For those of us who have endured family abuse, one of the most essential—and elusive—emotions is anger. A host of forces prevent us from accessing the righteous outrage we ought to feel toward relatives who assaulted us physically or sexually, who neglected us, or psychologically abused us with their insults, gaslighting, humiliation, and more.
Social conventions, religious teachings, and well-intentioned friends urge us to “let it go,” “forgive and forget,” “honor thy father and mother,” and other advice that implies that anger in this situation is misguided, even immoral.
In fact, this advice itself is misguided, even immoral, for we survivors need anger. It is both an invaluable guide and a vital source of resolve. As Gabor Maté, M.D., points out in his book The Myth of Normal, “anger in its healthy form is a boundary defense,”[i] As such, it may be the most important emotion to embrace as we work to establish a healthy distance from those who harm us.
Maté explains that the process of healing[ii] “involves a reintegration of this oft-banished emotion into our repertoire of available feelings.” He distinguishes healthy anger[iii] from “blind rage, bluster, resentment, spite, venom, or bile”—the unhealthy forms our abusers’ anger took. The only motive behind healthy anger is “a noble one: to maintain [our] integrity and equilibrium.”
Maté identifies anger’s central message as “a concise and potent no,[iv] said as forcefully as the occasion demands.” Therapist Nicole LePera puts an even finer point on the value of this emotion: “Anger is a messenger.[v] It tells us when we’re being violated or controlled. It’s a signal to be assertive, to place a boundary, or to protect ourselves. Anger holds wisdom.” For survivors in particular, it would be unwise to ignore the wisdom anger holds.
Healthy anger is situational rather than chronic. It serves its noble purpose, and then it subsides. Our abusers consistently denied us the opportunity to set boundaries, to maintain our integrity and equilibrium, to say “no.” In our childhood, they punished us for expressing anger, rather than soothing us or helping us learn how to regulate it. And they never modeled healthy anger for us because they could only access its toxic forms themselves or muffle it completely. Now, finally, we have the freedom to let our anger out.
Many of us feel anxious at that prospect, whether because we fear the risk of behaving like our abusers or because their behavior has made us fear anger itself. But healthy anger is a tonic we deserve and need. Survivors who have difficulty feeling anger toward our abusers might find that a brief exercise in detachment helps them tap the deep well they surely harbor.
Imagine your own child, or a friend’s, being treated precisely the way you were—or are—by your abusive relative. If you can, recall a specific scene from your own past. Picture your abuser insulting that child or screaming at them or assaulting them or quashing their delight or ignoring their heartbreak. Feel your outrage well up on that kid’s behalf. Feel the reflex to break in on the scene and defend that kid. Feel yourself pulling the abuser away, giving them hell. Hear yourself raging against their irrational cruelty. You don’t need to imagine the context of their maltreatment—what caused it—because no context could justify it.
When we were kids, we had to create a context by blaming ourselves rather than our abusers; our survival depended on such misdirection. Now we can spark our healing by reversing that direction. Therapist Pete Walker suggests addressing our abusers with terse declarations that put the blame back where it belongs: “Take back your shame and disgust.[vi] I am disgusted at your shameful job of parenting.”
Note that we’re not telling them this to their face. They wouldn’t respond appropriately if we did. We’re saying it—ideally out loud—to witness ourselves standing up for ourselves. Potent words like these tap the well of righteous rage and surface the pride and power it brings. They also bolster our commitment to guarding whatever boundaries we’ve established.
If you dismiss this kind of supportive self-talk as ineffectual or “a bit corny,”[vii] to use bell hooks’ term for it, you should think again, as she did. Her sister, a therapist who specialized in treating addiction, urged her to set aside her prejudice and try saying positive things to herself. She adopted several daily affirmations, her favorite being “I’m breaking with old patterns and moving forward with my life.” She found them to be “not only a tremendous energy boost… Affirmations helped restore my emotional equilibrium.”
A therapist and abuse survivor I spoke with advises her clients to write their abusers a letter. Again, we’re not communicating with them directly. Rather, we’re “communicating our pain away from us, to get it out of our system, to unburden ourselves.” She also suggests that her clients write their letter in longhand if possible, instead of typing it out. “Writing is much more therapeutic because your eyes are following your hand as you reveal the emotion.”
These physical sensations—the weight of the pen in your hand, the pressure you apply to the page as you unfurl the words, the sight of those words as they emerge, even the sound of the pen scratching the paper—reify the feelings you convey and intensify your sense of release. Just as trauma resides in the body, the release of trauma is best experienced in and through the body.
Whether we address our abusers by speaking, typing, or writing with pen and paper, we should put our anger front and center, and we shouldn’t mince words. Pete Walker cites another affirmation one of his patients devised, which I especially like: Out loud, she told her abuser: “you totally ruined my childhood, and I’m not going to let you get away with ruining my life now.” Amen, sister.
Speaking of sisters, I am lucky to have in mine someone with whom I can share my anger. She was beaten, neglected, and psychologically abused as harshly as I was, and she’s always seen our mother’s cruel nature as clearly as I do. Our abuser died in 2020, an early casualty of COVID. I happened to get the news before my sister did. When I called to tell her our mother was gone, her first words were “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” And we laughed with angry joy.
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