Fury

Koren Zailckas

I thought this was a work of fiction when I picked it up. It was really the author's memoirs as she confronts the issue of anger in others (without admitting she herself has any) which she is researching for her new book, a follow up to the book Smashed. This was heavy reading, and not for the faint-hearted. If I didn't have a lot of repressed anger myself, I would have put it back on the shelf."

Quotes I like:

'Cholerophobia is a defense mechanism created by the unconscious mind. At some point in the cholerophobe's past, there was an event linking anger to emotional trauma. Avoiding the emotion meant living in fear; missing out on life experiences big and small and living a life that is only a shadow of what it might be.'

'A bad girl has never been born, only persons with potentials are born. Something in that human being has to be denied, projected, ignored or distorted for her to become some kind of bad, sick, stupid, or crazy girl/woman."

'The self-abuse in my head is loud too. I'm recounting, martyrly, any nasty comment any one's ever directed my way, trying to figure out precisely which character flaw might be responsible for my latest life failure.'

'I wanted to go back to bright ignorance and ridiculous optimism, where people blessed me when I sneezed and told me to have a great day and were nice to me and meant it."

'I'm great at repressing anger by indulging guilt in its place. Many women cultivate guilt in order to blot out the awareness of our own anger. Anger and guilt are just about incompatible."

'Another powerful method for overcoming anger and the wish to retaliate is to see all undesirable situations as a reflection of our own faults and shortcomings. If someone insults us , we can remember the teachings on karma and think, "I wouldn't be suffering this harm now if I had not insulted someone in my past." Guilt is far easier to tap into than rage.

"Curling into my childhood bed feels like regression. All my life I've avoided relying on others or, even more, asking for help. I've thought of myself as self-contained, self-supporting, freewheeling, nonaligned. I'd give anything to be somewhere where I might crumple without anyone seeing."

"People keep telling me to vent and write down my feelings and get it all out. Try as I might, I can't seem to write more than lists of books I'm reading, snippets of print I see, and free floating quotations." (that's me)

"When he berated me and told me what a worthless employee I was, I wished I could have told him what I really think. I would have loved to call him a blading, ugly, fascist prick, to tell him that he ran the place like a Nazi death camp!"

"The need to be liked is a Spke 3 personality profile according to the MN Multiphasic Personality Inventory- (look up more about this).

"Depression is anger without enthusiasm."

"..angry? I'm much more a woman subdued."

"I see in him the things I hate in me. He seems too hungry for affection, too eager to win approval of others. He seems too sentimental, too thin-skinned, too vulnerable to criticism and attached to his loneliness. Most of all, too reluctant to stand up for himself."

Note to self: Look up homeopathy
staph is a remedy for the person w/ poor image from a past hurt and suppressed anger

"Human beings seem willing to pay whatever price is necessary to feel loved, to belong, to make sense, and to feel as if they matter, even if the price exacted doesn't really accomplish that."

"Good things best flourish in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible. When people don't feel micro manged."

"When a person has developed the art of blocking their feelings, if they feel at risk of losing approval or respect, or of being punished, they will repress their emotions. They cannot even experience them secretly, they will fail to experience them at all. They will however stay in the body, in the cells, stored up as info that can be triggered by a later event."

"A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.' (that's me)

"To find your voice gargle w/ salt water, do fish/plough pose, shoulder stands, meditate and envision a turquoise sunburst, sing, hum, chant ham, make noise, scream, crate vibration, from sound comes communication the main point of the throat chakra. The throat is connected to our idea of who we are. It's the place where the affairs of the mind meed the feeling of the body. It describes our experiences. It's the source of art and creativity."

"The word no has to be in your vocabulary. You can't placate, abide violence, or absorb every body's blame, because that would make you a broken warrior who is no good to anyone."

Story of Sadhu and the snake. A village was terrorized by a huge snake. The sadhu sat the snake down and taught him about non violence. Then a year later the snake was shriveled, bruised, and skinny. He was not respected. When the Sadhu asked him why the same said, because you told me not to bite. Yes, but I didn't tell you not to hiss."

"When a person is taught to repress anger and outrage at things done to them, they will not protect themselves. Teach your children to express their anger and that it is ok to say it out loud."

"Be honest. Be authentic. Express what you're feeling regardless of whether the voice on the other end of the line negates or affirms your out pour."

"The first place anger reveals itself is in the skin. An angry rash is like a check engine light coming on-it's your body's way of drawing attention to what it needs/wants. You to deal with your feelings."

"I should have handled it in a more professional way. I could have done it better. - You think you haven't handled anger well enough? You want to bring Little Miss Perfect into it? I know you're rewording over and over what you wish you had said to this jerk. -She isn't wrong. For days I've been rewriting the scene in my imagination. I've been obsessing over it. I keep trying to think of something else I might have said- a better way I might have staged my threats, a more articulate way I might have formed my insults. This compulsive self-editing is the same reason I made such slow progress on my anger book for so long. When it comes to emotion, I am still too selective and stingy about it."