as it does for all humans, I’m noticing the impulse to push the eject button, then remembering my father stomping in the cold, my mother wandering aimlessly through medieval cobblestone alleyways, my husband shrugging and laughing in the middle of the country, and little me on a median divide scratching my swelling ankles. I’m staying on the road, feeling everything—the big and the small emotions. I’ve got both hands on the wheel, and not I’m stopping until we all arrive safe and sound.
Arianne MacBean’s Tough Sh!t – the angry woman’ guide to embodying change (Tehom Center Publishing), is out now!
About the Author
Arianne MacBean is a Certified Somatic Psychotherapist and Associate Marriage Family Therapist in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a BA in Dance from UCLA, a Double MFA in Dance & Writing from California Institute of the Arts, and an MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her writing has been published by the academic journal Dance Chronicle as well as Feminism and Religion and Nasty Women Writers Project. Her children’s book, The Backyard Fairies is available on Amazon.
